A few days back, Ian posted a short diary relating an amazing video game conference that he helped to organize (a short description of the conference can be found here). I confess that when I first encountered Ian online I wasn’t quite sure what to make of his research. “Video games? What could possibly be of interest in video games? Isn’t this a sort of scam that academics pull over on administrations so they can sit around and play?” This, I suspect, is a response that those in digital humanities and cultural studies often receive when talking about their work to those outside of their discipline.
Unit Operations and Persuasive Games thoroughly disabused me of this notion. Not only did Unit Operations convince me that video games are a new form of art filled with all sorts of necessary questions worthy of investigation, Unit Operations and Persuasive Games got me thinking about rhetoric in a very different way. For a long time I’ve wondered why persuasion is so difficult. An argument can be well constructed, it can be beautifully rendered, and all the rest. Yet unless the audience is already sympathetic to the claim the rhetor is trying to persuade you of, or unless one already identifies with the rhetor or what the rhetor stands for, persuasion often fails to take place. I fully confess, for example, that I’m far more likely to be persuaded by someone who has a background in French theory or phenomenology, than someone who has a background in Anglo-American analytic philosophy even if the two rhetors are arguing for very similar things. This is unconscious. It is not as if I sit there and say to myself “this person is a Quinean, therefore I won’t listen to them.” It’s a sort of brute reaction. Yet the position from which a rhetor speaks makes a difference to the persuasive power of that speech. Freud already noted this with respect to the position of the physician. The physicians words were capable of evoking greater persuasion in the patient than those of another person, even if both were saying largely the same thing. And as an aside, I think philosophers tend to ignore and underplay this dimension of transference as a condition for persuasion. In an ideal world this wouldn’t make a difference, but it does in our world.
read on!
In Unit Operations and Persuasive Games, however, I think Ian sheds new light on this phenomenon. To put matters very crudely, Ian argues that video games unfold to what he calls “procedural rhetoric”. Procedures rhetoric functions not so much through expression or propositional content (though that’s all there too in many instances), but rather by engaging the player in a set of procedures or operations in playing the game. In a video game you have to relate to the game world in a particular way, execute actions in a particular way, and explore the world of the game in terms of these operations. What you encounter through these procedures is a set of outcomes or consequences that particular actions in the game world produce. As you explore the game world, you discover that certain actions on your part produce unexpected outcomes. And it is precisely this procedural dimension of games that seems to carry the power of changing how we think about the world in general.
I had experience along these lines prior to coming over to OOO. As I’ve sometimes related on this blog, SimCity had a tremendous impact on how I think about social and political issues. In SimCity, if you don’t build roads connecting particular parts of the city, if you don’t build power plants, if you don’t build them in particular locations, your citizens get angry with you. You get gridlock throughout the city. Productivity decreases. Tax revenues decrease. People begin to move to other cities. And fewer people moving to your own city. Things get ugly. In SimCity you’re always balancing all sorts of considerations against one another, trying to keep your populace happy and attract new citizens so your tax revenues can increase, you can build more, and your city can grow.
Now at the time I picked up this game, I didn’t do so for any intellectual reason. I wanted a distraction. I wanted to do something other than read and write. I wanted something completely disconnected from academia. Moreover, at this time, I was deeply entrenched within a Lacano-Zizeko framework, placing emphasis on the role the signifier plays in collective relations, ideology, the nature of desire, and the deadlocks of jouissance. The reason I found SimCity to be such a jarring experience is that it fundamentally challenged my assumptions as to why the social world is organized in the way that it is. It’s not that I abandoned the view that ideology, the signifier, jouissance, and desire play an important role in social relations and why they’re organized as they are. Rather, it’s that I realized these agencies weren’t enough and that things like whether or not there are roads that connect particular parts of a city, whether or not there are cheap internet connections that connect people together, what sorts of power plants there are, etc., also play a key role in explaining why social relations are organized as they are. My semiotic-Lacano-Zizekian framework couldn’t explain this, nor was my Badiousian politics of truth-procedures really adequate to explaining how change is produced given the role played by these agencies. These things were part of the story, but very far from being the whole story.
The strange thing is that I already had read all of these claims. I had read some Latour and knew that he argued along these lines. I had read DeLanda and knew that he thought about assemblages in these ways. I had read the later work of Deleuze and Guattari and was therefore acquainted within their “mechanic assemblages”. Yet somehow all of these things had failed to persuade me. They weren’t even on my radar. The slid off my brain like water off the back of a duck. In many ways I thought these authors were duped, that they simply failed to recognize the power of signifiers and how signifiers influence each and every aspect of our life, our interpersonal relations, and our relations to the world around us. I thought they lacked rigor.
In this instance, persuasion took place as a consequence of engaging in a series of procedures and experiencing what outcomes they produce. I am not saying that my entire shift arose from a video game (that would be absurd), only that this video game was a sort of encounter in the Deleuzian sense. That encounter, in turn, led me to go back to a number of other thinkers I had hitherto ignored and softened me up for object-oriented ontology.
Bogost’s thesis, I think, sheds possible light on the impotence of critique. Critique all too often unfolds solely at the level of the expressive, the propositional, the representational, or content. What is lacking here is this dimension of procedure. The point here is not that video games are our salvation– though I think Ian is right in arguing that they’re possibilities are not being fully explored –but rather that the effectiveness of video games in producing persuasion and change in cognitive attitudes sheds light on rhetoric as a whole. Perhaps, among rhetoric’s missing masses, is the dimension of the procedural where the positions and beliefs of people evolve as a result of exploring worlds that they wouldn’t otherwise explore.
August 31, 2010 at 6:24 am
[...] August 31, 2010 HERE. [...]
August 31, 2010 at 7:50 am
“Critique all too often unfolds solely at the level of the expressive, the propositional, the representational, or content. What is lacking here is this dimension of procedure.”
Are you talking here of videogame critique? Because there is precious little of this taking place, and certainly not enough for it to be worth claiming that what does “unfolds solely” in any one way! :p
Most of what happens is review, and review is not criticism, as such. And most of videogame reviews are essentially self-reports of gamers as to how effectively they are able to juice themselves on particular games. We might just as well wire the reviewers up and detect the extent of the activation of their nucleus acumbens as read review scores, to be frank.
I would go so far to say that the tragedy of games criticism is not that too much attention is paid to the representational, but not enough attention is paid to the role of representation – a myopia characterised by the expression “gameplay is everything”. See my post from last week connecting Professor Walton’s make-believe theory of representation to Shadow of the Colossus.
What is interesting in games comes together in the space between representation and function – attempts to single out function without assigning a sufficient role to representation will misunderstand the game. Of course, attempts to understand the representation without assigning a sufficient role to function will equally fail – as Miguel Sicart argued coherently in his book Ethics of Computer Games.
We still have a long way to go on this front! :)
Best wishes!
August 31, 2010 at 12:14 pm
No, I’m referring to critique in the broader sense practiced by social and political theory.
August 31, 2010 at 12:52 pm
An astute observation of the limits of persuasion, and why it is only a small slice of a larger set of rhetorical issues (despite Aristotle). The two different philosophers in your example aren’t making the same argument, even if in the abstract someone might say they are. As OOO clearly demonstrates, we don’t read things in the abstract. We read them in particular situations. Perhaps this is why rhetoric can never be purely philosophy; it must always also be an art and a practice.
As I’ve mentioned to Ian, I am very interested in his concept of procedural rhetoric. Of course, in rhetoric and composition, we’ve been talking about processes for decades: the writing process is the primary subject of first-year composition across the US. Ian certainly takes up the notion of procedure in a different way, but I think there are productive connections to be made there.
Ultimately my rhetorical interests are in understanding what a text does (and what it might do to/for me) rather than what it “is” or what it means. So that’s a procedural interest perhaps. It’s actually quite hard to approach texts with a beginner’s mind in the Zen sense, but it would be a refreshing shift in graduate education is we shifted the balance away from focusing so heavily on critique and hermeneutics and move more toward reading texts productively or heuristically.
August 31, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Thanks for these thoughts Levi.
I agree with you (and Alex) that procedural rhetoric can be found outside of videogames. Games were just the easiest place to find and theorize them. I’m writing an article on procedural rhetoric a as a general concept for the Oxford Handbook of Rhetoric, which will be out in a year or so, I suspect.
As for the impotence of critique: this is one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in making things. The philosophical practice of construction, which I’m calling carpentry, is something I discuss in Alien Phenomenology, the draft of which I’m happy to have just finished.
Finally, on the subject of the Art History of Games conference: I strongly recommend watching the videos, but of particular interest to anyone reading this blog is Frank Lantz’s talk Doorknobs and Butterflies, which discusses Duchamp’s chess playing, Wittgenstein’s doorknob design, and Nabokov’s lepidoptery.
August 31, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Ah, and it looks like the videos are now up on Georgia Tech’s YouTube page, for easier viewing and embedding.
September 4, 2010 at 1:28 pm
What a wonderful post! I was recently contemplating digital art used in video game design in an art history context – in my interview with Ubisoft artist Gilles Beloeil.
I’d be delighted for anyone perusing here to read it. I think I am coming at the topic from a different direction, but the crux still is that gaming, and the art associated with it – be it in-game or in the design phase is still not seen as serious art by elements of the art establishment, though not all thankfully. The art historians and classicists that frequent my site seemed quite positive about it.
Interview Link:
http://2.ly/ct7u
Kind Regards
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
September 18, 2010 at 11:28 am
In a sense this seems to mirror the Marxist insight that it is through the process of basic engagement by the working class with the structures in which they live and work that brings them into consciousness of the historical ‘truth’ about their position, by for example striking and so on.
The question that occurs to me though, since the world of a computer game is literally constructed can’t you create worlds which the processes you go through provide more or less any revelatory messages? So for example, you could easily forsee a bit of tweaking of SimCity such that it subtly pushes you in a small-government direction, or something along these lines.
October 1, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Will there be another video game conference soon?
Pokemon Wii