Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Hi Ian. Thanks for stopping by.

I absolutely agree, and I apologize if I gave the impression that the book's difficulty detracted from its value. Not at all. By identifying it as difficult, though, I think it helps readers be a little more prepared for what their getting into. For example, I saw UO listed among a number of "game related" books recently released, including Dean Takahashi's Xbox 360 Uncloaked. While I'm sure that's a fine book, it's clearly got a different audience in mind, and identifying UO from the outset as challenging hopefully heads off some of the more shrill "I can't understand it so it must be dumb" criticism that humanities-sympathetic approaches to game studies often endure. And yes, even though it's challenging at times, the book really hits a nice stride in applying unit analysis to various games/texts/poems. In those cases, it's equally helpful to be familiar with Joyce as with GTA.

It has certainly been my introduction, and a good one at that. In some cases, such as the "count as one", it's presented in a logical context where I can attach it other more familiar ideas.

A few years ago, I took a stab at some A.N. Whitehead and some of Badiou's ideas seemed similar or related. At least, I could understand Badiou with some of the same mental categories I recalled employing in my attempt to understand Whitehead. I don't know if that's really related, though, since it's been a few years.

I think in some cases, a few more declarative statements may have helped smooth out some of the edges, but in general, I don't think a how to book is necessary. That is, I don't think it would be true to the logic of unit operations if I understand it correctly. It's almost like Unit Operations lets your reader become Zizek to your Lacan -- we have to extract the fungible units of criticism and deploy them in our respective contexts. Similarly, the sort of sophomoric expressions of anxiety over difficult material are, if I understand your term correctly, something like the simulation fever surrounding an audience with differing degrees of simulation literacy. I mean, there's a point at which the audience or reader has to contribute something proactive to the equation of understanding.

Anyway, I'm eager to see the development of unit operations as an idea within serious games, and I look forward to the next book.

There's one last thing I'm still curious about, and this is more of a thought experiment if anything: What happens if the logic of unit operations gets flipped around? That is, if unit operations is a feature of both criticism and programming which merge in the analysis of a medium (video games) that is both programmatic and expressive, is there any way to approach criticism in a way that stays true to unit operations in a thorough sense? In other words, would there be a way to create video games that express critical arguments themselves?

Of course, the whole idea of serious games is based on the fact that games can be rhetorical, but I'm thinking more along the lines of hypertextual criticism. This is a bland generality, but it seems to be that hypertext authors immediately take a particular kind of postructuralism for granted so that when critics or scholars want to write about hypertext, the interlinked. hypertextual structure seems immediately appropriate.

Some games like Juul's (the one where you shoot down "invading theoretical models") and Aki Jarvinen's GameGame seem to be about games, but only in a didactic sense. That is, they're not in the same vein as, say, Zizek. Would it even be worthwhile to imagine such a game? I take it that Mackenzie Wark is up to something like that with his Gamer Theory (I know that should be in l33t, but I don't feel like typing it that way), but I don't know if taking a game as an organizational metaphor "counts".

Unit operations, however, might give us a way to at least think through a process for building critical videogames. Do you think that would be worthwhile, or do you think its even necessary for unit operations as an idea to be responsible to that possibility?