Bogost

Most of the problem I have with Bogost’s chapter on political gaming is that it does not acknowledge that it itself operates within or is affected by ideology in a very material way and that the interrogation of political issues as procedural systems is as well. He acknowledges or seems to subscribe to the various interpretations of ideology that identify the ability of ideology to distort material practice in a totalizing way and yet offers the claim that by playing games and unpacking their claims about political rhetoric, “we can gain an unusually detached perspective on the ideologies that drive” the games (75). A very clear example of how ideology operates in the article is his unabashedly liberal interpretation of Hurricane Katrina, and his also left-leaning interpretations of laissez faire political philosophy and practice and “America’s Army: Operations.” His offhanded criticism of laissez faire politics, for example, I believe, would not be possible without the Rawlsian-esque liberal ideology that succeeded such things as the Potato Famine and laissez faire politics. In his interpretation of America’s Army (which again is suffused with left-wing interpretation) the ambiguous task of interpreting ideology manifests itself when Bogost acknowledges the two main possible interpretations of the lack of realistic deaths: that the game is aimed at teens and therefore kept the gore to a minimum for rating purposes or that the Army does not perceive battles to be macabre. This task of interpretation seems to be far from removed from the influence ideology and certainly not detached. Thus, I have several questions. One, is gaining perspective on political institutions and ideologies itself driven by a specific ideology? How is interrogating political issues as procedural systems affected by the same ideologies it seeks to interrogate? Is it possible to have a detached perspective on ideologies, especially? Considering these questions, what is the value of specific claims made by video games about interrelations between political processes? How can we most effectively interpret them?

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

The Control Allegory

In Galloway's "Allegories of Control," a shift occurs between non-computerized culture and computerized society. This shift, highlighted by Deleuze, is "characterize by a movement away from central bureaucracies and vertical heirarchies toward a broad network of autonomous social actors" (88). We study this as a move from a disciplinary society to a control society. We are not forced to live within one system, but instead we are controlled within a vast set of systems.

Games contain a form of control known as informatic control. Instead of imposing a single ideology on the player, they impose a total system of control that the player must live within. Interpretation of video games involves canning a game for large patterns instead of recognizing a dominant ideology. Games "flaunt informatic control" therefore we must "Interpretive patterns".

Specificities, such as the racist use of nationalities in Civilization, give way to the variableness that can just as easily swap the inferior Iroquoi nation for the Soviet Union or the Babylonian empire. Yes, while a game can still have a racist undertone, the actual material history that formed that racist undertone is swept away since "informantic organization... recolonized the function of identity" (102). We play according to the "synchronic" or multiple mathematical equations/controlling code of the software system, not the "diachronic" or single/static point of the Iriqoi game character icon.

This variableness highlights flexibility within informatics and late-capitalism. Just changing the variables of the system does not change the control system of the game: "To be entirely clear: mine is an argument about informatic control, not about ideology; a politcally progressive 'People's Civilization' game, a la Howard Zinn, would beg the same critique" (103).

If the individual variables do not matter, how do we interpret or scan the text?

First, we must understand that playing a game involves understanding the system of control. Galloway states that our desire to win the game leads to our desire to master knowledge of the game algorithm. The only way to win a game is to live perfectly within its system of control. "The digital can't exert control with architecture, so it does so with information.... I see this fetishization of the "knowledge triumph" as a sort of informatization of the conspiracy film" (94). Playing a game in any manner (such as a suicide player, a PKer, an explorer, etc.) forces one to learn the rules of the system.

From there, if we understand that a game is an allegory, we can interpret these processes correctly. By constantly following these rules and acting within them, we can try to understand the larger system working behind the game: "When one plays civilization, there is action taking place, but there is more than one significant action taking place" (105). We constantly do this while playing a game- we do not always fixate on the racist Iriqoi icon but the implications of starting off the game as any "nation" throughout history. "There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later" (103).

Questions:
When a game designer creates a game, is a system of control always implicit? Is it even possible to make a game that does not have a system of control? In what ways can this control system prove beneficial? If Zinn's Civilization game just changes variables, what are some examples of game changes that would alter the system of Civilization?

If we focus on informatics as opposed to ideologies, does it even matter how "racist" a game is? Commercial game makers built Colonization, but there was a much larger public outcry against that game than Civilization. While I do not think Galloway dismisses the analysis of individual ideologies within a game entirely, it seems like the public still analyzes ideology within games with much greater scrutiny than Galloway proposes we should.

Galloway critiques informatic control as creating false realities and ignoring actual material conditions. Because of the computer age, he says, Bangalore has a booming economy but also a giant economic gap. He then goes on to say "the claims I make here about the relationship between video games and the contemporary poltical sitatuions refer specifically to the social imaginary of the wired world and how the various structures of organization and regulation within it are repurposed into the formal grammar of the medium" (89).

How might one take apart the imaginary wired world (e.g., Bangalore as an outsourced workers' paradise) and rewrite the grammar video games (i.e., alter the political context of video game)? Is the McDonald's game an example of this rewriting in action? Or is the McDonald's game just another imaginary construct of the digital world?

Galloway says games "solve the problem of politcal control, not by submiating it as it does the cinemea, but by making it conterminous with the entire game?" (92).

What is Galloway's "problem of political control here"? Is political control the same as informatic control? Does Galloway see political control as completely negative?

Simulation Games: Interactivity and Discovery

In reading Friedman, I find myself agreeing with most of what he says, but at the same time wanting to challenge the limits of some of his arguments. For example, in the section titled “The Power of Interactivity” Friedman talks about how games can restructure perception. While I agree that a game may temporarily alter ones way of looking at the world, I don’t think it can become dangerous. Friedman says that video games may make us lose our grip with reality and become desensitized to the human consequences of violence and war. It is here that I think he is going too far. Games like Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army may have been developed largely by the United States Army, but they certainly don’t make the impact of war any less horrific. Games, at least for now, haven’t crossed the boundary between the game world and the real world. The player doesn’t forget that he’s playing a game because it maintains the structure of a game. Even in Ender’s Game, the kids never knew it was real and that’s why it was so easy for them to do what they did. When Ender found out it was real, he was flooded with all the emotion that war brings. I don’t think this will change until the day comes that shooting a person in a video game looks like a video of someone being shot in real life.

Friedman also talks about how gamers form a cybernetic consciousness with the computer where gaming can be described by the constant back and forth player-computer interaction. I really enjoyed Friedman’s analysis of how powerful this experience can be. This is because it’s hard for me to describe to non-gamers how it’s possible to play something for 8 or more hours straight. Superficially it sounds extreme, but it’s something that I’ve done dozens of times. Friedman even alludes to that specifically when he says “It’s very hard to describe what it feels like when you’re lost inside a computer game, precisely because at that moment your sense of self has been transformed.” I want to add that this has actually been a dangerous for some people. Forgetting to eat or even sleep is a common result of this level of gaming. A great example of this type of danger is the South Korean men who played Starcraft for 50 hours with very little food or sleep and died.

I don’t really have much to say about the Galloway reading besides going over a two points that I liked and agreed with. He started off briefly predicting a golden age for video games in the next decade and alluded to how very few media critics consider it as a worthy art form. I find it especially interesting that video games have gotten a lot more media coverage and annual industry revenues have risen significantly since he wrote this in 2006. The other point that I wanted to talk about goes back to a few classes ago when we debated how much play was needed to really understand a game and critique/analyze it. Galloway writes that in games,

“The game is learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm).”

This argument that we should try to understand the allegorithm of a game is dependent on extensive play. He goes on to say later that doing this allows us to “understand contemporary political realities in a relatively unmediated form.” I wanted to mention this because I feel that this is a strong argument for why there should be a “close playing” of video games.

Separating Simulation and Reality

Late in the chapter Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity, Manovich says:

Games modeled after simulators - first of all, first-person shooters such as Doom, Quake, and Tomb Raider, but also flight and racing simulators - have been quite successful. In contrast to interactive narratives, such as Wing Commander, [... ] first-person shooters are based on the coexistence of the two states - which are also two states of the subject (perception and action) and two states of a screen (transparent and opaque). As you run through the corridors shooting at enemies or controlling the car on the racetrack, you also keep your eyes on the readouts, which tell you about the "health" of your character, the damage level of your vehicle, the availability of ammunition, and so on. (Manovich 210)

This mention is brought out in reference to systems which blur the line between the illusion and the periodic breaks out of it. I find the case of the racing simulator particularly interesting. Many racing simulation games offer an in-car view of the race, and have options to disable readouts such as relative track positions.

In this case, the simulation presents the same point of view, and the same sort of split action cycling between simply driving and checking gauges like the speedometer required in real driving. The user actions in the simulation and in the real life action being simulated are the same. With a pedal/wheel accessory for the system on which the simulator is run, even the physical actions are the same. But Manovich touches on this interesting point but drops it (or misses its value), even though it bolsters his point. It supports him in his argument that the oscillation between the system and action is not necessarily a limit of current technology; in the case of a driving simulator, this arrangement is an ideal goal for the game designer.

It also complements his notion that "the user invests in the illusion precisely because she is given control over it" (209) because this argument is a rationalization for why users surrender to illusions which break themselves periodically, while since there is virtually no break in this case there appears to be less need to rationalize the user's acceptance of the illusion. The readings we've gone through of late all seem to agree generally with, for example, one of Bogost's definitions of simulation, that it is "a representation of a source system via a less complex system that informs the user's understanding of the source system in a subjective way" (Bogost 107). But when the simulation is simplified in only obscure ways - such as the inability to open your door and evacuate a vehicle at 80 miles per hour - both Manovich's and Bogost's discussions seem as if they might lose relevance. Both are predicated on significant differences between simulation and source system. How closely can the simulation approach its source model before the distinction is too small for the discussions of submitting to illusion to be relevant? How close can they become before the more relevant factors become which exact points the user relies on to distinguish the two?

Some Cool Digital Art

Two cool things I found in the past day:

flickrvision displays photos uploaded to Flickr as they go, correlated on a world map.

Alex Dragulescu's Malwarez is a visual rendering of a few internet worms, based on analysis of their code.

One part I found interesting about this first part of Bogost's book Persuasive Games was hisdistinction between persuasive games and persuasive technology, later termed "captology," a subject that he seems eager to critique. I'm not sure I agree with Bogost in giving this field of study/practice the overtly negative label "manipulative technology." Nevertheless, there seems to be a somewhat dramatic distinction between persuasive technology and what Bogost chooses to focus on in this book. The way I would try to summarize this difference is by saying that while persuasive games try to persuade via some form of rhetoric, persuasive technology persuades via psychology, methods that one might use or study within a controlled, experimental environment.

On perhaps a less trivial note, I think it's particularly interesting to look at this book in light of what we talked about in Tuesday's class, namely software and games as allegories of social structures and processes. Because of the computer's increased ability to create representations of processes, Bogost chooses to focus on games and algorithms ("procedures") that "present or comment on processes inherent to human experience," such as processes that affect economic, political, social, and cultural conditions and behaviors. In other words, his focus seems to rest on games that stand as allegories for social processes (maybe more explicitly than the processes at work within software in general). As he argues, "procedural expression must entail symbol manipulation, the construction and interpretation of a symbolic system that governs human thought or action" -- a definition that I think one could apply not only to procedure, but also to ideology.

A quick look at the other sections of the book suggest that this connection isn't all that far-fetched. Bogost separates the rest of the text into three categories -- politics, advertising, and learning -- all of which correspond to the ideological state apparatuses presented by Althusser. Therefore, I think one could make the argument that an important part of procedural rhetoric is the mirroring and, in effect, critiquing of the processes at work in certain ideologies, or in ideology as a whole.