Over at his blog Ian Bogost attempts to provide a definition of OOO suitable for an elevator pitch to the layman. A very interesting discussion has ensued. Read the post here.

Today in class we reached the fourth basic principle of Latour’s ontology in Irreductions as depicted by Graham in the first chapter of Prince of Networks. As I formulate it:

The degree of reality possessed by an actant or object is a function of the number of its alliances with other actants.

Latour’s proposed object-oriented ontology differs from both my own and Harman’s in that under his conception objects or actants are defined by their relations. This is evident from this fourth ontological principle. For Latour, the more alliances an actant has the more real it is. Reciprocally, the less alliances an actant has, the less real it is. It seems to me that there are three senses of the term “reality” Latour is evoking:

1) An actant is real insofar as it is resistant to other actants.

2) An actant is real to the degree that it persists and endures through time and space.

3) The reality of an actant is a function of the magnitude and extensiveness of the effects it has on other actants.

According to the first sense of reality, a rock is real insofar as it resists another rock bumping into it. The second sense of reality coincides closely with intuitions we have about existence going all the way back to Plato where, as can be clearly seen in Plato’s divided line, the more fleeting something is the less real it is and the more enduring something is the more real it is. Consequently if simulacra or things like images in ponds are less real than objects, then this is because they cease to exist the minute clouds pass in front of the sun. If mathematical entities and forms are more real for Plato than objects, then this is because objects come-to-be and pass-away, whereas triangles always remain triangles and the Just or the Identical always remains the identical.

read on!

The third sense in which Latour thinks about reality can be illustrated with reference to President Obama. If President Obama is more real than me, then this is because he impacts other actants in a far more extensive way than I do. He impacts other nations, the citizens of other nations, the economy, the media, other state officials, American citizens, industries, etc., etc., etc.. If the sun is more real than Obama, then this is because it impacts all the other planets and objects populating the solar system through its charged solar particles and gravity, because it impacts each and every thing on the planet, and because it impacts many things outside the solar system besides.

For Latour then, reality is not a binary, but rather a matter of degrees ranging from the least real to the most real. Where for Harman and I reality or existence is a binary in the sense that something either is or is not regardless of the relations that it enters into– with the important caveat that something can cease to exist or pass out of existence –for Latour something is less real insofar as it possesses fewer alliances with other actants and impacts fewer actants, while something becomes more real insofar as it forms more alliances with other actants and impacts a more extensive range of actants. Here it is important to note that the reality of an actant is not a fixed essence. Rather, objects can become more real by entering into additional alliances and extending the range of their effects on other actants. Thus, since relations among actants are perpetually shifting, the degree of reality possessed by any actant fluctuates.

Now, when Latour’s fourth principle is taken from the realm of meta-theory or ontology and put into practice examining the world, things become difficult. If it is difficult to practice actor-network-theory or object-oriented ontology, then this is because so many of the actants that contribute to the reality or existence of any actant are “black boxes”. As Harman puts it,

What actants do is act, as the words themselves immediately suggest. In negative terms, this means that actants are not ready-made essences that happen to stumble into relations every now and then. An actant is always born from crisis and controversy; only when it succeeds in establishing a foothold in the world do we forget the tribulations of its birth and eventually treat it as a seamless black box… To speak of objects in action is to convert objects from black boxes into withering trials of strength, re-enacting the torrid events that gave birth to the most obvious facts in the world. (PN, 36)

The sense of reality that Harman is here working off of in his discussion of black boxes would be that of endurance and persistence. A black box is an object that has managed to secure its endurance or existence or that, as it were, is well put together such that its internal works disappear from view or become unobtrusive. The world all about us is populated by black boxes. And if this ubiquity of black boxes make actor-network-theory or alien phenomenology (Bogost’s nice term) so difficult, then this is because black boxes are above all unobtrusive and largely invisible. This essential invisibility or unobtrusiveness insures that many actants that are crucial to the existences of some actant will go unnoticed or passed over in analysis. I think this is part of what accounts for the superficiality of so much philosophy and social and political theory when compared to analyses undertaken by actor-network theorists. So many actants are “black boxed”, so many actants require that we actually know something about the world (rather than speaking in trite generalities), so many actants are so familiar that they become invisible, that philosophers and social and political theorists simply pass over them altogether, not recognizing how crucial they are to understanding the phenomenon in question. It seems that a number of philosophers and theorists suffer from the nasty habit of confusing superficiality with rigor and profundity, believing that because they can set up a series of entailments among propositions in a deduction they’ve really gotten at the essence of things. Yet that chain of entails, that phenomenological description, that ideology critique is only possible by making the vast majority of the world and its actants disappear. This is somewhat equivalent to treating a single type of fish as if it were representative of all life in the oceans.

To illustrate the imbrication of reality and alliances as understood by Latour I select a student from class, draw a stick picture of her on the board, and we collectively proceed to analyze the student’s alliances with other actants. We start with very basic and obvious things pertaining to the students bodies. The first actants that come up are, of course, food and water. However, even here things are not as simple as they might first appear, for as we already know by the principle of translation, actants relate to one another by translating one another and when one actant translates another actant it produces something new. We can adopt the slogan “no translation without transformation!” or, alternatively, “no relation without the production of something new!” Much of concrete actor-network and OOO analyses are devoted to the investigation of these translations and what they produce. Consequently, the types of food and liquids we digest make a difference. Food effects psychological states, health, vitality, etc. All of this must be taken into account.

The next things that inevitably come up are the earth’s gravity, air, the earth’s electro-magnetic field, etc. The gravity of the earth interacts with the genetics of our body playing an important role in how our bodies develop. Were we born on Mars it is likely we would grow much taller because Mars is a little over half the size of the earth. Moreover, as we’ve learned from space travel, the absence of gravity leads to muscle degeneration and bone deterioration. The situation is similar with the earth’s gases. It is not simply that we require oxygen and other gases to breath, but the pressure of the earth’s gases pressing down upon us prevents our bodies from exploding as depicted in Total Recall or Event Horizon when the characters are exposed to depressuration. Additionally, the amount of oxygen present in the atmosphere makes a difference in our lung development and the functioning of our blood as can be seen in the bodily differences between Peruvians that live in the Andes and those of us that don’t live at such high altitudes. The absence of sunshine wrecks havoc on moods and has all sorts of negative health benefits, while the earth’s electro-magnetic field diminishes the rate of genetic mutations and cancers by deflecting highly charged cosmic particles. All of these actors to which we’re related are so persistent that they go almost entirely unnoticed. To notice them at all you actually have to know something about the earth.

Having discussed these very basic actants we now move on to the more diffuse yet no less important actants. The first series of actants that is inevitably brought up consists of other people. Here I draw attention to family, friends, co-workers and a class of persons I refer to as “the anonymous”. The anonymous are all the black boxed people that make up the furniture of our everyday life while being almost completely invisible. These are folks like the janitors that keep classrooms clean and well organized, cooks that prepare food, the folks at plant operations and in the tech department that keep the electricity, heat, and communications networks running, etc. All sorts of affordances and constraints are dependent upon the anonymous such that our power of acting or not acting is increased or diminished as a result of the material infrastructure laid down by the anonymous.

The next series of actants that come up revolve around transportation. The student inevitably arrived at school in a car and will depart from school to work by car. In the absence of the automobile it is unlikely that the student would be able to attend school or maintain the job and job hours that they do. However, the automobile now leads to considerations of energy and infrastructure. Roads all but disappeared following the collapse of the Roman Empire such that travel became, if Braudel is to be believed, overland. In the absence of roads travel was far more difficult and perilous. Consequently the distribution of goods and communication between cities, villages, and farms was severely inhibited leading to much slower rates of change. The simple presence of roads and road signs significantly increases the reality of an actant, allowing it to form more extensive alliances with other actants and to impact far more actants.

The case is similar, of course, with energy. Energy comes in a variety of forms ranging from human power to animal power, and extending to wind, water, wood, nuclear, thermal, solar, and fossil fuels. Where the primary form of energy consists of wood, wind, and water the size that a city can attain and the forms of organization it can possess are significantly diminished. This is because the availability of wood needed to warm houses, cook, and build equipment and homes is limited. Very quickly we find resources being depleted and wars breaking out over valuable timberlands. To make matters worse, these wars themselves require all sorts of wood, thereby eating up the very resource that contributed to the conflict in the first place. The situation is the same with fossil fuels. Suddenly the student discovers that the simple act of driving a car has implicated her in global conflicts over resources. The situation here is a catch-22. She needs the car and the fuels to form an alliance we her education and job– not to mention, to maintain her important personal relationships –yet in driving the car all sorts of rather noxious geo-political conflicts are promoted (coupled with the damage to the environment).

There is, in addition to all this, the entire system of production and distribution. We eat better today than the emperors of Rome, enjoying foods that are out of season in our own locality and a wide range of goods that we would never be able to experience in other social settings as they come from far off lands. This system of production and distribution now embroils the student in all of the sweat shops throughout the world where people are more or less enslaved so that certain goods may be readily available and so that the price of production might be kept down to increase profit and offset costs of transport.

Then there are the technologies. Most of my students are in their late teens and early twenties so they can hardly discern the revolution that they are living through. At the age of 35 I lived prior to the personal computer and the invention of the internet and thus– following a line of thought Jameson explores somewhere in relation to Adorno and Benjamin and the changing circumstances through which they lived –have had the privilege (and culture shock) of living between two entirely distinct temporalities. The impact of internet communication, cable, cell phones, satellite communications, etc., has fundamentally changed the nature of our world, collectively increasing our reality as actors. When I first started studying philosophy around the age of 14 or 15, we only had B. Dalton’s and Walden Books which were little holes in the wall that carried crap. I had to scour the vintage and used book stores for miles around to find anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature texts. And I was forced to read whatever I happened to find, which partially accounts for my eclectic background. Now, however, I can link to the internet on my iPhone while hiking in a wooded park and order the newly released copy of Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence from France. I can acquire bootleg transcriptions of all of Lacan’s seminars, and online for free, no less! Additionally, SR and OOO would not have been possible without the intertubes or back in 1991. For SR/OOO to come into existence all sorts of relationships had to be forged among eclectic and diverse thinkers in a variety of fields and this simply would not have taken place in the conference format that traditionally brought thinkers together. The nature of research and interaction changes significantly as a result of these new network links, allowing for new forms of organization and resistance.

Floating amidst all this are the semiotic actants or all those signs, legal relations, partially semiotic entities like nations or the Elks, catch phrases (“you’re for us or against us!”), fads, and so on. These too are closely tied to infrastructure as, like highways, these entities must circulate through zero’s and one’s, radio waves, texts, etc. As Bogost is quick to remind us, it makes a big difference whether this infrastructure consists of copper wires, fiber optic cables, soup cans hooked together by taught string, illuminated texts as in the Middle Ages, satellites, etc. For most of us this infrastructure is invisible. Yet the difference between phone signals sent by copper wires and phone signals sent by fiber optic cables is a quantum leap. The former is deeply limited in the number of signals that can be transported across the line at any point in time, while the latter can carry a tremendous amount of signals. In my lifetime it used to be a fairly common occurrence for phone lines to get overloaded. The last time this occurred that I can recall was on September 11th in 2001. When my blog used to be over at Blogger I had a tracker in the html code that showed a map of the globe indicating where all of the visits I was receiving were originating.

One of the most striking things I recall about this map was that there was a narrow band of high traffic visits just north of the equator across the entire globe, from whence the majority of my traffic came. In the United States the majority of the traffic was along the coasts, whereas the center of the country was largely dark. I had hits throughout Europe (especially Great Britain, Northern Europe, and regions of Eastern Europe), while traffic began to drop off further into Eastern Europe and Russia. There was lots of traffic from regions of Australia and New Zealand, traffic from a few cities in Mexico, South and Central America, and cities in Africa. China was entirely blank. These are infrastructural issues pertaining to how the taught strings between all those soup cans are connected up with one another. I find the darkness or lack of visits in the middle regions of the United States particularly interested as this indicates a lack of well developed infrastructure and this lack of communications infrastructure correlates strongly with political party affiliation. If you want a revolution a good start would not be protests in the streets or critiques of ideology or even Badiouian truth-procedures, but quietly making internet, satellite, cable, and cell phone reception readily available in regions where these things aren’t available.

All of these actants and many more both afford and constrain my student, increasing her degree of reality by both connecting her in all sorts of ways that assist in her ability to endure and persist through time and space, but also by increasing the effects she can have on other actants in the world around her. Yet what I’ve outlined here is only the barest sketch of what an object-oriented analysis looks like. It’s still too vague and general, gesturing at relations with other actants without looking at the concrete actants involved and how these networks are organized, their history, their evolution, their dominant tendencies and directions, their interdependencies and how these constrain the possibility of certain forms of change, where “lines of flight” or tendencies of change are breaking free, how those might be assisted, accelerated, and enhanced, and so much more. In his magnificent three volumes entitled Capitalism & Civilization, Braudel seeks to investigate what he calls “material history”. Material history is the organization of these actants. Braudel’s seeks to determine why, despite the present of certain revolutionary semiotic actants in a historical epoch (semiotic actants), change is nonetheless so slow to come. Why does everything remain largely the same at the level of material life after Hume, Spinoza’s Theologico-Politico Treatise, Voltaire, Diderot, etc? This question seems pessimistic, as if one were claiming that change is impossible, but it’s precisely the opposite. Only through knowing how networks of actants are actually put together, what actants are involved, how these interactions among actants are organized, etc., does it become possible to locate the bottlenecks or inhibitors of change and devise strategies for undoing these bottlenecks and releasing transformative potentials. Just opening the black box and seeing the networks already imperiles the organization of the network by opening the possibility to think and enact other possibilities.

In response to my post on Nature and Its Discontents, Joseph C. Goodson posts a terrific comment on what he sees as the significance of OOO/SR. Joseph writes:

Precisely. As Gould puts it, the history of our evolution is a history of catastrophes, one after the other. I wonder, thinking along these lines, that in the wake of the death of God, this transcendentalizing of our fissures, breaks, discontents, etc, was done in such a way that the effect was one of making the human (so to speak) another exception (even if this exception is fundamentally “negative”). “Man” was still allowed this exceptional place even though the theological backdrop was lost. Part of what is exciting about SR and OOO in particular, and why the continuing backlash against it is so interesting, is that it takes these fundamental antagonisms of Marx, Freud, Lacan, et al, completely seriously — if anything, *its* wager seems to be that we have not taken them far enough, and that the death of God must imply, at one and the same time, the death of a theological concept of nature (this self-consistent sphere which would allow the -1 of humanity to appear).

Another very productive thing I have noticed about OOO is that, even in order for this ontology to begin, in its positivity, it also critiques much of these unsaid philosophical prejudices which, even in some of the most critical philosophies, still operate. This often subtle culture/nature hierarchy is one such prejudice that is very nicely displaced in a flat ontology.

Joseph here gets at one of the key aims or ambitions of the flat ontology I’ve tried to formulate in my version of OOO. I restrict this flat ontology to onticology because Graham, in the past, has expressed reservations about just how flat my ontology is. This difference, for example, comes out in our respective differences with respect to fictional entities. Graham draws a distinction between sensual objects (roughly intentional objects) and real objects. The latter are, if I’ve understood Graham correctly, dependent on minds to exist. In my case, however, symbolic entities are real actants or objects no less than rocks or stars. In my view there are collective entities like symbolic entities, pure mental relations, and nonhuman objects or actors like technologies, stars, quarks, cells, etc. I do not think that symbolic entities can be properly thought by reducing them to a mind-intention sort of relation. This, I suppose, is part of my debt to structuralism and semiotics. If I’m interested in fictions and the ontological status of fictions then this is not out of any sort of perverse wish to say that fictions are real, but rather because fictions provide a sort of exemplary case of a purely symbolic entity that is not a representation of something else. As a consequence, fictions shed light on what symbolic entities are in general. Hopefully Harman and I will work through some of these issues together at the Object-Oriented Ontology event at Georgia Tech in April (please come if you’re able! You’ll get to see me, Shaviro, Harman, and Bogost go at it!).

read on!

Setting all this aside, one of the striking things I’ve noticed in Lacanian secondary literature is precisely what Joseph alludes to in this post. Now my primary sources for Lacanian thought tend to be books written by clinicians or practicing analysts, not so much Zizek, Zupancic, Dolar and the rest of the crew. My view has been that to properly understand Lacan and psychoanalysis you should consult the analysts to see how the theory works. Within this secondary literature one of the striking themes I’ve noticed is a deep hostility to biology, neurology, and evolutionary theorists. Van Haute, of course, writes his book Against Adaptation, presenting a rather ridiculous picture of what evolutionary theory claims with respect to natural selection. He is to be excused, I think, because among the so-called ego psychologists you find a rather absurd picture of therapy as “adapting us” to the world. Then again, Johnston will tell you in private conversation that “ego psychology” as portrayed by Lacan and Lacanians is a myth and that the theories Lacan often makes the target of his critiques are far more sophisticated and nuanced than the Lacanian literature suggests.

Yet in addition to van Haute you will often find celebrations of “anti-evolutionary thought” with some Lacanians going so far as to champion “creationism”. Of course, the creationism that is here defended is a creationism of the signifier or the power of the signifier to bring non-being into being (and here they’re right in a sense), rather than Young Earth creationism. Nonetheless, there is a persistent strain in the secondary literature of wishing to treat man as an exception and as the condition of everything else (through the power of the symbolic and the subject). Here I think Joseph is right on the mark in suggesting that there is a residual theology at work in those that choose the culture side of the nature/culture debate and a tendency to wish to treat man in Ptolemaic terms as being at the center of being. OOO, of course, recognizes that there are differences between objects and therefore differences between humans, rocks, avocados, and other animals. However, differing from and requiring system specific analysis and serving as a condition for all other things are two entirely different claims. If Nick and company will still allow me to contribute to the Inhumanities Event sponsored by Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities, I hope to say more on this in the next couple weeks. Unfortunately I am currently swamped with other obligations so I can’t get to it immediately.

I should also add that this blog began by trying to think through the implications of the death of God or the possibility of a metaphysic beyond ontotheology (here and here). Soon a formalized version of these arguments in terms of Lacan’s graphs of sexuation (which I believe to be more about ontology than sex or sexual identity) will be published through Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory.

a.k.a. laying the foundation.

Google gives the following definitions:

• Game-based learning is a field of research and game design based on observations that play, structured or unstructured, conditions the human brain for transformation and learning. (Wikipedia)
• A form of learner-centred learning that uses electronic games for educational purposes. (from Wee Hoe Tan’s research glossary on the Warwick University website)

So it is a field of research and design as well as a form of learner-centred learning. Actually I like Wee’s definition quite much. I would add that it is not necessary to use just electronic (or digital) games or just games to qualify as game-based learning. The defining factor to me is that the use of games is an important factor in the learning process and environment.

There are a number of examples of game-based learning (GBL from now on), games used to support learner-centred learning and reports of use of game-based learning in authentic learning settings. I’ll outline a few as examples of GBL:

Business schools have used business games as part of the education for dozens of years. One of the state-of-the-art business games is the RealGame, developed by Timo Lainema. RealGame is a business simulation game to support learning of decision making in the environment of managing a manufacturing company. Realgame has mainly been used by large and middle-sized Finnish companies as well as several universities as a part of their management training programs.

RealGame casts the players as managers of a manufacturing business. The game provides a real-time simulation of the operating environment of the business in question. The players make decisions as managers and get real-time feedback on how their decisions affect the company. The game can be tailored to simulate different kinds of markets.

RealGame provides the players’ an experience of making management decisions and getting feedback of their consequences. The simulation works in real time so the players can adjust their strategies on the fly.

It is important to see that the game provides learning experiences in at least two levels. The first, self-evident one is the simulation environment allowing the players to practice performing the duties of their future occupations. It is important to notice that in this function the representation that the simulation provides and its verisimilitude to the ral-life environment is important.

The other way of producing learning experiences is experiencing the simulation environment itself and critiquing its verisimilitude. Every simulation is a subjective representation of reality. The aspects (units) of the simulation make statements on the world (Ian Bogost’s book Unit Operations deals with this perception). Through experiencing the game the players can assess the representation provided by it and contrast it with the relevant theory they have studied and case studies from the field.

The first type of learning occurs predominantly within the game but the latter one involves contrasting and discussing the experience of gameplay with other presentations of the same phenomena. It is to be noted that although GBL focuses on the use of games to support learning, playing games is not the be-all and end-all of learning activity in the model.

This concludes the first part of this on-going introduction to game-based learning. There’s too much to say to fit it in just one article, so I’ll continue describing the field of GBL through other examples in later articles.

After the last price cut on Amazon’s Kindle, I was kicking around some ways that Amazon could make the Kindle even more attractive, besides cutting price, that is. I was finally spurred to write these up by Prof. Bogost’s interesting post on Kindle economics (key revelation for me: it’s actually dirt cheap to print a physical book).

Each of these addresses either a barrier in the adoption of e-books, or a way that e-books can improve upon the physical format, making them attractive despite other shortcomings. Some of the most interesting things e-books will do will come from what they enable that physical books never can, and digital distribution is part and parcel of that.

A favorite analogy among media and analysts around the Kindle is how it compares to iPod. And those comparisons are indeed instructive. But the ways in which the two devices are not similar are often more interesting than the ways they are. For instance, the main factor in the iPod’s success was convenience: someone can listen to a dozen CDs in a single day, and he doesn’t know in the morning what he will want to listen to at night. So the ability to carry hundreds of albums in your pocket represented an awesome leap in convenience. By contrast, a paperback book is alread pretty damn handy. Most of us don’t read a dozen books simultaneously, but instead spend days or weeks working on a single title. Yet how many times hav eyou reached for your bookshelf to look up that funny passage, check a factoid, or even just remember who that one author ways, anyway? So like the iPod, convenience is a factor with the Kindle, just not in the same way. 

So here are some ways that the Kindle business model can really stand out.  

1. Get past purchases on Kindle for a one-time fee. Imagine an iPod or MP3 player that doesn’t allow you to put any of your existing music on it but only new purchases that are formatted just for that device. MP3 players are so successful because nearly everyone has an existing collection of dozens or hundreds of CDs that can be nearly instantly ported over to the new device. But with Kindle, all those books on your shelf are destined to stay there, collecting dust and forever separated from digital nirvana. But what if Amazon made an offer to all Kindle owners that for a nominal charge, say, $2 a book, you will be provided with a Kindle copy of every book you’ve ever bought from Amazon. Heck, for power readers who have ordered a ton of books, call it Kindle Prime and charge a flat $99 to cover every past purchase. This is similar to what Apple did with its iTunes store when it started offering unprotected MP3 files at a premium. For an additional 30 cents per song, Apple would upgrade your library of tracks to the new, DRM-free format. By doing the same thing with books early on in the Kindle’s lifecycle, Amazon would basically bootstrap the device and makes it instantly more useful to users by an order of magnitude.  

2. Get the physical and electronic editions together at a discount. A lot of people are intrigued by Kindle but still want a physical copy for their bookshelf at home, or as insurance in case Kindle flops or Jeff Bezos really does turn into Big Brother. Amazon already offerings pairings of popular products and books, so it’d be a snap to say, “Add the print edition of this book to your Kindle order for just another $5.” A colleague of mine also suggested that Amazon could notify Kindle users when the physical form of a book they’ve bought digitally moves down into discount bin territory.

3. “Lend” your books to other Kindle owners. This is a huge one for me. My parents and I trade quite a few books. In fact, there’s sort of an arrangement where nearly any book we buy each other for Christmas, birthdays, etc, we will lend it back to the buyer after we’re done with it. I’m sure a lot of families are the same. We are all bibliophiles and also technophiles, which should make us ideal Kindle consumers. But the inability to swap books is a big limiting factor on our purchase intent. So why not enable that with a sort of digital lending license that would let me, say, lend two copies of the book to any other Kindle user for, say, 30 days? It could be like transfering a file via IM: “Scott has offered to lend you ‘Outliers’ by Malcom Gladwell. Do you accept? You will have 30 days to read this book from the moment you accept.” Amazon could reap a huge amount of goodwill with a move like this. 

4. Give book lovers a way to show off their bookshelves. Another gem from my aforementioned colleague. Admit it, there are books you like having on your coffee table or bookshelf to impress visitors. What about when you’re at the airport and you see someone reading a fantastic book you just read? You sometimes start a conversation with them to see what they think, right? But with Kindle, there’s no way for any of this signaling to take place. What Amazon needs is a sort of virtual bookshelf that will let anyone browse your library, perhaps even leave comments. Sort of a social network for booklovers. There’s already something like it on Facebook called LivingSocial, which lets you display and review books, games, albums, movies, etc for other users to see. However, it’s clunky and obnoxious to use, and Amazon could either build something better or buy it and make it better. To be sure, iPod suffered from the same shortcoming, which has only been somewhat rectified with the recent introduction of Cover Flow.

I’m sure there are tons of other cool things Amazon could do. Heck, it could even resurrect those old book clubs deals where you got five books for a penny if you promised to buy a book a month at regular price for the next year. Maybe you could get a Kindle for $99 if you could promise to buy a Kindle book a month ($9.99 minimum price) for the next two years. What other ways could Amazon innovate and use the Kindle’s digital infrastructure to light a fire under e-book sales?

Bogost has an interesting post up reflecting on Nick’s talk [.PDF] on actor-network theory and politics. Ian writes:

This is something like what Srnicek is suggesting for politics: instead of the fast-cook burger revolution of revolution, what if we considered the slow-cook barbeque of reform?

Another implication of this notion, which Nick hints at but doesn’t say directly, is whether this process can be understood in relation to Badiou’s notion of the event. Is Badiou’s idea of fidelity as a process by which an event is sustained compatible with Srnicek’s political slow cooking? Or is the event too static, more like the protein denaturing of the burger than like the melting collagen of the slab of ribs? It seems to me that the event is too retrospective, too singular, and too momentarily constituted to stand up to the sauce of reform.

I confess that the term “reform” really causes my hackles to rise. To me it just sounds a lot like “working within the system to change the system”, where one becomes a politician or joins a corporation with the intention of changing things. In this respect, Badiou’s notion of “truth-procedures” strikes me as closer to what Nick is getting at, though “truth-procedure” isn’t quite the best term either. Responding to Ian’s worry, it’s worthwhile to recall that for Badiou it is not the event that is important, but the practice that emerges following the event that is important. Truth-procedures proceed by restructuring elements, objects, and relations belonging to a situation, producing the sort of groundwork for new networks and relations that Nick describes in his paper.

read on!

Perhaps what Nick is getting at with his rejection of politics based on grand abstraction can be fleshed out through an anecdote about a young child. A while back an exasperated co-worker told me an amusing story about how her child had had a melt down the night before because she wanted fruit. The mother first tried to give her child grapes, then melons, then apple, then oranges, but with each attempt to appease the child the child’s face grew a darker shade of purple, clouded with anger and frustration. The whole time the child screamed “No! I want fruit!” I was, of course, delighted by this anecdote because it is an exact version of Hegel’s joke about the universal and the man who goes to the market trying to buy fruit. I was astonished to hear that this mistake could genuinely be made.

When Nick denounces grand abstractions it seems like he’s gesturing at something like the error of trying to eat fruit. You can’t fight capitalism, nor can you fight neoliberalism. Asking how to turn over capitalism or how we can overcome neoliberalism is like trying to eat fruit. The real issue is that of how the local relations in a network can be used to produce effects on global relations within a network. So suppose you’re an oppressed worker in a corporation. Just as you can’t fight capitalism and you can’t eat fruit, you can’t fight a corporation. Where is the corporation? It is everywhere and nowhere.

However, while you can’t get at the corporation itself, within the corporation there are all sorts of local networks and nodes that you can act upon. Just as there are strawberries, grapes, apples, and so on, there are local interactive relations that make up the endo-consistency of the corporation in its ongoing existence. These can be targeted. Among these nodes there will be hubs, through which many axial or radiating elements are connected. For example, in the United States there are major airports like Chicago International or Dallas Fort Worth, and then all sorts of other smaller airports that radiate out from these like Lynchburg, Virginia’s airport. If Chicago International Airport shuts down due to ice or a snow storm, all of these other airports are effectively shut down as well. Similarly, in the blogosphere, there are blogs that function as hubs that regulate flows of connection and exchanges of information throughout the rest of the internet. If these shut down, then the sites that get their traffic from these hubs become separate. New “speciations” begin to take place as a result through topological isolation and “information drift”, new relations begin to come into being, and so on.

It seems to me that Nick is thus making two proposals. On the one hand, Nick is making the obvious observation that we need to know how these networks are concretely organized, where their hubs are, how interfaces among the elements in these hubs are interrelated, to strategize acting upon these networks. Absent that sort of concrete knowledge we are like the child trying to eat fruit. On the other hand, in proposing that “we can see that what is needed now is not a full-scale revolution, nor an overthrowing of an entire network, but rather the piece-meal construction of the conditions for a new system to emerge”, I take it that Nick is asking how we go about producing new networks, nodes, and, perhaps most importantly hubs that act upon established networks that have become efficient at reproducing themselves over time. The point is that through this sort of local action the global network is acted upon. And, with any luck, a point emerges where a tipping point or bifurcation point is reached, leading to a qualitative change in the object or social organization as a whole. The worry here, however, is that what follows these tipping points is generally very difficult to calculate and predict.

This week, I was asked to examine the website bogost.com to examine the use of video games in the arena of news. Having never heard of the site, the brainchild of Ian Bogost - Georgia Tech professor, video game research and creator, founding partner of Persuasive Games and board member of the educational publisher Open Texture, I was unsure what to expect.

To find the most interactive online games addressing current issues, I went directly to the Persuasive Games homepage. There I found a number of interesting games such as Killer Flu (“A game about seasonal and pandemic flu, how they mutate, and how they are spread. Commissioned by the UK Clinical Virology Network and produced in association with Scotland’s Traffic Games”), Points of Entry (“Compete to award Green Cards under the Merit-Based Evaluation System included in legislation recently debated in Congress”) and Fatworld (‘Fatworld is a game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.”).

Fatworld was the game that I chose to play, but only after waiting ten minutes for it to download (an eternity in today’s internet world!) and then having to install it on my computer. When it was finally ready to play, I found that it was much more involved than I had originally thought it would be. At the start of the game you are supposed to pick your characters attributes including age, skin color, size, and socioeconomic circumstance. You are then prompted to complete tasks like grocery shopping, eating, etc. It runs in the same vein as The Sims but with the random circumstantial changes of Life. After nearly a half an hour of playing, I had still yet to see the value of the game.

The other game that I played was The Arcade Wire: Oil God (“You are an Oil God! Wreak havoc on the world’s oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster. Bend governments and economies to your will to alter trade practices. Your goal? Double consumer gasoline prices in five years using whatever means necessary. Oil God is the second in our ongoing series of newsgames.”) Once again, the concept of this game seemed to surpass its practicality and I was not able to really get into the game because I didn’t really understand quite how it worked and the correlations it presented.

To be honest, I was not really that impressed with the overall experience. While I have never been much of a gamer, for people like me, it was just way too involved. Don’t get me wrong, the concept behind such games are interesting and I think that games like this definitely have their contexts (this would be best suited for educational purposes of youths that have a designated and consistent amount of time to put into it). However, for someone like me who is simply interested in the correlations that the game addresses, the synopsis on the game’s main page is far more insightful as it outlines the issue concisely like a traditional news article would. As such, I think that games like these are successful in certain situations – of which mine is not one.

I’m afraid its just the good old news for me. What can I say? Text is sexy.

A large part of what fascinates me about games is the subjective nature of the play experience itself, the notion that no two people will have the same experience even within a heavily scripted game. Recently Australian blogger Ben Abraham has been gaining attention for his decision to partake in an “iron man” play through of Far Cry 2, no reloading when his character dies the game is over. The manner in which this player imposed boundary altered his play experience is something I’m particularly interested in. Fortunately Ben was kind enough to answer some questions I had:

1. In your own words, what prompted your decisions to play Far Cry 2 in this fashion?

I think the initial desire was to impose a new way of playing Far Cry 2 that would lead to more of those fun moments where it feels like something is really hanging in the balance – where the outcome is hinged upon my performance. I thought that perhaps by imposing a limit of a single life, it would add more drama and weight to my actions and performance in the game and ultimately provide me with a more satisfying experience.

In that sense it was for entirely selfish, experiential reasons – I wanted to enjoy and continue enjoying Far Cry 2 having played it a lot already.

2. Having completed Far Cry 2 previously, can you describe some of the ways in which permadeath changed the way you approach the game? Have you noticed yourself doing things differently when you played it under normal conditions?

I guess the approach I took reflected my desire to have a fun experience, and so I took it very seriously and played it quite safe at first. When the initial sense of tension and danger wore off I experimented a bit more, deliberately courted danger a little bit. When playing normally however I probably strode right up to danger and punched it in the face, trusting luck and skill to get me by, but by prioritizing my survival I became much more reserved and cautious. Kinda boring, really.

Practical things that changed how I played included picking safe options, and utilizing all the points on my “How To Kill People More Effectively” strategy. Basically any time there was a dangerous option and a boring safe option, I took the safe one.

3. Do you think this type of play through is something you could imagine doing for a game you had never played before?

I don’t think so. Far Cry 2 is quite forgiving of your mistakes in the sense that if you ‘die’ with a rescue buddy around, you get a second chance. That’s one of the reasons I thought it would be feasible for an ordinary non-uber player like myself to complete Far Cry 2 without ever dying.

4. Is there something specific to the design of Far Cry 2 that makes it more suitable to this type of play through than other games? Do you think Far Cry 2 was a good choice for what you were intending to do, and if so why?

I think the buddy rescue system is one of the best ways of dealing with the problem of lost and wasted game-time that you get by forcing players to reload and try parts of a game again – and I do think that it is a loss. Jesper Juul talks about ‘time lost’ as a punishment in a talk from GDC earlier this year.

5. You have been describing the events that took place from a first person perspective (With a notable exception), and as a connected narrative, is there an explicit reason for this approach to the presentation of your experience?

Part of the attraction to the “one life” approach was that it made everything in the game more meaningful to the story – that is, never ever was an action ‘wasted’ because I died and had to start over. I had also hoped that it would add weight to every action, even insignificant ones, but as it turns out, it’s not quite that straightforward.

I wanted to write from a first person perspective because of a couple of reasons – firstly I was (and still am) increasingly bored with straight essay style writing about games. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the good ones, and they’ll certainly always have their place, but more and more I’m finding myself attracted to the kind of games criticism that involves some application of creativity of expression. I’m a bit of a desperate fan of Kieron Gillen’s somewhat controversial New Games Journalism style of writing because it doesn’t just give permission to a writer to be creative, it demands it. I think a lot of people mis-read it back in the day and took it as meaning that was the only way you were meant to write about games, but it’s not meant to be so constrictive – it’s just another tool in the critic’s toolbox.

I also thought that the first person perspective would let me describe how I was feeling while playing it, and as the whole point of the exercise was to change the experience, keep it new and interesting, that seemed the logical choice.

6. The concept of adding additional rules to a game is not a new one: “Iron Man” runs, “Speed Runs”, various approaches have been adopted when playing Thief: The Dark Project: “Ghosting” etc. From your own perspective why do you feel your play through has garnered so much attention? How much of it do you feel is because of the way your have presented your experience? Do you feel people are more interested in the story of your play through, or the concept of what you are doing itself?

I think Kieron Gillen when he linked to the story in RPS’ Sunday Papers hit the nail on the head when he said he wished he’d thought of it. Like you say, self imposing additional rules and constraints isn’t new, but the idea of writing about them is still not done particularly often, and almost never with a view to how it changes the experience.

So in that respect I think it’s the concept that made people sit up and take notice. Whether they stuck around and enjoyed the story, I can’t be sure, but if it’s any indication comments have dropped off slightly in the later episodes while pageviews are still holding steady at somewhere around 100 a day.

When thinking about whether people are explicitly interested in the story, the question I’ve got to ask is “What really is the permanent death story?” Is it the experience that I, the player, have in the game? Or is it the story I construct with blog posts and pictures as it’s received by readers of the blog (and eventually, in the PDF novelization)? From my vantage point as both player and reader of the story, I know that there are a lot of things that happened in the game that get cut from the written story because they either make it too long and boring, compromising the quality of the narrative, or they’re nearly impossible to convey to a reader.

How does one write about the feeling of boating down a river under the cover of darkness as the moon slides behind trees? How do you convince a reader that you really were imagining the feel of the breeze in your face, and the feel of being immersed in this environment? Does the reader even care whether or not I was engaged at this particular point or not? How do I convince a reader that the idea of a soldier who I already shot, but who was still staggering around, was going to burn to death mildly horrified me? The fact that it horrified me in a videogame at all is still amazing to me because videogames suck at making me feel anything other than a desire to collect shit or blow stuff up.

I think it’s in trying to convey these sorts of experiences and personal reactions that I draw the most inspiration from NGJ. Not that Permanent Death is even an NGJ piece, it’s not quite personal enough and it often borders on the edge of being Fan Fiction, so I guess there’s that.

7. Permanence is an unusual term to use when discussing any video game, after all isn’t every decision you make permanent? You can return, change your actions and play out the consequences of that alerted decision but that doesn’t remove the fact that at some point you did make that initial decision?

When writing my thesis last year, I downloaded a single-life speed run of Halo 2 completed on Legendary difficulty. I watched it religiously – I watched all two and a half hours of it through more than once. I think what was so attractive and mesmerising about it was that it seemed to me like this is how Halo 2 was meant to be played.

In terms of making sense within the overarching narrative and fiction, this was how Master Chief would have done it. Any time you die, you mess up and you fail to live up to the chief’s standard, so you have to repeat a section until you get it right. Why do we not see the inherent weirdness in this? I think we have this ingrained, rote-learned blindness to the fundamental strangeness of videogame narratives. We do not experience the real world in anything remotely like the way we experience the events in a videogame.

Obviously, there are lots of good reasons for some of this – if it weren’t possible to fail then where would the challenge in the game come from? I think there are some great alternatives just waiting to be discovered, but so far all we do boils down to retconning the story on-the-fly. Ideally, every game would be perfectly set at that optimum level of difficulty that made it just hard enough to stay interesting, but not hard enough that you ever die and have to repeat any sections. I think most games err on the side of un-boring and go for just a little too hard. Which is fine, but it’s hardly a perfect system.

8. In reference to the previous question, would the decision to play Far Cry 2 again after this play through mitigate the decisions you made? Is that your intent, to never play Far Cry 2 again, and therefore make this your definitive play through?

I definitely intend to play Far Cry 2 again in the future, so no, the series of events in-game that became ‘Permanent Death’ are in no way meant to be the (or even just my) definitive Far Cry 2 story-experience. For starters, they are a fantastically more boring sequence of events than I have had in even other games of Far Cry 2, so it would be doing the game a disservice to leave it at that.

I don’t think playing again would diminish the permadeath story, either. There will always be the written record that roughly equates to that in-game series of events so I don’t think it would be impacted by playing again – or even by someone else attempting the same (or similar) thing.

9. How do you feel about the fact that there is no way to prove you have actually done anything you’ve described? Have you ever considered that there is no way in which the game can confirm that you in fact have not died? Is there such a means of recording this information that I have missed?

It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking recently about what I would do if I died right before the end of the game in a brain-meltingly stupid way, by shooting myself in the face with a grenade launcher, for example. If I was tantalisingly close to the end and messed up I know I would be tempted to lie about it and just keep playing as if nothing happened – after all how would anyone know? As far as the written Permadeath story goes, it’s whatever I say it is, right?

I guess there is no way of proving that I really did all the things I said I did, except to take me at my word. I don’t know if I’d want to there to be a way of proving what I said I did was what really happened, either. I wonder if it would limit the things I could do with the written story – as in, I couldn’t get away with as much ‘sexing up’ of the story as I have so far. I’ll freely admit that I’ve added in all sorts of stuff to make the written story more readable – like adding in some imaginary reasons for why I did the things I did in game.

It’s quite boring to just say “And then I shot some dude because it feels good to click my mouse and have the little man fall over” so I often invent a motivation for the character. I think it comes back to the question of ‘What is the Permanent Death story?’, because if you’re being truly honest, there aren’t any reasons for why we do a lot of what we do in games. Why do we shoot enemy soldiers? Because we’re told we should? Are we even explicitly told that most of the time? It’s certainly not because we are afraid of dying ourselves, as would be the case in a real combat situation. So is it fair game to pretend that’s why I was doing it in the game? I think for the sake of making an interesting written story, it is.

10. Do you think if there was an Achievement for completing the game without dying (Well until the very end), this is something you would have attempted for no other reason that obtaining that Achievement? What about if there was a scoreboard recording the total play time before death, would you be interested in trying to beat the “scores” of others?

I think if there were an achievement for it I wouldn’t need to do the Permanent Death ‘experiment’/story. I’m not very interested in achievements so I may have never bothered with it, but then I may have just to get some additional replay out of the game. Who’s to say?

Actually, I take that first bit back – I may still have done the permadeath play through because it’s important to note that anyone who finishes the game already does never die – because any “narrative branch” of the story that leads to the players death, gets pruned off when they die. Your loading the game eliminates the series of events between that save and your previous death from the Far Cry 2 history and your character goes on none-the-wiser. You may know and remember, but as far as the story is concerned, no one else does because it never happened. Now, the difference with permanent death is that there are no pruned branches.

I’m not really a competitive player, so scoreboards hold next to no interest for me. If you want to play Left 4 Dead with me though, I totally love cooperation and I daresay I work harder at a game when it’s for a cooperative goal than when it’s for a competitive reason.

11. Personally where do you fall on the ludology vs. narratology debate? How do you feel your personal opinions have influenced the decisions you have made during your play through?

I think the ludology/narratology debate is worn out and as Ian Bogost says in his DiGRA keynote, even the question of whether it’s one or the other presupposes a formalist approach to the ontology of games. Realistically, my opinions on whether games are play versus narrative only really matters when thinking about games as stories or games as playgrounds and any other time of the day I’m quite happy to let games be whatever they want to be.

Bogost characterises the Ludology/Naratology debate as “a formalist rather than functionalist approach to the study of games” and by arguing over what games are we end up ignoring what games mean already.

12. A number of other people joined you in your permadeath play through at the start, I believe none of them are still playing having already died. Do you think there is anything about the way you have approached your play through that has helped you to stay alive?

I think it’s more sheer bloody-mindedness that’s kept me going. Michel McBride got bored and quit, and if you’re an experienced player it’s not that hard to stay alive on normal. A reader who started up his own blog was playing along too, but on the hardest difficulty and he didn’t last very long. For me, it’s turned into an endurance test, rather than a skill test.

I’m feeling pretty wretched this evening, whether from a cold or allergies. To amuse myself in my sinus fog, I’ll post this clip and then proceed to the issue of this post.

Returning to Ian’s keynote address where tacos are mentioned, I just cannot resist posting this clip as a nice cinematic representation of non-human objects as actors. Silliness and sinus headaches aside, I have some rather vague and unformed thoughts rolling about in my cobweb filled mind regarding the nature of theories. One of the measures of any ontology, I think, is the issue of self-reflexivity. Does the ontology take account of its own ontological status within its own theoretical framework, or does it implicitly exempt itself from the claims it makes about the nature of the world? Foucault, for example, got himself in trouble with Habermas. As Habermas argued in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Foucault seems to exempt his own archaeological and genealogical analyses from the very dynamics of power he discerns everywhere else. If truth is a product of power, the argument runs, what is it that authorizes Foucault’s own discourse? Wouldn’t it too be a product of power-relations? I am not here endorsing Habermas’ criticism, but simply giving an example of the problem of self-reflexivity to draw attention to what the issue is. How is it that a theory takes account of itself within the framework of its own ontological commitments?

read on!

This issue arises within the framework of onticology and OOO more generally as well. Onticology is committed to the thesis that there is only one type of being: objects. For anything that is, it is an object. This entails that theories cannot be something other than objects, but rather that theories must themselves be objects. Yet what does this mean at the ontological level? I don’t know. If onticology and OOO are ontologies, does this entail that there is one object that somehow represents all other objects? Yet within the framework of OOO and onticology, this clearly cannot be the case, as onticology advances the thesis that objects are split or barred (Ø), that they withdraw, that they are necessarily in excess of any relation they enter into. Insofar as objects necessarily withdraw from other objects, it follows that there cannot be one object that represents all the others. Yet it is a strange ontology that simultaneously treats itself as one of the objects to be explained, purports to account for other objects, and embraces the impossibility of its own endeavor at the theoretical level.

I do not yet have an answer to these questions, so I’m simply trying to formulate them here. Moreover, I am not convinced that the requirement of self-reflexivity must be met in order for good work to be done. Foucault did all sorts of good work without having a robust self-reflexive account of his own practice. Following concerns raised by Ghost, I would also argue that the barred nature of objects is not simply the opacity of one object with respect to another object in an exo-relation between objects, but that objects capable of self-reflexivity are also split or barred (Ø) with respect to themselves. Taking up Gasche’s marvelous metaphor of the “tain of a mirror” and combining it with Lacan’s notion of objet a or my matheme δ, it could be said that one of the features of any self-reflexive object is that it is opaque or split with respect to itself and not simply for another. In this regard, any self-reflexive object will necessarily contain a tain or δ in its self-relation that functions as a condition for the possibility of its reflexivity.

However, it is minimally clear that if theory is itself an object, then the question of the relation between theory and what it theorizes must be conceptualized as an inter-ontic relation between two or more objects. If this is the case, then theory should be conceived less as a representation of objects (a mirroring), than as a translation of other objects. As I suggested in discussion with Bogost, theories are better conceived on the model of recipes than representations. A recipe does not represent a dish or tell you what it will taste like or what it will be like. Rather, a recipe is a set of prescriptions or, better yet, operations, for producing an endo-consistent set of differences. “First saute a bit of fresh oregano and garlic in olive oil. Then…” Put in Ian’s language, a recipe is a set of operations for acting on units, thereby producing another unit. Here we would have a sense of the dynamics behind what Badiou, and Ian following him, refers to as the “count-as-one”. It would be a set of operations where the one is not a pre-existing one or unity, but where it is a result or effect of other operations. In my language, the operations exercised on units or objects would produce differences (δ) as their outcome (the completed dish).

A theory then would be no different than a recipe. Just as a recipe directs us to act on units in a particular way so as to produce a new unit, a theory directs us to act on objects in a particular way so as to produce particular differences in that object. Note that here our understanding of theory is substantially modified. No longer does theory represent an object as a realist painting might depict the “ultra-real” of an object photographically. No, the whole point is that theories, like recipes, direct us to bring objects into relation with one another so as to produce certain differences. When we look at the table of elements, what we see are not representations of elements, but potential differential relations that would occur were elements combined in various ways. The names of objects in theories thus become, just as Sartre and Pierce had it, the differences which a thing produces under controlled circumstances. Here we would have a beginning sketch of how one object, theories, act on other objects– researches, instruments, ingredients used, etc –to produce a new unit or difference (δ). Yet we also need to account for the reverse direction: other types of objects acting on theories. However, with my head in sinus agony I’ll leave off there for the moment.

Ian Bogost has posted his keynote address for the 2009 Digital Games Research Association conference in Uxbridge, UK. On the one hand it is gorgeously and charmingly written (I can only imagine how the delivery must have been). This line caused me to spit out my wine:

Flying the standard of “speculative realism,” Meillassoux and a number of other thinkers have sought to reject correlationism and to re-admit the multifarious complexity of being, as well as to free being from the sole purview of human, returning it to all objects, including the human ones. Reality is reaffirmed, and humans are allowed to live within it alongside the sea urchins, kudzu, tacos, quasars, and Tesla coils.

The lecture is filled with terrific– and I’ll add very kind –one liners of this sort. For some reason I can’t stop thinking of the scene where a taco and a grilled cheese sandwich fight one another in Hot Rod. As Dan occasionally likes to point out, humor is essential to humor. Similar Graham talks about how philosophy should be vivid. Following Deleuze, I think philosophy should act directly on the nervous system. Ian certain hits all three requirements in his keynote, producing a work of theory that is rich, lively, playful, and open to a variety of audiences as is befitting of this sort of conference.

More fundamentally, Bogost is dealing with a fundamental ontology question that extends well beyond his chosen terrain and venue. In this talk he is posing the question of the ontology of games. One might think that this is a question of limited interest, belonging only to those “freaks” on the fringes of the pop culture theory world that are obsessed with games (I often wonder if there isn’t a little ressentiment motivating these attitudes towards the media studies folk, as if there’s a suspicion that they’ve gamed the system and are enjoying themselves too much). This would be a mistake, as it is always a mistake to dismiss the animal studies crowd, the technology studies crowd, and the media studies crowd. In my view, what is so important in Ian’s work is two-fold: On the one hand, he is struggling mightily with the question of how to think messes. That is, how do we simultaneously think the platforms which render these games possible, programming, the socio-economics behind them, and the semiotic level of games. In this respect, Bogost is facing straight on a number of questions I’m pre-occupied with concerning both the reality of symbolic entities and their relation to all sorts of other entities. On the other hand– and sadly this issue is much less present in this paper than elsewhere –Bogost is approaching the question of how objects come-to-be or how “units” are formed. Alongside the onticological analytic and dialectic that I have proposed, it could thus be said that there must be an onticological genesis, not unlike the transcendental deduction of Kant’s first Critique. It is this sort of issue that Bogost is targeting with his concept of units. At any rate, enjoy!… And I mean that in the full superegoic sense!

In response to my post on Extended Cognition, english140prof or Alice writes:

Students in my Digital Humanities course are reading selections from Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media for next Tuesday. I agree with Ian that McLuhan remains extremely useful, especially when introducing humanities-based students to a new media curriculum. Of course, the Medievalist in my English Department also appreciates that I’m resurrecting his work and introducing it into general student discourse!

In many respects, I think this gets at the project of re-construction I proposed and that Paul Ennis named. On the one hand, I’m hoping to teach McLuhan– hopefully in the context of my “extended pedagogy” experiment –in the next semester or so. Any suggestions as to what text would be good to assign would be terrific. I think I might have frightened other people off with the proposal of extended pedagogy. The point of extended pedagogy is not to structure classes in the same way, but to provide an opportunity for academics interested in each others work to collaboratively read a text with one another over the course of the semester. The text could be an entire book or, as Mel and I plan to do this semester, something as small as an essay like Deleuze’s “Post-Script on Society of Control”. In this respect, the extended pedagogy experiment allows for dual duty, simultaneously providing the opportunity to do research with someone who’s though and ideas you’re interested in and assign material to students. Now, ideally– and Mel and I are going to try this –I would also like to involve students for a portion of the semester. This would involve creating a blog or discussion list for the class where students from different courses would participate with one another in digital dialogue. I think this could potentially be a productive experience for the students in the form of active learning, rather than simply listening to professors lecture and guide discussion. I’d like to do this with McLuhan in the future.

All of these pedagogical issues aside, however, in other contexts I’ve spoken about object-oriented ontology in the context of a project I refer to, following Paul Ennis, as “re-construction”. Part of that project would consist, as Deleuze suggested, in creating a counter tradition and in resurrecting those moments of the philosophical and theoretical tradition that are particularly valuable from the standpoint of onticology and ontography. Just as Deleuze sought to create a minor tradition consisting of Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz, and so on, OOO needs its “minor tradition” of those object-oriented philosophers that have been object-oriented philosophers without knowing it.

read on!

Harman has already been doing quite a bit of this himself. His book on Latour is certainly an example of such a re-construction that functions to bring a thinker, largely neglected by philosophy (he’s huge elsewhere), to center stage. His retrieval of Zubiri and Ortega y Gassett also come to mind. One of the marks of a philosopher, I believe, is the manner in which they create their own history, not in the sense of themselves making a historical contributions (who knows who will?), but in the sense of producing a history that preceded them. In this regard, one difference between a philosopher and a scholar lies in the willingness to produce a counter-history rather than simply accepting the history that they inherit from the academy. This is a hermeneutic point. We are only as free as the history we make for ourselves. Harman has been seeding McLuhan all over the place as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that he has another book in the works on him. If he doesn’t, I guess it falls to me or Ian or someone else to write such a book. Kittler and Ong, I think, are on that list as well. Stengers has written the book on Whitehead that renders such a resurrection possible, as has Shaviro (though I doubt he’d call himself an OOO theorist). Re-construction will thus be organized along two fronts. On the one hand it will consist in object-oriented readings of the tradition such as Harman’s reading of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, etc., or Bogost’s reading of Badiou, where the object-oriented “kernel” is redeemed from the anti-realist shell. Like Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology, such readings are simultaneously critical in the sense that they reveal the arbitrary ontological assumptions behind anti-realist thought at work in these thinkers, while also being possible in redeeming missed opportunities and failed paths of thought in these thinkers.

On the other hand, it will consist in the creation of a counter-tradition of “minor” (in the Deleuzian sense) thinkers that alethetically strives to bring a set of tools and concepts to center stage that have been significantly overlooked by a tradition dominated by anti-realist thought. I’ve learned a lot from media and technology folk such as “Alice” or “englishprof140″. I’d really enjoy hearing the historians, critical animal theorists, environmentalists, and artists speak up on these matters, drawing attention to those crucial moments in this counter-tradition and the theory produced around it, requiring disclosedness.

Ian Bogost recently published a paper in Gama Sutra on the importance of gestures in games – a topic I’ve been itching to write about for a while now. Generally, what he talks about is helpful in starting the ball rolling, and there a number of interesting places to dig in, particularly for those of us that are interested in topics like embodiment, meaning, and action. For example, he explains how “gestures … can also alter an actor’s own thoughts or feelings about the world or himself. These sensations can be complex, and they can evolve.” While all of this is true, I think that much more can be said in order to provide traction and utility for designers by being clearer, and elucidating more explicit implications as well as applications for gesture. More to come on this later.

Ryan here…

One of my interests in video games is the way in which they’re available platforms to use for cultural/societal critiques.  Video games, especially if you consider the works of Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, can be used in a much more serious matter.  Here is a good article, although I think they’re late by a few years, it’s a growing trend in game design and worth a look.

Video games that let you play with your news

* Without IBM: Sun’s plan B (David Goldman, Money)

(CNNMoney.com) — There may still be a plan B for Sun Microsystems after merger talks with IBM reportedly broke down, but any new deal will be a lot messier for the Silicon Valley giant.

* Goldman Sachs has the Buffett rachet to deal with (Antony Currie, The Daily Telegraph)

All the Wall Street firm needs to do is replenish some of the funds by selling new stock, right? Not so fast. Goldman still needs to reckon with Warren Buffett.

* Mobile society (Alyssa Abkowitz, Money)

Apple’s iPhone app store sells tools for counting calories, cooking perfect eggs, and performing voodoo on digital dolls. Game designer Ian Bogost thought he’d add to that eclectic mix by making a “newsgame” about airport security. (Fun!)

Racing the Beam

I recently finished reading Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. I have a passion for classic gaming, so of course I’m always interested in reading up about the old Atari VCS, which I first came across back in 1981 I think. My first stepmother’s ex-husband had actually purchased one shortly after it came to market, and she won it, as well as an organ and his machete, in the divorce (actually, I think he just left most of his stuff in the apartment and took off for less stricter pastures, but that’s a story in and of itself).

At the time, the VCS was really gaining popularity with kids my age. My stepmother didn’t actually realize this until I started being social and going to other kids’ house in the building to play blotchy Asteroids on their consoles. Then she remembered the dusty box in the back of the closet, and my brother and I were happy campers playing endless versions of Combat.

(A note: the VCS was not our first addiction: that would be console Pong.)

The VCS was the first extremely popular console system at a time when technology for gaming was quite young and extremely limited. The MOS 6507 CPU could only use* a whopping 8 KB of memory, and games were therefore limited to 4 KB until bank switching came to games years later. The TIA was the real star of system as it was responsible for putting the graphics on our television screens. The technology was limited, however, and it wasn’t really until Activision came on the scene that designers really pushed the limits and made beautiful games for the VCS.

Racing the Beam focuses both on the technological aspects of the VCS and how game designers worked with and overcame the limitations of the hardware. Montfort and Bogost look at six games which took advantage of and pushed the envelope of the VCS:

• Combat
• Adventure
• Yars’ Revenge
• Pac-Man
• Pitfall!
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

I’m not going to go into details about how each game was handled in the text. Mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s much more interesting to read how the technology inspired the design of each game by people who actually know what they are talking about rather than someone simply regurgitating what they think they know. What I am going to talk about, however, is the way in which we design around limitations, using myself (one of my favorite topics!) as an example.

I’m not a programmer. I’ve tried to learn a language here or there, but I simply can never get a handle on things. It’s like mathematics: I know 1 + 1 = 2, but if you want me to do some odd trigonometry calculation you’d probably have better luck speaking to me in Swahili. This is why, in part, I took a class in Game Programming at Hunter College last semester. The language was ActionScript, and it was taught by my Concepts In Gaming professor, Angela Ferraiolo. While I did well in the class, I was a complete and utter newbie, unable to execute my rather simple ideas into finished products.

My first project, coincidentally enough, was a port of Atari’s Outlaw, one of my favorite Atari games. I created a splash screen, a rules page, and had an easter egg page on the splash screen giving a brief history of the game. That was the easy part.

I knew how to move my avatar up and down and within the limitations of the stage, but I did not really know how to randomly move the “bad guy” up and down. At the same time, I didn’t know how to successfully fire the gun and have the bullet move across the screen, but did know how to do collision detection. I also did not know how to add sound to get an audio feedback (gun fire, gun hit, win/lose, etc.). Because of my coding limitations, I had to design my game around them. There’s a win/lose state that’s only initiated when the player clicks an object on the screen. Click yourself or the cactus and you lose. Click the bad guy and you win. In either state, you can replay the game (return to the splash home page) and start again.

Whether or not my version of Outlaw is a successful game isn’t up for debate, but what is interesting to me is how I worked with my limitations to produce some sort of product. What I didn’t do, however, is push the limits of my knowledge, nor push the limits of ActionScript’s technology to produce a viable product, but that’s understandable considering that I was only two weeks into learning the language. Racing the Beam, however, gave me food for thought regarding how many designers and programmers have to work around the limitations of whatever platform they are working in. While the Atari VCS is certainly a low end platform system that was severely limited by the technology available in its day, a slew of effective games were produced that are not only some of the most beloved games of all time, but set design standards that are still in use today. Effective game design and programming looks at the lowest common denominator and then says “okay, how can I push the envelope and make a kick ass game.” Not every game is successful in this area, but it is an extremely worthy goal to reach for, and something that I, as a designer, should keep in mind as I continue to expand and learn and develop my myriad tools (none of which should really include programming ).

Racing the Beam is part of the Platform Studies series, published by The MIT Press

* correction submitted by Simon… thanks!
Check out….

• Boston.com interview with Nick Montfort

Dawno już na Altergraniu nie pisałam o tym, co nowego pojawiło się w sieci w związku z szeroko rozumianą nauką o grach. Pora nadrobić zaległości, poniżej więc krótkie zestawienie publikacji, które ukazały się w ciągu kilku ostatnich miesięcy, a z którymi warto się zapoznać, by pozostać w miarę na bieżąco z tym, co dzieje się w ludologii – polskiej i światowej (a dokładnie mówiąc anglojęzycznej).

Polska:

• W ramach wydawanej przez Zakład Teorii i Filozofii Komunikacji UAM serii „Homo Communicativus” opublikowano dwa tomy będące owocem konferencji Polskiego Towarzystwa Badania Gier z cyklu „Kulturotwórcza funkcja gier” (tom pierwszy, tom drugi). PTBG zajmuje się wszelakimi rodzajami gier, toteż uprzedzam, że nie należy się dziwić obecności takich artykułów jak na przykład „Piosenka jako element ludyczny na lektoracie języka włoskiego” czy „Tamburyno w rozwoju gier ruchowych na Górnym Śląsku”. Z obszaru nas interesującego pojawiły się m.in. teksty dotyczące badań nad postacią w grach fabularnych (na przykładzie Neverwinter Nights), alfabetyzacji informacyjnej za pomocą gier czy gier 2.0. Jest też niemało artykułów, które mogą zaciekawić fanów niekomputerowego RPG.

• W dziale ludologicznym serwisu Wiedza i Edukacja pojawiło się tłumaczenie artykułu Daniela Kromanda Kategoryzacja awatarów. W przygotowaniu tłumaczenia kolejnych artykułów, w tym prawdopodobnie tych zamieszczanych na łamach Game Studies, pierwszego i bodaj do dziś najważniejszego sieciowego periodyku ludologicznego (którego najowszy numer ukazał się w grudniu).

• W najnowszym numerze czasopisma Kultura i Historia ukazała się recenzja książki Fransa Mäyrä An Introduction to Game Studies. Games In Culture. Autorem recenzji jest Radosław Bomba z Instytutu Kulturoznawstwa UMCS. Warto przy okazji wspomnieć, że Radek niedawno otworzył przewód doktorski. Temat jego pracy brzmi „Gry komputerowe w perspektywie antropologi codzienności”, a dotyczyć ma głównie tego, jak gry stapiają się z naszym życiem codziennym (pracą, nauką, odpoczynkiem). Szykuje się zatem trzeci, po Grach sieciowych jako medium komunikacyjnym Mirosława Filiciaka i “Grach komputerowych jako obszarze zainteresowań nowej teorii literatury” Jana Stasieńki polski doktorat na temat gier wideo. Trzymamy kciuki

Świat:

• Pojawiło się kilka nowych czasopism naukowych poświęconych grom. Z punktu widzenia polskich graczy, wśród których gry fabularne cieszą się od lat dużą popularnością, najciekawiej przedstawia się International Journal of Role-Playing. W walijskim Uniwersytecie w Bangor rozpoczęto z kolei publikację Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, a pracownicy kilku uczelni amerykańskich zainicjowali Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

• Henry Jenkins, amerykański badacz mediów i kultury popularnej, zamieścił na swoim blogu zapis dwóch ciekawych wywiadów. W pierwszym (część I, część II) rozmawia z Michaelem Nitsche z Georgia Institute of Technology, autorem książki Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds, na temat gier jako systemów przestrzennych. W drugim (część I, część II) na spytki bierze Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter i Jill Denner, redaktorki książki Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming i organizatorki konferencji pod tym samym tytułem. Rozmowa dotyczy różnych kwestii związanych z grami i płcią.

• Wspominany nie raz przy różnych okazjach na Altergraniu Ian Bogost z Georgia Institute of Technology rozpoczął wraz z kilkoma naukowcami i studentami nowy projekt badawczy: Journalism and Games. Jak sama nazwa wskazuje, projekt dotyczy gier i dziennikarstwa, a dokładnie tego, na jakie sposoby i w jakich formach gry mogą być wykorzystywane w celach publicystycznych. 

• Na zakończenie przypominam, że na stronie Digiplay Initiative znaleźć można na bieżąco aktualizowaną bibliografię naukowych publikacji poświęconych grom – nie tylko sieciowych, ale i drukowanych, co może być przydatne na wypadek, gdyby ktoś na przykład zechciał szarpnąć się na nowe książki ludologiczne z Amazona.

Kubizm i pop-art. Parnasizm i realizm magiczny. Nowa Fala i Dogma 95. Przykłady nurtów, prądów i tendencji w sztukach plastycznych, literaturze i filmie można by mnożyć. Tego samego o grach nie da się (jeszcze) powiedzieć. Mamy bogactwo gatunków i konwencji, ale trudno mówić o spójnych filozofiach tworzenia czy dążeniach ideowo-estetycznych. Tym bardziej interesujące wydają się pierwsze próby opisania styli, jakie zaczynają wyodrębniać się na polu game designu. Jedną z takich prób podjął Ian Bogost w opublikowanym niedawno na łamach serwisu Gamasutra artykule The Proceduralist Style. Zaproponowane przez autora pojęcie stylu proceduralnego jest na tyle ciekawe, że warto jak sądzę nieco je przybliżyć. 

Zanim przejdziemy do jego charakterystyki, warto zaznaczyć, że styl proceduralny stoi w opozycji do stylu konwencjonalnego, z jakim do czynienia mamy w większości współczesnych gier. Zamiast realistycznej symulacji, otrzymujemy metaforyczną prezentację idei. Zamiast nagradzania gracza za osiągnięcia – zaproszenie do introspekcji. Zamiast wyzwalania jego kreatywności – wizję indywidualnego twórcy. Siłą rzeczy zatem gier proceduralnych nie należy raczej szukać na sklepowych półkach, lecz na scenie niezależnej. Parę ostatnich wpisów na Altergraniu poświęconych było grom tkwiącym po uszy w popkulturze (z naciskiem na “pop”), teraz dla równowagi proponuję odrobinę pozytywnego snobizmu.

Do rzeczy zatem. Autor wyróżnia pięć cech charakteryzujących styl:

• Retoryka proceduralna. Jest to termin wprowadzony przez Bogosta w książce Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Jego znaczenie można streścić następująco: gry komunikują odbiorcom treści poprzez procedury, zasady i algorytmy (tak jak książki czynią to poprzez słowa, a sztuki wizualne poprzez obrazy), ich tworzywem jest bowiem język programowania. Grając, wchodzimy w interakcję z owymi procedurami, które definiują, co nasze działania znaczą w kontekście świata gry. Przenosząc to na bardziej konkretny poziom, mamy procedury odpowiadające za to, by po wciśnięciu odpowiedniego klawisza nasza postać wyciągnęła broń, za to, by po strzeleniu w nogę przeciwnik zaczął kuleć i za to, ile razy musimy w niego trafić, by wyeliminować go na dobre. I tak dalej. W przypadku stylu proceduralnego, nacisk położony jest właśnie na komunikowanie treści poprzez naszą interakcję z mechaniką i dynamiką gry. Grafika, dźwięk, tekst są na planie drugim, a często jeszcze dalszym. Druga część terminu, czyli “retoryka”, odnosi się z kolei do ekspresji, do wyrażania idei. Gry tego rodzaju stawiają nas w określonej sytuacji w ten sposób, byśmy mogli jak najpełniej ją odczuć.

• Introspekcja. Gry proceduralne mają na celu wzbudzenie w nas refleksji na konkretny temat, przy czym refleksja pojawić się może zarówno w trakcie rozgrywki, jak i po jej zakończeniu, w wyniku analizy tejże rozgrywki. Dobrymi przykładami ilustrującymi tę cechę są dwa tytuły, którym poświęciłam swego czasu na Altergraniu osobne wpisy – Passage Jasona Rohrera i The Marriage Roda Humble’a. W pierwszym przypadku forma przedstawienia tytułowego przejścia od wieku młodego do nieuchronnej śmierci w naturalny sposób inspiruje do rozważań nad wyborami, jakich dokonujemy w życiu. W drugim przypadku mamy do czynienia z metaforą małżeństwa i trudów, jakich wymaga stworzenie i utrzymanie szczęśliwego związku. Gry tego typu stawiają pytania, ale odszukanie odpowiedzi należy już do gracza.

• Abstrakcja. Gry proceduralne nie odrzucają znaczenia grafiki, dźwięku, tekstu czy fabuły, ale nie wykorzystują tych elementów w celu upodobnienia się do rzeczywistości. Najczęściej unikają mimetyzmu. Z jednej strony można tłumaczyć to prozaicznie: są zazwyczaj tworzone przez jedną, dwie osoby, a nie całe zespoły pracowników wyspecjalizowanych w konkretnych częściach składowych procesu powstawania gier. Ale główny powód jest natury estetycznej: forma jest tu podrzędna wobec treści i służy jedynie jej uwydatnieniu. Autorom zależy na tym, by dekoracje nie odwracały naszej uwagi od przekazu, lecz go podbudowywały (jest to, notabene, podejście dokładnie odwrotne od tego, z jakim spotkać się możemy w niektórych produkcjach komercyjnych, w których rozbuchana oprawa audiowizualna przykryć ma wątłą zawartość). Jeśli chodzi o historię, zamiast opowieści w tradycyjnym sensie otrzymujemy zazwyczaj alegorię lub fabularny odpowiednik migawek. Bogost przywołuje przykład gry Daniela Benmerguia, The Storyteller. Jest to historia utrzymana w konwencji baśni, w której sami ustalamy relacje między trójką bohaterów, zmieniając ich rozmieszczenie na pionowym tryptyku. Na części dolnej widoczny jest rezultat naszych wyborów, czyli zakończenie baśni.

 



The Storyteller (gra otworzy się w przeglądarce po kliknięciu na obrazek).

• Subiektywizm. Istnieją gry, które są o czymś konkretnym – tak jak SimCity jest o zarządzaniu miastem, a Madden o futbolu amerykańskim – oraz gry, które nie są o niczym konkretnym, tak jak całkowicie oderwany od rzeczywistości Tetris. Gry proceduralne sytuują się mniej więcej po środku. Zawsze są o czymś, ale trudno tu mówić o konkretyzacji – to czysto subiektywne spojrzenie na pewien wycinek rzeczywistości, które wynika z osobistych doświadczeń autora. To “coś”, o czym jest gra, rzadko jest prezentowane w bezpośredni sposób. Dlatego gry tego typu cechuje wieloznaczność i można je interpretować na różne sposoby. Tak jak w The Marriage, gdzie do nas należy wybór, czy rozmiar symbolizujących żonę i męża kwadratów potraktujemy np. jako wielkość ich ego czy raczej wyraz pozycji w związku. Bogost przywołuje tu też przykład gry Bernarda Schulenburga, Where is My Heart. Jej tematem jest życie rodzinne i jego komplikacje, a do nas należy interpretacja poszczególnych elementów rozgrywki i świata gry, mamy tu bowiem do czynienia z platformówką wraz z większością atrybutów tego gatunku.

• Autorstwo. Gry proceduralne są subiektywnym wyrazem ludzkich doświadczeń, a trudno byłoby mówić o autentyzmie tego wyrazu, gdybyśmy mieli do czynienia z produkcją stworzoną przez grupę kilkudziesięciu czy wręcz kilkuset w większości anonimowych osób. Dlatego też “autor” – jako jedna osoba lub niewielki zespół osób – jest w przypadku tego typu gier zawsze znany, a jego rola podkreślona. Celem było wyrażenie zaprezentowanie indywidualnej wizji, a nie skrojenie produktu pod gusta ustalonej grupy docelowej. Wiedza o tym, że za daną grą stoi konkretny człowiek, może też pomóc w jej interpretacji.

W tym miejscu mała ciekawostka. Styl proceduralny jawić się może jako wydumana koncepcja, która przydatna jest głównie krytykom i garstce twórców o artystycznych ambicjach. Ale okazuje się, że gra posiadająca wszelkie cechy stylu może zdobyć powszechny rozgłos oraz uznanie graczy i recenzentów, a także osiągnąć komercyjny sukces. Mowa o Braid, produkcji autorstwa Jonathana Blowa, która od sierpnia 2008 roku dostępna jest do pobrania za pośrednictwem usługi Xbox Live Arcade (warto dodać, że 31 marca premierę będzie mieć wersja na PC). Braid jest grą platformowo-logiczną zbudowaną wokół możliwości manipulowania upływem czasu (retoryka proceduralna). Opowiada historię mężczyzny, który próbuje odzyskać utraconą miłość, co prowokuje do rozważania kwestii żalu i przebaczenia (introspekcja). Oprawa graficzna jest daleka od mimetyzmu; lokacje są dwuwymiarowe i przypominają akwarelowe obrazy (abstrakcja). Zakończenie jest niejednoznaczne i podatne na interpretacje (subiektywizm). Twórca gry jest powszechnie znany z nazwiska – stał się wręcz gwiazdą na scenie niezależnej, jest zapraszany na wykłady i spotkania, prowadzi poczytnego bloga (autorstwo).

Braid w akcji. Możemy przewijać swoje działania, nawet po śmierci bohatera.

W całym tekście celowo unikałam słowa sztuka, bo i sam Bogost odnosi się nieufnie do dyskusji na temat tego, czy gry są lub mogą nią być. Zamiast teoretycznych i często jałowych debat – sam termin jest wszak niejasny i zmienia swoje znaczenie w zależności od epoki – proponuje konkretne rozważania dotyczące konkretnych właściwości konkretnych gier. Okazuje się, że w ten sposób odnaleźć da się bardziej lub mniej zamierzone przez autorów gier prawidłowości, które z kolei prowadzić mogą do wykształcenia artystycznych nurtów, prądów, tendencji. Styl proceduralny jest tylko jedną z propozycji i czas pokaże, czy przyjmie się na dłużej. Sami twórcy też zresztą nie pozostają dłużni krytykom w kwestii deklaracji twórczych. Założyciele znanego na scenie niezależnej studia Tale of Tales (twórcy m.in. The Graveyard) napisali na przykład swego czasu Realtime Art Manifesto, którego założenia są zgoła odmienne od tych charakteryzujących styl proceduralny. Ale to już temat na osobny wpis, który z pewnością za jakiś czas powstanie.

—

Wybrane gry proceduralne niewymienione w tekście:

• Reflect
• I Wish I Were the Moon
• Between
• Gravitation

INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR AND PREMISE

In his second book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that videogames are inherently rhetorical and, open a new sphere for persuasion all together.  Subdividing his book into three chapters, Bogost substantiates his argument through numerous case studies in the realms of politics, advertising, and education; all of which have leveraged videogame persuasion and hold potential for future manifestations. Persuasive Games is a didactic tool in game studies, media studies in general, that in many ways can by helpful to game critics, students, and designers alike.

The perspective of Persuasive Games is undoubtedly influenced by Bogost’s unique background.  On the one hand, as a videogame designer, Bogost obviously has a vested interest in their ability to communicate evocative messages.  On the other hand, as an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, he has an academic interest in understanding the force and impact that videogames have on society.  As a result, Bogost creates a read both substantial in historical precedent and philosophical context, as well as grounded in actual media practice.

As Bogost sets up the premise of Persuasive Games, he goes to great lengths breaking down the central expression, procedural rhetoric. He defines procedurality as a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes.  It’s a term he inextricably ties to computers and their ability to execute a series of rules.  Once he has exhausted this discussion, he moves on to a larger and historical discussion of rhetoric, as examined by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among others. Though he recognizes the term rhetoric generically refers to persuasive expression, he dedicates ample time to the examination of nuanced differentiation, such as visual or digital rhetoric.  Taken together, procedural rhetoric is defined as the “practice of authoring arguments through process” (p29).

Bogost uses this notion of procedural rhetoric to reveal why videogames are both an expressive and persuasive medium. Expressive simply refers to the representation of how real and imagined systems work and persuasive simply refers to the intrinsic ability of videogames to make salient arguments about the way systems work in the real world.  It is because of the nature of videogames then that Bogost believes players are able to interact with representational systems to change their attitudes about those systems outside of the game.

POLITICS

Discussing videogames in the sphere of politics, Bogost first scrutinizes political processes and then the definition of ideology.  He ultimately describes a multifaceted way videogames challenge ideology: “videogames are particularly useful tools for visualizing the logics that make up a worldview (following Gramsci), the ideological distortions in political situations (following Zizek), or the state of such situations (following Badiou)…. [Thus] videogames that engage political topics codify the logic of political system through procedural representation” (p75).  This explanation makes way for Bogost’s hope that players can have a detached perspective on the ideologies that drive the procedural rhetorics claims about political situations (p75).

Examples Bogost uses in this section are “characterized by procedural rhetorics that expose the logic of a political order, thereby opening a possibility for its support, interrogation, or disruption” (p90).  One example of a political videogame that Bogost discusses in depth is America’s Army: Operations. The game, Bogost juxtaposes with Counter-Strike, reveals a contemporary U.S. ideology of war. America’s Army is “ a manifestation of the ideology that propels the U.S. Army, the game encourages players to consider the logic of duty, honor, and singular global political truths as a desirable worldview” (p79).

Bogost dedicates considerable attention examining rule-based systems that frame political discourse.  He describes the many ways in which a videogame can utilize procedural frames to deploy rhetoric: using the rhetoric of failure (Kabul Kaboom, Madrid); reinforcement (Tax Invaders); contestation (Vigilance 1.0); and implication (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas).

Lastly, Bogost gives insight into the officially endorsed political games that utilized, effectively or not, procedural rhetoric to instigate political discourse.  My favorite example is The Howard Dean for Iowa game that “proceduralized the individual experience necessary to yield the positive collective benefit of citizen supporters” (p93).  Though not effective at differentiating Howard Dean by his political views, the videogame did offer players the opportunity to explore the notion of grassroots outreach.

ADVERTISING

Discussing videogames in the sphere of advertising, Bogost defines the three types of advertising:

1.    Demonstrative advertising communicates the functional utility of a product or service and reinforces the fact that the product is a commodity. Bogost gives the example of a detergent “sponsor message” late of television that simply features a demonstration of the utility of detergent.

2.    Illustrative advertising communicates both the tangible and intangible characteristics of a product, highlighting the incremental benefit.  For example, an ad that shows a soccer mom single-handedly putting in a third row of seats before carpooling a team of players to the big game.  The ad illustrates the utility of the easy addition of a third row of seats, but more importantly, it offers contextual information about the person who may need this feature and when he/she might use it.

3.    Associative advertising (a.k.a. “lifestyle advertising”) is the opposite of demonstrative advertising.  It focuses on the intangibles of a product or service, creating a niche market appeal.  Advertisements for Patron Tequila utilize this type of advertising to associate their tequila with sophistication and elitism.

The reasons Bogost dedicates time to these distinctions are to show the “advertising shift from a minimalist, rationalistic strategy to a spectacular, emotional one” (p150), as well as to argue for a reversion; at least as it relates to advertising employed in videogames.  In this vein, Bogost maps the concepts of demonstrative, illustrative, and associative advertising onto the medium of videogames. Just as in advertising, associative videogames (i.e. Mountain Dew Skateboarding) are the most prevalent, but he argues, not the most effective in delivering a powerful message.  He believes demonstrative advertising in videogames offers a “space for discourse about the use or value of a product…[and] encourage[s] critical consumption: the reasoned and conscious interrogation of individual wants and needs, rather than manipulated subservience to corporate ones” (p230).

In making his argument for advertisers to revert to demonstrative advertising when using videogames, Bogost accurately points some advertisers may not try because an alternative agenda.  He suggests “contemporary interest in advertising games has been driven by a broader interest in videogames as a gateway to a particular consumer than by the unique properties of the medium as a new form of marketplace discourse” (p161).  To the fault of advertisers, many use evidence of growth in the gaming industry and time-spent with the medium to rationalize their mere presence on say, a billboard in Grand Theft Auto. I strongly agree with Bogost’s cogent argument for advertisers to utilize the procedural strength of videogames to involve players in the discussion of various products and services.  Conclusively, as Bogost suggests, “videogames offer a mode of engagement with products and services that can activate critical perspectives on consumption. But to do so, advertising must reconnect with the fundamental property of videogames, procedurality” (p174).

Bogost then goes on to discuss a number of ways that advertisers can leverage videogames in an effective way through licensing, in-game product placement, and branded games.  Through a number of case studies, Bogost exemplifies that “games which articulate the function of a product or service deploy the most productive procedural rhetorics,” and in turn, are the most persuasive games.

LEARNING

Just as we saw in the previous two chapters, Bogost begins with a critique; in this case of education. He offers an abridged history of the competing constructivist and behaviorist educational theories, and strongly conveys his opinion of why neither of the theories can be used as a lens to understand the type of learning videogames promote.

The problem with the behaviorist theory, in Bogost’s opinion, is that it “ignore[s] the individual contexts for learning, [which] fail to account for both different player contexts and the ambiguity of meaning inherent of creative artifacts of all kinds” (p239).  In other words, the behaviorists theory allows for videogames to teach their content without taking into consideration the medium in which it was delivered.  “Such a turn ignore[s] Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that we understand media themselves as shapers of human experience, not just carriers of content” (p240).

As for the shortcoming of the constructivist theory, Bogost believes it “risks total divestiture of the specificity of a particular videogame in favor of the general, abstract principles it embodies” (p241).  In addition, it undermines the expressive potential of videogames.

Reconciling the strengths of the behaviorists’ subject-specificity and constructivists’ abstraction, Bogost idea of procedural literacy draws upon the strength of videogames to use “abstract processes to make procedural claims about specific topics” (p245).  “Procedurality offers a possible bridge between the abstraction-poor behaviorist approach and the subject-poor constructivist approach, focusing on the way processes come together to create meaning” (p240).

Through this distinction, Bogost explains that videogames have the potential to “teach perspectives about how things work through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism” (p260).  His case studies touch on how procedural rhetoric can teach in an array of worlds – consumer culture (ex. Animal Crossing), values in the workplace (ex. Cold Stone Creamery: Stone City), morality (ex. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas), and exercise (ex. Dance Dance Revolution).

CONCLUSION

This rehearsal of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames seeks merely to introduce Bogost’s idea of procedural rhetoric and its potential if employed in videogames: in political videogames procedural rhetoric can advance the function of existing or proposed public policy; in advertising videogames procedural rhetoric can advance the function of product and services; and in educational videogames procedural rhetoric can advance the function of conceptual or material systems in general (p264).

I believe Persuasive Games is a must read.  Ian Bogost offers a compelling perspective on how we should judge videogames as a cultural artifact, and ultimately a powerful pedagogic tool.  After reading Persuasive Games, I believe that if the procedural nature of videogames is effectively employed, they have the potential to be great agents for disruption and change of peoples’ attitudes and beliefs about the world.

WORK CITED

Bogost, Ian. “Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.” Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007.

Over at the blog err…whateverz. snugglebus I has posted a couple of nice posts on Speculative Realism. Before getting to the actual content of the posts, I’d first like to note that I love it that here in the blogosphere making interesting and thoughtful remarks with names like “snugglebus”. Moving on to the content, snugglebug defends speculative realism against some criticisms by Giuseppe in his second post. As snugglebus writes:

Responding in the comments however, Giuseppe thinks I kind missed the point entirely. As he put it:

what is it that lures intellectuals into the comfort of “reality” in the rather consolidated turn that so many social sciences are experiencing towards some form of “ontology” (another way, very academic indeed, to name the interest in the “real” nature of things)?… I suspect it has something to do with a very precise insecurity and a certain modesty that affects social scientists when they are compared to solid scientists: the former would talk about real, solid, things, the first would just babble away about the sex of angels.

Ok – I’ll take the bait! I’m not an SR scholar, just an interested, but uninvested, spectator, so I might not be the most effective spokesperson, but this will help me start to work out my own thoughts on a group of thinkers who I have been following for a while now.

I think there is a lot more to the success of SR than a reactionary response to the fact that ‘physical’ science is saying ever more concrete things about areas that were once the preserve of social scientists. Just anecdotally SR people (see for example Larval subjects here) seem to be intensely interested in hard science and thinking its consequences (though SR is concerned above all with metaphysics, not philosophy of science). In fact I think it would be more productive to turn Giuseppe’s view on its head: isn’t it actually crude idealism that expresses the insecurity (in a very different, less modest form than Giuseppe meant) of social science? Doesn’t idealism sometimes seem to shut scientific ‘reality’ away, seeing science somewhere between a naïve enterprise at one end of the spectrum (whereas we know that ‘truth’ is a function of consciousness, power, signs etc.), or just a separate field that is at best interesting, but not our concern as social scientists…?

Obviously I cannot speak for all the speculative realists and, in fact, it is impossible to do so as our positions tend to be radically different. For example, beyond a rejection of the centrality of the human, my own thought shares almost nothing in common with that of Brassier’s. Brassier advocates a sort of eliminative materialism that leans heavily on the hard sciences, whereas I advocate a realism. While there is a robust place for the sciences in my ontology, I do not see the sciences as delivering us to “true reality” whereas all the other disciplines investigate things that are epiphenomenal or mere illusions. In this I follow Bruno Latour in his rejection of the nature/culture distinction, the division of the world into two distinct ontological domains– the domain of nature and the domain of the subject –and instead replace this division with collectives of human and non-human actors. This is quite a difference.

read on!

Giuseppe raises a question that the speculative realists, and especially the object-oriented ontologists, have had to address again and again. We’ve made some headway in addressing these assumptions, but I suspect we’ll have to do so many times again in the future as OOO continues to develop. Certain intellectual categories are deeply sedimented in our culture, and this is above all the case with the distinction between nature and culture, nature and society, or object and subject. As a result of this, whenever the term “realism” is evoked there is a tendency to immediately arrive at the conclusion that one is siding with the nature side of this binary and disavowing the “distortions” of culture, society, perception, mind, and thought. In other words, the real is implicitly treated as falling on the nature side of the equation and the non-real on the social-cultural-mental side of the equation.

This, however, is not the move that OOO is making. OOO is not drawing a distinction between two ontological orders, nature and culture, and then seeking to reduce one to the other or escape the illusions of the latter, but rather is abolishing the distinction altogether. This point can be elucidated through reference to the diagram to the right. Let line AB refer to Nature and line CD refer to Culture-Society-Mind-Language (etc). Within the modernist framework, we have two distinct ontological realms that never touch one another. Within the game of modernist ontology you are thus required to choose one or the other of these lines and show how the other is derivative from that line. Thus, for example, the neurologist or sociobiologist has chosen the Nature line, CD, and sets about attempting to show how all of the formations of Culture are really fetishes and illusions produced as a result of natural causal processes.

If one chooses the AB or Culture-Society-Mind-Language line, we get the inversion of the “naturalists” gesture. Rather than showing how mind and the social are products of natural causal processes, the anti-realist instead shows how Nature is constructed by perception, society, culture, mind, or language. In other words, with the anti-realisms we get the inverse gesture of naturalistic materialism. The conclusion to be drawn is that both naturalistic materialism and anti-realism share the same “meta-ontology” or framework of thought. When I evoke the concept of a “meta-ontology” I am not speaking of the specific ontologies that philosophers such as Spinoza, Hume, or Kant might formulate. A meta-ontology is not attached to any specific thinker, but rather consists of the broad ontological assumptions inhabiting a particular milieu. Meta-ontology is ontologically and epistemologically neutral in that it embodies and houuses contradictory positions while nonetheless remaining the same. What a meta-ontology does is delineate the philosophical possibilities within a particular historical milieu. Despite the fact that Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, and Hume all have opposed philosophies, their philosophies nonetheless inhabit the same meta-ontology. In this respect, a meta-ontology is a bit like a Foucaultian episteme. It will be recalled that the epistemes haunting the historical sequences investigated by Foucault in his magnificent Order of Things allow for a plurality of different positions in the social sciences.

When Giuseppe suggests that the speculative realists have turned to ontology and advocated realism on the grounds that we are insecure about the hard sciences, he reveals the meta-ontology within which he is working: That the only possible realism is one in which the philosopher turns towards nature as the real and explains culture in terms of nature or simply ignores the cultural-social-mental-linguistic altogether. But this is not what OOO is doing. In many respects it could be said that OOO is fed up with modernist reductivisms of all sorts, whether they be in the form of eliminative idealist reductions or eliminative materialist reductions. Where the modernist imperative is to reduce something to something else whether we are reducing objects to fields of the subject or the field of the subject to the material, OOO acknowledges dependency relations while vigorously reduction of one entity to another. As I have put it in another context, OOO is a slutty or promiscuous ontology. It does not aim at fewer but rather more entities. Moreover, it places entities of all sorts, whether social or natural, on equal ontological footing. This is not to say that all entities equally make a difference, but that all entities, whether cultural or natural are equally real.

Where the modernist constitution demands that we either choose line AB, or the Nature line, or line CD, the Culture line, reducing one line to the other, OOO draws a transversal line, SP, across both lines, abolishing the idea of two separate ontological domains that somehow have to be brought into contact and reduced to one or the other. In other words, instead of society on the one hand and nature on the other hand, we get collectives of social and natural object that interact with one another.

This brings me to the issue of the human or social sciences. One of the reasons I find OOO powerfully attractive is not because I want to escape the “softness” of the social sciences to the “hardness” of the natural sciences, but precisely because I want good social and political theory. In its obsession with a single gap between humans and world and the question of how these two domains can be related to one another, I believe that social and political theory has been led to a number of unfortunate theoretical decisions that lead to distorted analyses of the social sphere. Treating objects as mere receptacles for social forces, language, ideas, perceptions, etc., that contribute no differences of their own, social and political theory comes to focus almost exclusively on the discursive, the linguistic, texts, norms, social forces, and so on. As a result, it is led to ignore the role played by nonhuman objects the form or pattern that social fields come to embody. For example, as far as I can tell, contemporary sociology and social theory has a very difficult time discussing the role that a particular layout of public transit plays in the social organization of Chicago. Likewise, contemporary social and political thought has a very difficult time discussing the role that rice cultivation, the fact that it could yield three harvests a year, and how those crops had to be planted and harvested played in the social configurations of 16th Century China. Similarly, it has a difficult time discussing the role played by grain production in Europe between the 15th and 18th century and its fluctuations (and there were many) played in the form social relations took. And again, ignoring the rise of the city during this same time period, it has a difficult time explaining the rise of the incredibly strange idea of selling one’s labor as a commodity, because it tends to ignore the fact that city dwellers were no longer self-sufficient like peasants, but rather required money to pay for food, clothing, and housing to live in the city. In all these cases, a focus on mind, culture, society, language, and so on tends to render these other actors, these nonhuman actors, invisible to analysis. As a result we find ourselves resorting, in an almost knee jerk fashion, to “false consciousness” explanations of social relations.

Let me be clear because the modernist that sorts the world into two distinct ontological domains that are autonomous from one another has, I think, a very difficult time hearing what I’m saying when I make these points. The point here is not that we should abandon talk of norms, beliefs, ideologies, texts, and so on, so as to exclusively discuss techniques of grain production, distributions of roads, highways, trains, and flight paths between cities, factories, etc. Such a move would remain within the modernist orbit, asking us to forsake the culture-mind-society-language line in favor of the “nature” line or nonhuman actors. No. What I am calling for is analytic tools broad enough to embrace in its social analysis a variety of heterogeneous actors ranging from the technological, to practices of food production, the availability of food, the layout of roads and trains, the role of mountains, lakes, and oceans, texts, ideologies, narratives, norms, humans, networks of human relations, etc.

The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai– and generally ethnographers are very good on these points, weaving together the semiotic, the “natural”, the technological, the legal, the amorous, etc –makes this point nicely in his book Modernity at Large. There Appadurai proposes the notion of “scapes” that are something like fields of consistency presiding over relations between humans and nonhumans. In this connection, Appadurai proposes ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes all interacting in the production of cultural phenomena. To this we could add “naturescapes” and “weather” or “meteoroscapes”. The point is that we must become clear about the role played by these different fields in the formation of planes of consistency or collectives and how these different scapes interact with one another. We must overcome the illusion of thinking that the slice of the real we are investigating– for example ideology –exhausts the field out of which it is drawn. As Luhmann observes, an environment is always more complex than the system that relates to that environment. Theory, I believe, perpetually suffers from confusing system and environment, treating the distinctions operative in the system as exhaustive of the environment and thereby rendering entire fields of factors invisible. Is it our fault that the world is complicated and flat?

In this connection snugglebus, in his first post, already provides a simple object-oriented social analysis of how object-oriented ontology came to be. As snugglebus writes:

What is it about SR that has lent itself to this kind of blogosphere success? Obviously the fact that it had some prolific and well-known practitioners who blog helped, but generally I think it is also possible to perceive at least 3 superficial features which I would say have helped. SR benefits from being a (relatively) clear intellectual project (and therefore gives some key rallying points for prospective adherents), timely, and for want of a better word ‘sexy’ (the idea of a “turn”, i.e. rejection of predominant trends in favour of something ‘new’, has a particular appeal). Apart from perhaps ‘timeliness’, the other two are replicable.

In the same post snugglebus later goes on to write:

So the what conclusions to draw?

* SR would not have existed if it was grounded in mainstream academia, though now exists symbiotically with academia.

* The key elements of SR that have made it successful in the blogosphere have been a clear, attractive, but broad identity, around which people can rally, and the willingness of proponents to engage in dialogue with people from different disciplines, and with people who have no prior reputation, itself applying a certain genoristy in exchange.

* The blogosphere itself has added speed, and breadth, as well as contributing to this sense of openness.

There is probably an interesting question to pose about how this has then shaped the ideas of SR itself, but that’s beyond my both my-grade and concern here I think.

Let me note that this is only a thumbnail or brief example of what an object-oriented social analysis might look like. However, look at the motley army of actors snugglebus refers to in his discussion of the formation of speculative realism (and his whole analysis is well worth reading). Rather than a single obsession with the relation between humans and the world, snugglebus simultaneously treats the internet or technology as an actor in this movement, a particular electronic community (the theory blogosphere), contingent or chance encounters between different humans such as the encounter between Graham, Nick, Ben, Reid, Shaviro, Jodi, N.Pepperell, Jon Cogburn, Mel, Protevi, Mikhail, Nikki, Peter, Kvond, etc., and many others, the ideational, the amorous or libidinal, speeds of communication and exchange, the universities, and so on. None of these actors can be said to overdetermine the other. The internet, for example, did not make speculative realism or cause speculative realism, but in many respects speculative realism would not exist as it now does without the theory blogosphere or the internet. However, while it’s unlikely that speculative realism could have taken place in its current form in the halls of the academy alone, it is now feeding back on that “scape”. Increasingly papers are getting published in this area, various texts by speculative realist thinkers such as myself and Harman are being taught both inside and outside of philosophy courses, graduate students are taking these trends seriously and organizing their dissertation work and conference presentations around these subjects, and so on. Even the dissenting voices serve a role in bringing SR into the walls of the academy.

And not only do technologies, human encounters, ideoscapic features such as “timeliness”, and affective dimensions such as “sexiness” play a role in these developments, but even simple signifiers or signs have been actors playing a significant role in the development of this thought. Thus, for example, the term “Speculative Realism” was more or less an accident. The four philosophers that participated in the legendary Goldsmith’s conference back in 2007, sharing little in common beyond advocating some form of realism and a rejection of correlationism, anti-realisms, or philosophies of access, needed a name for the event and settled on the title “Speculative Realism”. Yet the signifier “Speculative Realism” created the phantom of an entity that has itself played a role in both shaping the reception of these thinkers and the movement itself. The signifier here was an actor.

Likewise, norms have been actors in this movement as well. Back in the day of the notorious “correlationism or Kant wars” that took place on this blog around February, much of the discussion revolved around norms of interpretation, argumentation, and how people ought to engage with one another in philosophical discourse. Here the norms did not precede these encounters– except in perhaps a virtual or potential fashion –but were more or less emergent from the encounter. As Latour observes so beautifully in The Politics of Nature, discussions of normativity tend to arise only when a new actor, a surprising actor, appears within a collective and struggle ensues as to where it is to be placed, how hierarchies need to be re-ordered, and so on. This was certainly the case in the “Kant wars”. In some cases, pre-existing norms were evoked and applied to the appearance of this strange new actor, calling into question both protocols or norms of standard continental argumentation and philosophical engagement. In most of the other cases, norms were being built, enginnering new relations among actors. One of the things that I find most remarkable in these discussions is that where blog posts were previously devoted to exposition over some philosopher’s text, participants began to existentially avow and argue for certain philosophical positions rather than simply engaging in explication de texte. While texts were still endlessly discussed, it was no longer possible to simply “talk about” a philosopher or text, but it now became necessary to elaborate arguments and positions, to take stands. What really shocks me is the rapidity with which this shift took place. Where before we were all simply “referencing out”, evoking this or that philosopher in a discussion, now suddenly we were engaged in tooth and nail debate making claims not about philosophers, but about being, norms, reality, and so on. Semantically the evocation of a philosopher changed markedly. It was no longer a question of elaborating the philosopher, but of evoking a sequence of argument in an existentially committed debate. It’s been remarkable to behold.

Nor would speculative realism exist as it now does without the cross fertilizations of textual backgrounds between the different people that came to participate in these exchanges. Graham, of course, has had a decisive impact on my thought and has led me to read figures such as Zubiri, Bhaskar, and Latour. Mel introduced me to Latour, Kittler, Ong, Bogost, and a whole host of other thinkers. Shaviro got me back into Whitehead. And so on. And to snugglebus’ merit, while he doesn’t execute the analysis himself, he does node to the parity or reciprocity of interactions between these different human and nonhuman actors, wondering how the medium of the blogosphere itself, of the internet itself, might play a role in moulding or influencing the content of speculative realist thought. In other words, we don’t have unilateral determination between human actors or objects and nonhuman actors and objects, but rather have bilateral relations where influence moves in both directions.

Enough for now. Read snugglebus’ posts.