Options
Today: Several riffs on options and “multivocality”. Tomorrow: A little bit on “totalitarianism” and my recent readings. — I. Options I’ve painted a worldview that’s very messy, but not so messy that it demands inaction and trembling. I do think that engineering drastic moves is dangerous when you can’t see very far. (I also more »
Unit Operations IV
Part I defined the foundational terms (units, operations) Part II applies the principles of Unit Operations, arguing for a “comparative approach to videogame criticism that identifies and analyzes configurative expression in multiple media”. Part III was on “procedural subjectivity”: the the nature of simulations, their limitations, and the critical role of the user. Below Bogost writes on more »
Unit Operations III
And for me, a circle closes. As I’ve mentioned before, the Simulation Gap was one of my first darling games-analysis-tools. I had picked it up from the far less dense Persuasive Games, which was clearly more meant for practioners than Unit Operations, whose audience is a little more difficult to discern (Media Studies?). It’s been two weeks and a more »
Text Dump: Maneuverability, StarCraft, and human override
Post-heavy week this week- Unit Operations excerpts tomorrow and Wednesday, and then if I can clean them up, maybe some more coherent posts at the end of the week. — Below, some loosely related threads that are incubating. Posts like these are an opportunity to share some recent thoughts/readings and to use bits as fodder for later more »
Mulling: The “Sheeple” Problem
(Relax, I’m not using that word seriously.) I have a tendency to wax on a bit, especially when idea is still new and exciting to me- writing helps me crystallize things and turn them around in my hand. I wanted to be clear about a few positions before I start picking up another line of more »
Learning from Fictions
I wanted to make some broad strokes to tie together some previous posts before I move on from this thread of thought. Below, two tangentially-related ideas. I. “What is true is to be believed; what is fictional is to be imagined.” -Kendall Walton I have long talked about ‘apologetic‘ as an operation for cohering tribes. more »
Law of Unrecognized Novelty
I. “Nothing new under the sun.” I think that any sufficiently new idea will be confused for a repudiated old one. Nuance regularly dies in-transit from speaker to listener, due to lack of a shared episteme (and the social pressure to properly understand in the first place may not be there either). An idea cannot be so freakishly new that nothing more »
Unknown Knowns
Note: I thought that “Totalizing Views” was a perfectly cromulent and useful phrase when I first noticed it, when it was announced as the theme for Keith Adams’ upcoming blogging residency at Ribbonfarm. Since then, the Baader-Meinhof effect has been in full swing. I’ve certainly seen it from the anti-essentialist crowd, including in Unit Operations. I have myself used the phrase more »
Unit Operations II
Notes from around the neighborhood: Jordan Peacock recently wroteon the idea of the episteme and a “miscommunication-reduction strategy”. Also, Adam Gurri recently wrote an excellent piece in response to the neoreaction that articulates a view of institutions that I particularly appreciate. (There’s also an annual roundup post by him on his personal site that I intend more »
Unit Operations I
I first really engaged with Bogosts’ work in college, a few years ago, as I dug into Games Studies seriously for the first time. I’ve expressed slivers of his work before- one of my earliest posts was a rather dry excerption of a college essay of mine, on the Simulation Gap, Procedural Rhetoric, and Sim City. I more »