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JSONUnit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
My scavengings from Ian Bogost's book
Keywords | Text | Date | ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intellectual Property / Language / Technology | "If the move from real to intellectual property is what fueled the burgeoning technology industry of the past thirty years, then jargon is the raw material that helped industry form that intellectual property." "Jargon ... is a way of laying groundwork for novel production." Bogost, xi | 03/23/07 | 7696 |
| Biology | Bogost: "Over the last two hundred years, biology has revised its conception of natural life from the random wholeness of natural selection (Darwin) to the command-and-control directedness of genomics (Mendel, Crick, and Watson) to the periodiciy of punctuated equilibrium (Gould) to the complexity of autocatalysis (Kauffman)." | 03/23/07 | 7697 |
| Systems | Bogost: contemporary systems are "the spontaneous and complex result of multitudes rather than singular and absolute holisms" (4) | 03/23/07 | 7698 |
| Systems | "The first form of complexity was conceived in the 1940s, as biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy's systems theory." -Bogost, p.4 | 03/23/07 | 7699 |
| Philosophy: Harman / Network / Relationships / Artifacts / To Read | philosopher Graham Harman's "object-oriented philosophy" a development of Heidegger's Zuhandenheit ("readiness-at-hand") Bogost: "Harman suggests that all objects in the world, not just humans, are fundamentally referential, or form from relationships that extend beyond their own limits." see his "Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects" | 03/23/07 | 7701 |
| Systems / Biology | Francisco Valera + Humberto Maturana "autopoetic systems theorists" who "showed that the neurology of the frog operates as a system that regulates the organism's behavior." (Bogost 6) | 03/23/07 | 7702 |
| System / Culture / Communication / Border | sociologist Niklas Luhmann believes that social systems regulate themselves by "creating and maintaining a difference from their environment, and [using] their boundaries to regulate this difference." Bogost: "In Luhmann's systems theory, communication is the basic unit of social systems." (6) | 03/23/07 | 7703 |
| Systems | Bogost, 6: "[S]ystems imply a fundamental order that an agent might 'discover,' one that exists by natural, universal, or common law." a "totalizing" system, distinct from "complex systems in which individual units relate", which are "autopoetic or at least arbitrary, and characterized by exploration or interpretation rather than discovery." | 03/23/07 | 7704 |
| Systems / Philosophy: Heidegger / Energy / Concept | Bogost: "Heidegger called the grasp of totalizing systems Gestell, or Enframing. Enframing is the modern condition of ordering the potential of structures in the world only to conceal and hold onto their energy for future use." see also Heidegger's Bestand, "standing reserve" and poiesis, "bringing-forth" | 03/23/07 | 7705 |
| Systems | Bogost: "We cannot escape systems, but we can explore them, or understand ourselves as implicated in their exploration." (7) | 03/23/07 | 7706 |
| Philosophy: Heidegger / Art / Technology | Heidegger suggests that the goal of art is to reconfigure the elements of Enframing / Gestell art becomes "expressive units that reconfigure our relationship with technology in new ways" (Bogost) | 03/23/07 | 7707 |
| Systems | "Complex networks are open, adjudicated by the nonsimple interaction of variety of constantly changing constituents." Bogost, 8 | 03/25/07 | 7714 |
| Philosophy: Spinoza / Memory | "[W]e clearly understand what memory is. For it is othing other than a certain connection of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body." Bogost understands this as a merging of "ontological and epistemological materiality" (9) | 03/25/07 | 7715 |
| Philosophy: Spinoza / Network / Systems | Bogost: "Spinoza's philosophy sets up a network-like superstructure for almost any kind of material relation ... [This] sets the stage for future forms of complex systems." Spinoza sees relationships between objects as "innumerably re-creatable" | 03/25/07 | 7716 |
| Philosophy: Badiou / Math | Alain Badiou develops an interest in set theory-- "A set for Badiou is a collection of elements selected from the infinite possible collections of elements. These elements in turn must be thought of as multiplicities, as sets themselves." (Bogost) there's a way that this is applicable to the "Everything Device" notion ... ? | 03/25/07 | 7717 |
| Process / Emotion / Poetry: Eliot | T.S. Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative" is a "literary formula for the production of an emotion" (Bogost) connected to Janet Murray's notion of "procedurality" ? | 03/25/07 | 7718 |
| Hypertext | Espen Aarseth's "cybertexts" rely on "configuration as a formal property" (Bogost, 14) "Aarseth articulates a 'traversal function' that assembles a particular string of readable signs (what he calls 'scriptons') from a possible array of textual signs (what he calls 'textons')" Bogost's unit-operations-based criticism is similar, although instead of locating these notions in a "work," Bogost applies them in the service of "a particular critical practice" Hm | 03/25/07 | 7719 |
| Philosophy / Form / Reality | Bogost: "The problem of universals is one of the oldest in philosophy. It asks whether abstract concepts (universals) that range over individual things (particulars) exist in some realm outside human understanding." (21) realists (i.e. Plato) v. nominalists (i.e. Ockham) | 03/25/07 | 7725 |
| Philosophy: Aristotle / Form / Experience | Bogost: "Aristotle makes a decisive gesture in the philosophy of universals ... [He] shifted the position of universals from without to within human experience." For Aristotle, "universals (forms) do exist, but only in *matter,* in the material world of experiences." universal modes vs. particular modes "For Aristotle, matter and form are fundamentally tied" It is only a "mental function that allows us to gain an unverstanding of the form in the matter, the universal in the particular. He calls this faculty *abstraction*" (22) This maneuver is a "simultaneous individuation and generalization" of forms (23) | 03/25/07 | 7726 |
| Philosophy: Aristotle / Form | Bogost: "Aristotle posits a specific notion of causality. Final causality is the natural procession of matter toward the realization of its form ... The final cause is the purpose objects work towards as they change. In this sense, Aristotle's world is deeply teleological; things seek a formal, ideal purpose. Such striving relies on a purposiveness that orders and regulates the universe; a system that directs the movements of objects towards a directed end." | 03/25/07 | 7727 |
| Philosophy: Derrida / Systems | Bogost: "Derrida is obsessed with dismantling totalizing systems" (24) "However, taken as a whole, deconstructionism can also be said to exhibit remarkable systematicity. ... [T]he process of deconstruction itself threatens to become a closed, static system." | 03/25/07 | 7728 |
| Computers / Timeline | "[I]n 1945 ENIAC engineer and renowned mathematician John von Neumann suggested that computers should have a simple physical structure and yet be able to perform any kind of computation through programmable control alone rather than physical alteration of the computer itself." (Bogost 25) the "von Neumann architecture" or "the stored-program technique" | 03/25/07 | 7729 |
| Media: Digital Media | Bogost: "the force and power" of digital media "comes not only from their material structure, but also from an amalgam of their logical and functional structures--the fashion in which computational and cultural works are created and used." | 03/25/07 | 7730 |
| Media: Digital Media | Bogost: "In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich claims that binary digital data signals a sea change in representation; digital computers manipulate content previously of different media forms (audio, video, text, image, etc) and represent that content in unitary structures." However, "it is wrong to claim that digitalization introduced the notion of universalism to computation." (28) | 03/25/07 | 7731 |
| Systems / Cyborg / Patterns / Chaos | Bogost: "N. Katherine Hayles's approach to cybernetics [suggests] that cybernetic systems function within a dialectic of pattern and randomness. In the immense world of binary data, meaning emerges where authors or users create or recognize patterns." | 03/25/07 | 7732 |
| Computers | Bogost: "Software must exhibit four properties to be considered object-oriented: abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance." Unit Operations, 39 | 03/27/07 | 7861 |
| Technology / Reality | Bogost: "The common thread in analyses like those of [Friedrich] Kittler and [Neil] Postman is that even a word processing program limits the way humans relate to the world in a radical way, almost to the point of constituting an ontological threat." (37) | 03/27/07 | 7862 |
| Computers / Timeline / Math / Philosophy: Leibniz / Reality | "Leibniz developed the first system of digital arithmetic, the basis of all digital technology" from this, Leibniz concludes "that all reality is therefore constructed of extensions of this notion, Being (1) and Nothing (0)." Bogost, 37 | 03/27/07 | 7863 |
| Computers / Timeline / Mind / Information | object technology "descends directly from John von Neumann's dream of unviersal computation" and is popularized by Alan Kay's SmallTalk, created at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s an attempt to get computers to "manage information in the same way as human cognition" | 03/27/07 | 7864 |
| Intellectual Property / Computers | the way that Windows (for instance) encases or encapsulates functions into "component objects" (dynamic link libraries, or dlls) is a "method of encapsulating intellectual capital" (Bogost) in a set of "black boxes" --object technology | 03/27/07 | 7865 |
| Intellectual Property / Computers | Bogost, 41: "the primary basis for the defensible intellectual property of software systems" is in "encapsulation" which "hides the internal workings of a particular operation" | 04/09/07 | 7873 |
| Technology: ATM Machine / Work / Capitalism | Bogost points out that the "encapsulation" of an ATM surcharge into the "withdrawal operation" has the effect of making us accept the fact "that access to the exchange value of one's own labor comes at a cost" | 04/09/07 | 7874 |
| Media / To Read / Narrative | Jay Bolter + Richard Grusin's book, Remediation develops the McLuhan-like claim that "all media articulate or pay homage to previous media, thus 'remediating' previous media forms" (Bogost's summary) Bogost connects this, somehow [?] to his process of "encapsulation," claiming that Bolter and Grusin see the "encapsulation of cultural prodcts as an artifact of the process of remediation" (the example is the way that Batman recurs in various media) could this be connected to that thing where the Matrix attempts to tell its meta-narrative across media? | 04/09/07 | 7875 |
| Capitalism / Media / Design | Bogost points out the cross-media development of the Hello Kitty archetype: "Since 1976, the Japanese company Sanrio has done nothing but license its popular Hello Kitty character for use in other forms of cultural capital ... Licensing is an example of the fungible use of a unit operation in the cultural, commercial, and legal registers." (42) | 04/09/07 | 7876 |
| Memetics / Concept / Culture / Capitalism | Ryan Mathew and Watts Wacker have promoted the notion of the "devox" -- a "memelike superentity ... which effects cultural change through the promulgation of deviance." in footnote, Bogost clarifies: "Deviance in this case refers ... to the notion that cultural units begin as marginalized units before becoming mass-market" | 04/09/07 | 7877 |
| Literary Criticism / Bricolage / Philosophy: Derrida | "Gerard Genette draws a direct correlation between bricolage and cultural criticism; it is a process of borrowing concepts and putting them to use." (Bogost) apparently Derrida develops Genette's idea? | 04/09/07 | 7878 |
| Media: Videogames / Interactive Fiction / Communication | Espen Aarseth wants people to study "videogames and related technologies" (Bogost) "for what they can tell us about the principles and evolution of human communication" (Aarseth) yet simultaneously he thinks that focusing on games as literature-- "applying the theories of literary criticism to a new empirical field, seemingly without any reassessment of the terms and concepts involved" --is a problem leading him to say things like "interactive fiction [is] an unfocused fantasy rather than a concept of any analytical substance" | 04/09/07 | 7879 |
| Game | Frans Mayra (head of the Digital Game Research Association or DiGRA): "Games have their own distinctive features and fundamental character or ontology, which are not shared as such by other cultural forms." | 04/09/07 | 7880 |
| Computers / Media: Videogames / Form / Genre / Intellectual Property | Bogost: "Common gameplay in works of the same genre makes it possible to develop new games on the code written for existing games." the "common substructure" here creates an angle through which games can (should?) be analyzed "Game engines move far beyond literary devices and genres ... [G]ame engines regulate individual videogames' artistic, cultural, and narrative expression." also: "[G]ame engines are IP. They exist in the material world in a way that genres, devices, and cliches do not." | 04/09/07 | 7882 |
| Film / Industrial Age / Corporations | Bogost: "[T]he film industry remains the dominant example of an industrial art, where large teams of individuals with specific skills (both artistic and technical) produce a work often, but not always, funded by large corporate investors." | 04/09/07 | 7883 |
| Media: Videogames / Genre / Technology / Form | Bogost: "[F]irst-person shooter game engines construe entire gameplay behaviors, facilitating functional interactions divorced from individual games. ... Game engines differ from genres in that they abstract ... material requirements as their primary-- perhaps their only --formal constituent." (57) | 04/09/07 | 7884 |
| Media: Videogames | Bogost: "After the success of Doom, its developer iD Software recognized that they could capitalize not just on games they created, but also on helping other developers create similar and derivative games ... iD turned that idea into the Quake Engine, which has become the basis for dozens of titles released since, including HeXen 2 and Half-Life" | 04/20/07 | 7909 |
| Media: Videogames / Intellectual Property | "Valve Software ... released Half-Life in 1998, based on the Quake II engine. Half-Life in turn spawned a multiplayer edition called Counter-Strike, which remains among the most popular Internet/LAN games today." see also the relationship between Tank and Pong "Both Tank and Half-Life demonstrate how formal intellectual property relationships between games and their developers or publishers encourage growth that benefits both." Bogost, 61 | 04/20/07 | 7910 |
| Media: Videogames / Intellectual Property | "[E]ffective criticism of [video]games as cultural works may need to take the licensing operation [the relation between a game engine and a derivative game] into account in understanding how a work functions discursively." Bogotst, 62 | 04/20/07 | 7911 |
| Media: Videogames / To Play | Notable first-person shooters or FPS include Warren Spector's Thief, in which "the main goal is to *avoid* conflict, sneaking through shadows and darkness to avoid detection" and Warren Spector's Deus Ex (built on the Unreal game engine) which adds a "moral tenor" : "each violent *and* nonviolent player decision affects the outcome of the game" | 04/20/07 | 7912 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Facade utilizes ABL (A Behavior Language), a "reactive planning language" [?] ABL is based on Hap, a "computational system for goal-directed activity developed at Carnegie Mellon University" Note that Wikipedia has entries on neither Hap nor ABL-- start from the Facade page and work outwards? | 04/20/07 | 7913 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | "[Michael] Mateas and [Andrew] Stern [the creators of Facade] ... break down master narrative into story beats, a term they borrow from screen writing. In film, story beats simply refer to plot points within a larger story; in Facade, they refer to short segments of goal-driven, flexible interaction ... [T]he platform queues subsequent beats to progress the experience along a given story arc, a bit like narrative pathfinding." (Bogost, 65-6) | 04/20/07 | 7914 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Bogost: "[Jesper] Juul concedes that games and narratives share common properties: we use narratives to make sense of experiences, and games have embedded stories and backstories that are undeniably narrative. Juul shows how even a 'simple' game like Space Invaders relies on a narrative backstory to motivate gameplay" (67) | 04/20/07 | 7915 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Bogost: "Juul's fundamental point is that games disturb the relation between reader and story that narratives require." Juul: "the player inhabits a twilight zone where he/she is both an empirical subject outside the game *and* undertakes a role inside the game." sort of like Will Wright's claims about feeling pride or guilt / shame while playing | 04/20/07 | 7916 |
| Media: Videogames / Game / Narrative | Jesper Juul, on "what makes games games": "rules, goals, player activity, the projection of the player's actions into the game world, the way the game defines the possible actions of the player." | 04/20/07 | 7917 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative / Film: Eisenstein / To Read | Henry Jenkins, discussing the relationship between narratives and games, talks about a concept of "localized incidents," or "micronarratives" he uses Eisentein's "Odessa Steps" sequence to illustrate this concept, referring to "short narrative units ... [built] upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama" see Eisenstein's concept of "attractions" ("any element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact" ... "discrete elements" (Jenkins)) This is from Jenkins' "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" in First Person | 04/20/07 | 7918 |
| Narrative / Mind / To Read | AI researcher Roger Schank: "we think in stories" Bogost: "In Schank's conception, humans simply process units of meaning in story form" see his Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence | 04/20/07 | 7921 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative / Generative Art / Interactive Fiction | Mateas and Stern's Facade "musters a great many core technologies toward the production of a legitimate generative narrative, among them natural language processing, goal-directed behavior management, procedural facial animation, and drama management. Of these, only drama management is fundamentally related to narrative." (Bogost, 70) | 04/20/07 | 7922 |
| City / Chance / Desire / Theme: Baudelaire | Ian Bogost refers to the "chance encounter" as a particular (unit-operational) trope "a founding archetype of modernity" The fleeting experience with an object of desire "is so familiar that it is hard to imagine what it would be like to experience it for the first time, to have to think about this encounter deliberately to make sense of it." | 05/16/07 | 8049 |
| Experience / Ritual / Alienation / Theme: Baudelaire | Walter Benjamin "articulates a decline in the aura of human experience" it has decoupled "from the continuity of ritual and social abundance," contributing "to the feeling of alienation that Baudelaire so famously recounts" (Bogost, 74) | 05/16/07 | 8050 |
| Poetry: Baudelaire | Bogost: "Baudelaire tried to resist alienation through his poetry, both creating a record of his contemporary strategies and tools for combating estrangement and formalizing those very tools into a framework, a kind of scaffolding for modern experience that remains with us today." | 05/16/07 | 8051 |
| Crowd / City / Relationships / Theme: Baudelaire | Walter Benjamin: "Far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates. The delight of the urban poet is love -- not at first sight, but at last sight." an experience "spared, rather than denied, fulfillment." | 05/16/07 | 8052 |
| Memory / Experience | Benjamin, on Bergson's "Matter and Memory" : experience becomes "a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data" | 05/16/07 | 8053 |
| Media: Videogames / Comics | Bogost: "Will Wright has explained that some of the interaction design of The Sims is based on Scott McCloud's principles of comic design" specifically the way that comics readers project themselves "into their reading and interpretation of the story" Wright on abstraction: "there are certain things we cannot simulate on a computer, but on the other hand that people are very good at simulating in their head. So we just take that part of the simulation and offload it from the computer into the player's head." | 05/16/07 | 8054 |
| Time / Media: Videogames | Will Wright (quoted in Unit Operations): "One of the biggest things that I wanted to show [in The Sims] was how, basically, the real resource everybody has in life is time. You can convert time to a lot of other things-- you can convert it into money, objects, and friends --but how you choose to spend your time is how you're playing the game of life. That's the one thing that you don't get more of, really." | 05/16/07 | 8055 |
| Complexity | Ian Bogost's useful one-line description of cellular automata: "Cellular automata are mechanized systems that perform a single, simple, isolatable task, and then transmit their output to a neighoring cell." and, invariably: "The sum total effect of these individual unit operations yeilds tremendous complexity." Stephen Wolfram's one-line description: "[C]ellular automata may be viewed as parallel-processing computers of simple construction." | 05/16/07 | 8057 |
| Media: Videogames / Play / Interface | Ted Friedman says that playing a game like SimCity is an experience in which "[t]he interaction between player and computer is constant and intense." He describes it as "a continuous flow" | 05/16/07 | 8058 |
| Media: Videogames / Education | Ted Friedman, on Sim City: "The player molds his or her strategy through trial-and-error experimentation to see 'what works' -- what actions are rewarded and which are punished." | 05/18/07 | 8061 |
| Computers: Simulations / Narrative | Gonzalo Frasca: "for an external observer, the outcome of a simulation is narration." Too simple? | 05/18/07 | 8062 |
| Media: Videogames / Interface / Consciousness | Ian Bogost: "the most important moment in the study of a videogame" is the moment when "the unit operations of a simulation embody themselves in a player's understanding" | 05/18/07 | 8063 |
| Media: Videogames / Narrative | Janet Murray's claim that Tetris is narrative is used by Gonzalo Frasca as "convincing evidence that simulations can have different interpretations" (Bogost's summary) by contrast, Markku Eskelinen refers to it as an "interpretative violence" -- "the determination to find or forge a story at any cost" even if this involves obscuring or failing to engage with "the features that make Tetris a game" see Jesper Juul's read on card 8316 | 05/18/07 | 8064 |
| Interface / Mind | HCI is an acronym for human-computer interaction "HCI research suggests that people form mental models of a computer system's apparent capabilities in order to learn how to use the system" | 05/18/07 | 8065 |
| Globalism / Identity / Concept | Fredric Jameson's "cognitive mapping" "seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" | 05/18/07 | 8066 |
| Language / Network / Philosophy: Derrida | Bogost: "Saussure understood language as a 'system of differences' -- the signifier 'dog' has meaning only insofar as it is not the signifier 'cat'" this is an idea that Derrida expands on. Bogost: "differences are palpable" -- unlike in Saussure for whom they are "without positive terms" --"but differences are not stable identities that persist" "In this respect, meaning for Derrida is a relational system, a network of actual and possible things and experiences." | 05/18/07 | 8067 |
| Computers: Simulation / Zeitgeist | Sherry Turkle identifies two reactions to computer simulations-- "simulation resignation" (wherein people insist on the use of models even if they know "the models are wrong") and "simulation denial" (in which one "reject[s] simulation to whatever degree possible," as in the case of MIT physicists who saw them as a "thoroughly destructive force in science education") | 05/18/07 | 8069 |
| Computers: Simulation / Systems / Interface / Knowledge / Subjectivity | Bogost: "A simulation 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." | 05/18/07 | 8070 |
| Philosophy: Derrida / Indexing / Memory / Concept | Derrida's "archive fever" (mal d'archive) "a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement" Bogost: "Archive fever is the simultaneous drive toward and fear of archivization. The cure for archive fever is a process of working through this discomfort" | 05/18/07 | 8072 |
| Game / Narrative | Ian Bogost's paraphrase of Markku Eskelinen's summary of Espen Aarseth's understanding of "the difference between games and literature": "[T]he dominant user function in literature, theatre, and film is interpretative, but in games it is a configurative [?] one." | 05/18/07 | 8073 |
| Structure: Benjamin / Fragments / Juxtaposition / Flux | The Arcades Project aka Passagenwerk Ian Bogost describes it as "an experiment in text of reconfigurable, unit-operational aphorisms" Susan Buck-Morss describes the "constructions" as having a "deliberate unconnectedness ... easily moved about in changing arrangements and trial combinations, in response to the altered demands of the changing 'present'" | 05/27/07 | 8098 |
| Play | Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens: Play is "a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life ... but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings, which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means." | 05/27/07 | 8100 |
| Play / Ritual | "Huizinga's conception of play bears more similarity to the kind of ritualistic activity that Benjamin calls cult practice." Bogost, 115 | 05/27/07 | 8101 |
| Play / Game / To Read | Roger Callois' "Man, Play and Games" -- an extension of Huizinga's arguments Bogost: "For Callois, play is *make-believe,* 'accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as *against real life*" | 05/27/07 | 8102 |
| Art / Play / Philosophy: Heidegger / To Read | Hans Gadamer's Truth and Method, 1989 Gadamer borrows Huizinga's idea of "play as a system of 'fixed rules'" (Bogost) and applies this to the artistic process play is the means by which an artwork undergoes a "transformation into structure" or undergoes (Heideggerean) "unconcealment" | 05/27/07 | 8103 |
| Game / Education | Raph Koster argues that "the primary kind of fun that games produces comes from mastery of a task" (Bogost, 117) Bogost: "For Koster, fun is very nearly a pedagogical category, 'the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes'" | 05/27/07 | 8104 |
| Game | Raph Koster argues that games should be considered an "expressive medium," and complains that "[n]o other artistic medium defines itself around an intended *effect* on the user, such as 'fun.' They all embrace a wider array of emotional impact." | 05/27/07 | 8105 |
| Media: Videogames / Systems | Jesper Juul's distinction between emergent games and progressive games progressive games are "games in which the player performs sequential actions to reach the game's end, such as action / adventure games" whereas "emergent games" are more simulation-oriented games (for instance) which "necessitate strategic tactics and therefore yield high replayability" (Bogost's paraphrasings) | 05/27/07 | 8106 |
| Philosophy: Badiou / Poetry | Badiou's "events" Bogost: "Badiou gives special attention to poetry, whose breaks from the ordinary use of language he finds particularly disruptive." a structure that "invites ... reconfiguration" [?] See Badiou's "Que pense le poeme," which may be unavailable in English translation? | 05/27/07 | 8107 |
| Hypertext / Systems / Communication | Espen Aarseth's cybertexts are "various kinds of literary communication systems where the functional difference among the mechanical parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process" | 06/15/07 | 8111 |
| Literary Criticism / Media / Book Arts | N. Katherine Hayles, critiquing Espen Aarseth's "cybertext" concept (in the way that it combines "individual media into one master medium" (Bogost)) "[M]aterial differences between media do matter, and matter significantly, if one wishes to account for the specificity of reading pracices, the responses of users or readers to particular texts, and the nuanced effects that different kinds of texts can acheive." akin to Johanna Drucker's "materiality of signification" idea | 06/15/07 | 8112 |
| Play / Game / TAZ | Johan Huizinga's "magic circle" "The arena, the card table, the magic circle ... are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world" | 06/15/07 | 8113 |
| Game / Play / Media: Videogames | Chris Crawford's four characteristics of computer games are "representation, interaction, conflict, and safety" Crawford: "a game is an artifice for providing the psychological experiences of conflict and danger while excluding their physical realizations. In short, a game is a safe way to experience reality." | 06/15/07 | 8114 |
| Play / Community | effects of the establishment of a magic circle: "the feeling of being 'apart together' in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game" (Huizinga) | 06/15/07 | 8115 |
| Liberty / Everyday / Capitalism / Control | Michel de Certeau's "practice of everyday life" involves "individual and group actions [reclaiming] the autonomy lost to statist and commercial structures" | 06/15/07 | 8116 |
| Liberty / Control / Identity / Body / Language | Deleuze and Guarrari's mission is "to upset the basic notions of meaning, particularly those surrounding the subject, the body, and language." (Bogost) "To do this, they seek to topple three Goliaths of meaning-making: psychoanalysis, physiology, and semiotics" A Thousand Plateaus is a book of "liberation strategies" it seeks to disrupt "unities of meaning and [replace] them with assemblages of singular states of meaning" [?] | 06/15/07 | 8117 |
| Control / Government / Nomadism / Concept | Deleuze and Guattari's "state space": Bogost: "State space focuses on organization, be it cultural, religious, sexual, psychological, psychoanalytic, familiar, or commercial." The oppositional form is "nomad space" -- "smooth," open-ended | 06/15/07 | 8118 |
| Concept / Systems / Liberty / Nomadism | Deleuze and Guattari's "plateau" Gregory Bateson's concept (Bogost: "systems that seek not to interrupt or terminate their intensity through either external intervention or internal climax") a set of plateaus form "components of passage" -- plateaus line up with other plateaus, "allowing free [nomadic] movement" (Bogost) "The practice of nomadism is thus one of receptivity to possible escape paths from one state into another." (Bogost, 141) | 06/15/07 | 8119 |
| Network / Relationships | Paul Erdos and Alfred Reyni were mathematicians who began to think of complex network theorization as a mathematical problem see also Stanley Milgram's "small world" experiment, which formally observes the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon (note also that the "Erdős number" is essentially a referent to "degrees of separation" from Erdos) | 06/21/07 | 8133 |
| Network / Relationships | Mark Granovetter-- Harvard sociologist studies the importance of "weak ties" in social networks Bogot's summary : "Granovetter argued that when people leverage their social network ... acquaintances are far more valuable than close friendships" | 06/21/07 | 8134 |
| Network / Form | Bogost: "[I]nterconnected complex networks, and especially scale-free networks, underlie many kinds of phenomena" "Scale-free networks also happen to be very strong, because breaks in individual ties do not lead to chain reactions like cascading failures that destroy the entire system." Scale-free networks are hub-node networks (as illustrated by "the route map in any airline magazine") -- networks structured in a way which does "not exhibit the same connectivity or *scale* from node to node (that is to say, each node does not have a proportional, or scaled, number of connections to any other node)" | 06/22/07 | 8135 |
| Nomadism / Network / Relationships / Subjectivity | In Deleuze and Guattari, "[n]omadism is not about following one's whims arbitrarily; rather, it is a statement that subjectivity should overcome isolation and constitute itself in assemblages of relation, along the lines of something like what matematicians and information theorists call a network." (Bogost, 149) | 06/22/07 | 8136 |
| Media: Videogames | still trying to grasp what Bogost means by "unit operations," exactly... on p. 150 he applies the concept to "moves and actions" in a game (such as "placing a stone" in Go or "zoning a property" in Sim City) | 06/22/07 | 8139 |
| Art: Generative Art / Systems | Bogost: "As aesthetic structures, emergent systems are undeniably captivating, although perhaps only as instances of the sublime, not the expressive." (150) | 06/22/07 | 8140 |
| Liberty / Concept / Body | Deleuze and Guattari's "Body without Organs" is a "reformation of the physical body that rejects its boundaries in flesh" "a mass of potential 'zones of intensity'" "The BwO maintains a higher degree of freedom the more impulses it might consider following" | 06/23/07 | 8141 |
| Network / Relationships | Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs): "Social network literacy is not about how many connections you have, but how well you use them to navigate your life." | 06/23/07 | 8142 |
| Media: Videogames / Timeline | The Legend of Zelda is the first game with "on-cartridge read/writeable memory" (the first in-game save) and is also the first videogame to sell one million units | 06/23/07 | 8143 |
| Structure: Joyce / Network | James Joyce's Ulysses traces "not two stationary events [as in Flaubert] but dozens of simultaneous, shifting actions." See specifically the "Wandering Rocks" chapter, which Bogost describes as a "small-scale redition of the entire book" | 06/23/07 | 8144 |
| Internet / Computers / Intellectual Property | "Recently, a technology standard called Web services has emerged that claims to offer a solution to the problem of interoperability. The idea is simple: the one standard to which every system already adheres is the Internet protocol used to deliver content from computers to human readers on the World Wide Web (hypertext transfer protocol or HTTP). ... The standardization of the data format and the transfer protocol represents a radical break from the traditional foundational [concept] of intellectual property. ... The primary benefit of Web services is that two computers with nothing in common architecturally can mutually invoke software routines and share the results" (Bogost 175) other WEb services formats-- XML (extensible markup language) and SOAP (simple object access protocol) (which allows the execution of "object technology-style requests from applications on remote computer systems") | 06/23/07 | 8145 |
| Mind / Capitalism / Education / To Read | "Thought is non-productive labor, and hence does not show up on balance sheets except as waste." -Bill Readings, in The University In Ruins (at UIC -- LB2322.2 .R42 1996) | 06/23/07 | 8146 |