Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

[Note: This review comes to us from new contributor Darshana Jayemanne from the University of Melbourne, and is part of a thesis on visual culture and videogames. -- Zach]

In his book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Ian Bogost spends a good deal of time explicating the ontology of Alain Badiou. But what exactly does ontology have to do with criticism? Bogost starts bravely by saying that he is interested in combining the insights of literary theory with those of information sciences. Badiou’s thought can underpin this endeavour as:

There’s a lot going on here! An immediate problem arises because the count-as-one is itself counted only as one, when in fact the summary given a page before correctly outlines two counts. The first corresponds to presentation (the situation), the second to representation (the state of the situation). This rapid elision of Badiou’s double meta-ontological account occurs in the phrase ‘enacted by an agent’ where in fact there is nothing of the sort in the source material. The second count is the equivalent of the power set operation – which Badiou assesses in Meditation 7 of L'Etre et l'événement as vastly more ‘powerful’ than the first.

Thus when Bogost asserts that Badiou extends ‘mathemetization to all domains’ (35) there is reason for concern, given that Badiou is explicit in extending it in fact only to ontology. Ontology as set-theory is subtractive, it gives the ontological schema of the situation, and in order to link this way of speaking about pure multiplicities (being qua Being) to non-ontological situations Badiou employs a set of meta-ontological terms (it may be better to say that Badiou extends a variety of logic to all domains). A proper exploration of some of these terms could have helped the discussion: in particular the three types of multiple (which depend on whether they are presented, represented or both) and the three types of situation that arise given the kinds of multiples they count-as-one. It is the last type of situation, the historical, in which a special type of singular multiple is decisive (that is, presented but not represented, escaping the activity of the second count and thus relying on this distinction) – the evental site. There is no hint in Unit Operations of what may constitute a historical situation/count-as-one/unit operation as opposed to natural or normal varieties. Without a satisfactory theory – Badiouean or not – as to how we may characterise unit operations the exhortation to act in fidelity to the event remains a slogan. If Bogost relies on Badiou to unify mathematical and cultural representation but does not follow the means (meta-ontology) by which the latter does this, doubt is thrown up about the coherence of the endeavour ante argumentum.

So much and so little for ontology – it may still be held that we have a good approach to videogame criticism on our hands. More however is at stake here than a persnickety account of unmobilised resources in Badiou’s text (that would be a long review indeed) or an otherwise forgivable infidelity to the latest in philosophy’s well-received “Being and…” series of books. As the regimes of presentation and representation are conflated in the concept of the unit operation, Bogost’s proffered unit analysis remains overly sanguine about the coercive and stultifying aspects of the count-as-one. In his own seminal discussions of unit operations, Theodor W. Adorno links them to the historical process in which the spheres of culture and production are increasingly brought into syzygy under the baleful telescope of the mass culture industry. This has an effect on high and low cultural forms, but the most pertinent is that both become unit-operational. Great works of the past become units in a catalogue vetted by ‘the command of publishers, sound film magnates and rulers of radio’ (Adorno, 36 – even the term ‘classical music’ is a barbarity), and internally they are fragmented into sensationalised moments – we listen for the good bits (‘the concept of the idea is far from appropriate to established classical music’). Popular forms are inversely affected, being designed to maximise the fascination of their unit operations to such a degree that they ‘advertise themselves’ – they strive to be nothing but ‘good bits’. All this serves to guarantee their comparability, their exchange value, their fungibility in the marketplace – and fungibility is one of Bogost’s favourite terms for characterising unit operations.

Now Adorno of course is not just doing aesthetics in his assessment of the culture industry – much of his insight comes from a sociological perspective. This is why there’s a useful comparison to be drawn with the critical outcomes of Unit Operations, especially in light of the latter’s elision of the state of the situation. Bogost’s concept of the unit operation concentrates on the detemporalising category of its fungibility (that which remains exchangeable between contexts), whereas Adorno’s analysis shows a historical movement within modernity in terms of that which is not fungible; say, the dubious status of Musil’s novelistic dialogue in a film of Törless. Despite the assertion that Bogost ‘is not interested in making general statements about media forms’, it is maintained that ‘Unit analysis is especially useful in comparative criticism across legacy and computational media…Each medium carries particular expressive potential, but unit analysis can help the critic uncover the discrete meaning-making [sic] in texts of all kinds’ (15). And if ‘Unit analysis is the name I suggest for the general practice of criticism through the discovery and exposition of unit operations in one or many source texts’, we may ask due to its intended scope what this means from the sociological perspective. For Bogost freedom is consciousness about combinatorial options; for Adorno the problem is the reduction of the concept of freedom to a choice between commodities.

From a point of view such as Adorno’s, unit analysis fails to provide the resources to critically or theoretically discern what is encapsulated computer model of some ‘real’ system and what is mass behavioural coercion in service of the society of control (or if there is really any difference whatsoever). Perhaps then the initial ontological missteps are not simply epiphenomena with regard to the critical method: in conflating situation and state of the situation, or presentation and representation, or disavowing the systematic means by which units are peddled by the culture industry, a unit analytical perspective by definition forecloses on the possibility of addressing such concerns and underestimates the complexity of the social life of virtual things.

As Julian Stallabrass argues concisely, the characteristic of fungibility is itself a major contributor to the alienating and reifying effects of the commodity fetish – the ultimate unit currently operational in our society. Videogames are from this perspective allegories of commodity exchange which through their presentation of controllable worlds disseminate mass forms of behaviour and socially necessary tasks. ‘Allegory is linked to fashion because of its fragmentation of the image into elements, and fashion is like objectification because of the fungibility of its elements, in that there is no restriction on the number or type of combinations allowed.’ (Stallabrass, 108). It may thus be conjectured that in tracing what is most fungible in cultural productions one is in fact tracing their most objectified aspects. And what then is reified in Bogost’s own theoretical economy of fungibile units? The obvious answer is the necessary correlate of objectified and alienated reality: a unified subject of experience, valid as a selector and evaluator of unit operations over both ‘legacy and computational media’.

Symptoms of this ideological blindspot in Unit Operations go beyond the confusion of presentation and representation in the object (and hence safely away from coercive effects on the subject) or the assertion that the count as one is ‘enacted by an agent’. A cognitivist bias recurs in the form of a renunciation of bodily experience in favour of an inner mental voice. Kittler, for example, is said to hold ‘that we are slaves to technological representation’ (80) precisely because he takes grammatology seriously and construes media as dynamic processes of education by extant ‘discourse networks’ (delineated for example in the relatively baggage free terms 1800/1900) that shape bodily experience through the externality of inscription and trace. Similarly, the temporalisation of linguistic signification and context performed by différance is supposedly neutralised in this case because ‘... unit operations function at a higher level than linguistic signs’, as if the critique of the metaphysics of presence could be ameliorated simply by asserting More Better Presence™. The treatment of nomadism and rhizomatics in Deleuze and Guattari makes no mention of molar state machines, arborescence or apparati of capture (while D&G’s terminology can sure be irritating, it militates of itself against reductionist accounts)^[1]. A snide remark to the effect that ‘applications of nomadism or schizoanalysis as a viable praxis have been limited’ (149) ignores the fact that the elsewhere lionized psychoanalysis (perhaps more palatable qua reified subjectivity) as of the omission of the term ‘neurosis’ since DSM-II, remains in a somewhat dubious situation as a viable clinical or therapeutic praxis itself.

In such cases the materiality of experience has been overlooked, but nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, the greatest thinker and poet of modern experience respectively. Scouring A une passant for unit operations, Bogost declares that the experience of the ‘coming-to-pass’ that the poet feels upon exchanging glances with a widow through the crowd is ‘a tool that others can make fungible as a performance of the modern life’ (74). The poem ‘marks a strategy of lonely love, not erotic love, to come to grips with the shock of modern life... In the alienating confusion of the procedural city, Baudelaire’s lyric posits the figure that fascinates as a replacement for the woman’s companionship... the poet is waging a war he can never win, for he has no recourse to consummate the encounter.’ (77) By Bogost’s argument, this unit operation of utilising the ‘figure that fascinates’ to defray the subjective shock of fragmented modern experience is increasingly ‘encapsulated’ through Bukowski, the film Amélie (2001) and finally Maxis’ The Sims, which ‘finally takes the ultimate step in representing the chance encounter as a unit operation: it encapsulates it into the code of a simulation’ (87). In effect, ‘... that strategy, the figure that fascinates, has itself compacted and become embodied as a unit of cultural currency’ (79).

In both Baudelaire and Bukowski, the gaze of the passerby’s foot is ‘not lascivious, nor even mildly erotic; instead, it holds the woman in suspense, keeping her at the distance required for the figure that fascinates to function’ (79)^[2]. Readers of the poet of La chevelure, an avowed fetishist, may be somewhat surprised to learn that there is nothing erotic in the fragmentary! The unit analysis retrieves a fungible procedural operation, one by which others can deal with the shock of a chance encounter through repeating the otherwise unrepeatable, only by denying one of the deepest and most sophisticated experiences of the poem – the libidinal investment in the absent object through its embodied, fleeting experience, its very passing. In this way, the poetry can be read by Bogost as incompletely ‘encapsulated’ and hence a precursor of videogame representation – rather than a dangerous and overdetermined temporal relation split by the screen of the widow’s veil. No mention here of another renowned Baudelairean trope, the boredom, spleen and ennui which the modern subject experiences when abandoned to itself in its own unstimulated interminability – a good thing for the videogame industry, for without it we’d all be perfectly satisfied with the cognitive pace of chess.

The subject that emerges in Bogost’s book is an entity that deploys unit operations in order to deal with the shocks of modern life by relating them to a self-sufficient realm of cognitive experience: it is a rhetoric of possession (‘consummate the encounter’) and control over an objectified reality. This would partially accord with Freud’s view, who saw contemplative consciousness as a defence of the senses against excessive energies – the psyche retreats into itself to order phenomena too intense to make sense of in real time. Benjamin, for his part, almost reverses this thesis with regards to the technical apparatus of modernity or what Susan Buck-Morss calls the ‘synaesthetic system’. The modern subject’s experience of the media is constituted by the staccato intrusions endemic to mass existence that leave insufficient time for cognition. Benjamin holds that the masses navigate the image-space of mass culture in a state of tactile distraction rather than optical contemplation. And this dispersed mass experience is organised around the materiality of the apparatus, for which the fungibility of unit operations is a socialising effect, a second nature and a training of the ‘human sensorium’ far from an ontological presupposition: in the essay on Surrealism, Benjamin asserts resoundingly that ‘The collective is a body, too’. For Benjamin’s age, the physiognomic character of experience under shock found its most salient inscription in the cut of cinematic montage; in our own, it is in the innervation of the videogame’s technical-sensory apparatus that lets the figure that fascinates get under our skin.

‘To fetishise commodities is, in one of Marx’s least-understood jokes, to reverse the whole history of fetishism. For it is to fetishise the invisible, the immaterial, the supra-sensible. The fetishism of the commodity inscribes immateriality as the defining feature of capitalism.’ (Stallybrass, 184). At least one ‘founder of discourse’ seems to have found a straight man in the author of Unit Operations. If the ontological underpinnings of Bogost’s endeavour do not in fact obtain – and it seems that insufficient authority can be derived from Badiou at least on this point – then recourse must be made to a history or typology of media forms by virtue of their unit operations. However in this respect it cannot be claimed that there is a Benjaminian ‘monadological’ method at work, for this would require (to retain Buck-Morss’ terms) far more volatile notions of both nature and history. In receiving only what is fungible across disparate contexts and thereby denaturing media histories, unit analysis risks both tautology and a high degree of arbitrariness.

This is evident in the book’s rather precarious critical outcomes. Most salient is the critical approach Bogost suggests by which players should concentrate on their ‘simulation fever’, ‘the nervous discomfort caused by the interaction of the game’s unit operational representations of a segment of the real world and the player’s subjective understanding of that representation’ (136). However if we are to take as critical the neurotic question ‘What is left out of SimCity?’ as compared to a ‘real’ city or a player’s ‘mental model’ of a city we’re in for a seriously lengthy discussion^[3]: the answer is ‘Just about everything’. More fruitful perhaps is to interrogate just how it is that a bunch of simple algorithms and their encapsulating audio-visualisation could possibly be thought to mimetically correspond to something as complex as a city, a question which can be approached through the interrelated histories of educational, visual, tactile and social norms which define what can be classed as unit operation and what may be acceptably effaced – ‘the mass production of the senses’, in Miriam Hansen’s phrase. And what does unit analysis have to say about games that don’t claim to model the real world as such (that is, where the player’s mental model comes from the media)? In one sample application, there is an identification of game elements in Star Wars Galaxies and the particular socio-economic situation of Southern California. An intentional fallacy and the magic circle of a few statistical models counted-as-you-like-it fail to prevent this reading from being as arbitrary as an intelligent design argument. The template could be slapped on most any large industrialised metropolis.

If the major structural weakness of Unit Operations is therefore its inability to consider how the state or the mass counts-as-one, this feeds back into its conception of individual media experience in the form of an inadequate treatment of alienation’s role in encapsulating experiences. Ironically, the book is at its best the further it is away from ontology, such as in the timely discussion of the legal, aesthetic and textual status of game engines which insists (as would Adorno, albeit in somewhat more cantankerous fashion) on their commercial and sociological basis. This historicised and cogent account helps us understand the differences between game engines and other recurring cultural categories such as genre, character or style and does so, notably, without any help from Badiou. Several other useful contributions have been covered in other reviews, such as Zach Whalen’s on gameology.org.

The move to rethink closed, teleological, totalising systems as open, teleonomic, adaptive systems has been an important one since structuralism, non-mechanistic cybernetics, the Santiago Theory of Cognition or even since Hegel heard the cannonades at Jena. There is no doubt that the concept of the unit operation captures an important aspect of mediated temporality. Indeed, the possibility of something like a history of the most objectivised forms of cultural phenomena derived through extracting their fungible elements (something like Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation) sounds quite edifying. For a book of around 250 pages, Unit Operations covers quite a bit of territory – just about everyone apart from Karl Marx makes an appearance and the names of titan after titan fall like virtual tenpins before a deftly manipulated Wiitroller – but, if the focus were shifted it is possible that the liberal-progressive institutional and pedagogical agenda articulated in the closing sections could be separated from the shockwaves sent through the book by reliance on defanged revolutionary philosophy. The book’s contribution to game studies should not be judged based on its reading of Badiou or Benjamin. However the concern remains that a critical approach maintaining that ‘we should consider software and programming as a possible mode of expression equivalent to any other, striving to meet, describe and comment on human activities, needs, and relations’ (37) cannot consider except in arbitrary (or ‘equivalent to any other’) fashion the way in which technology, as an array of techniques of social organisation both liberatory and coercive, is transforming those activities, needs and relations. Unless you’ve played Diablo II, you wouldn’t even know that you didn’t want an Exceptional Cruel Colossal Sword of Life Everlasting.

(Special thanks go to Christian McCrea and the Badiou Reading Group in Melbourne, in particular Adam Bartlett and Oliver Feltham)

1. A further objection may be that this critique relies overmuch on Badiou’s own book on Deleuze, which is a reception that by and large ignores the Capitalism and Schizophrenia duo. It is therefore incongruent that Bogost would use Deleuze: The Clamour of Being to refute the unit operational character of rhizomatics, nomadism and other concepts that arise from those texts – and furthermore, Badiou’s reading of Deleuze is hardly uncontested.

2. At least in the copy to which I had access, ‘jambe’ is mistranslated as ‘arms’ when in fact it is the singular for ‘leg’ and, crucially, aligned by Baudelaire’s semantics and prosody with the inorganic and classical trope of the statue.

3. Akin to ‘What is left out in Bogost’s reading of Badiou?’, this would be an infelicitous framing of the problem.

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