The nice thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that the computer manages all the math. The video game medium has different affordances to a tabletop game – most obvious when you compare digital and physical versions of the same game. As a computer version of D&D, Baldur’s Gate manages all the math. It automates all the rules that you have to keep track of manually in tabletop. Tabletop games also often have verbal declarations of the game state: if you’re playing Magic: the Gathering, you tell other players that you’re ending your turn, or that you’re attacking. The risk with that approach is that sometimes verbal statements can be misunderstood, or they can carry meanings that aren’t shared by all players. There are examples in the history of Magic of players saying one thing thinking that it means something slightly different, which can have significant consequences in competitive tournaments. By comparison, in digital versions of Magic, like MtG Arena, game states are maintained digitally, which removes the chance of miscommunication. You can’t say the wrong thing any more. You can click the wrong button, but everything’s managed by the machine. In tabletop Magic, if you attack a player with a hundred different creatures, you have to add up all the damage to figure out how much life they lose. In Arena, the computer figures it out. These games with reasonably parallel versions in digital and physical form highlight the affordances of either medium. In physical games, it’s easy to let someone take back a move. You can be flexible with beginners. In digital games, the rules are modelled by the computer, which relieves some of the technical burden on players – they don’t have to maintain all the rules in their heads.

That modelling capacity gives rise to some of the weird beauty of video games, as rules interact unexpectedly. There are famous stories like the drunk cats in Dwarf Fortress – the cats had one rule where they would clean themselves if they got dirty, and another rule where they’d pick up spilled liquids on their feet as they walked around, and sometimes they walked through the bars and got beer on their feet, and then they licked it off, and then they got drunk. None of that was intentional design. It was an unexpected affordance of the rules. Games are, in that sense, machines. They’re simulation machines – the aesthetic form of interactive systems, as Frank Lantz has it. There’s a specific shot in Call of Duty: WWII (2017) where a tower explodes – it’s the header image on my long-form look into the plot of COD: WWII – it’s not strictly special, I guess, but it sticks with me. It evokes that idea of games as simulation machines. Light, smoke, fire, the physics engine, modelling the tower, modelling its collapse – there’s so much going on, all these graphical aspects that underpin the moment. It’s an aesthetic born of interactive systems, the same systems that make up the game engine in which you play. The spectacle is the computational power as much as the visual image on the screen.

Vampire Survivors is a 2022 reverse bullet hell from Luca Galante, an indie developer publishing under the name poncle. The traditional bullet hell is a navigation game, where players dodge around a screen drowning in enemy projectiles; Vampire Survivors has been described as a reverse bullet hell, where you the player fire out an unholy number of projectiles at an increasingly unhinged number of enemies. Crucially, you don’t directly shoot enemies through any manual process. Shooting is mostly automated, and your interaction is limited to moving around the screen. There are some little nuances to that – the dagger will fire in whatever direction you’re facing, and if you play as the dog O’Sole you’ll have flowers that drop behind you as you’re moving – but the weapons will go off regardless of player behaviour. You don’t have a ‘shoot’ button. It’s just your job to move. The gimmick with Vampire Survivors is that you can build up truly ridiculous combinations, joining weapons with various passive buffs and transforming and upgrading different effects, to the point where you’re adding garlic to a health boost to create the Soul Eater, a pulsing black circle that sucks the life out of monsters who get too close. The game has a dizzying procedural complexity. Like Call of Duty, it demonstrates staggering computational power, but where Call of Duty leans towards graphical complexity, with expensive, time-consuming animation, Vampire Survivors showcases a flurry of calculations around attacks, enemies, and damage. There are so many tickers and counters firing off different attacks with different delays, different damage, and enemies flood into the screen – you feel like the computer’s going to calculate off the edge of the table. You can blow up ten thousand monsters in twenty minutes, fifty thousand in thirty minutes. There’s a point where it’s not even really gameplay – sometimes you’re just watching, aghast, at this visual and computational monstrosity working itself out on the screen.

Really if you think about it every game could be described as computational art – they are, after all, obviously computing. What emphasises the label in Vampire Survivors is the restriction around your controls. There are so many twin-stick games where you move and shoot – where you navigate some character around a top-down environment and blast away at enemies who come after you. It’s in everything from Asteroids to The Binding of Isaac. Automating the shooting is a marked restriction on that model – especially in a game where shooting is the core of the spectacle. The function of your movement, in the broad view, is reduced to picking up the gemstones that drop when you kill an enemy. At the start of a game you might run to a couple of places and get some extra treasures, you know, there are little incidental activities, but after a certain point you can just stay in one place. Movement almost becomes an optional extra – maybe you dodge a couple of enemies who get too close, but in some builds, movement is explicitly counter-productive. Moving towards an enemy can shorten the amount of time it spends in your kill field, which means it can damage you before it dies. So you just sort of sit there, picking up gemstones, and everything explodes around you.

It’s not the case that Vampire Survivors is an idle game, like a clicker game or one of those desktop widgets that you leave on in the background. You still have to engage some level of thought and strategy, and sometimes you have to hotfoot it around a horde of monsters. But compare it to Sekiro, a game obsessed with split-second timing and microscopic windows for specific parries and counters. The spectacle of that game is in your gameplay, in the player’s ability to carry out pitch-perfect maneuvers. Spectacle in Vampire Survivors is removed from your gameplay. It’s in the stuff you don’t control. In that sense there’s a vulnerability to the gameplay in Vampire Survivors – sometimes you’re just running from a pack of monsters and hoping your bullets kill them all before they catch up to you. Sometimes you get swarmed and you know your build’s not strong enough to keep them away. There’s not really anything you can do in those situations. The machine does what it does. Beyond a certain point, all you can do is watch.

Vampire Survivors finely balances power and powerlessness, action and inaction. It’s loud, busy, and stupid, with minimal input from the player. The speed and volume of calculation is insane – tens of thousands of enemies loading onto the screen, moving towards the player, with different speeds, different levels of health, and then the damage, the weapons, the cooldowns – there’s so much loaded onto the screen, and you’re at such leisure in terms of what you’re asked to do. It’s an offensive sensory assault, a mathematical delirium. It feels like a purified essence. I’d describe Vampire Survivors as computational art, not in the sense that it has any particularly deep themes or ideas, but in that it’s art about the act of computation.