Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Play Anything
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://bogost.com/
CITY: Atlanta
STATE: GA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.iac.gatech.edu/people/faculty/bogost * http://bogost.com/downloads/I.%20Bogost%20CV.pdf * https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/how-to-use-fun-to-find-meaning-in-life/499805/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
WRITER NOTE: 40-page CV is referenced but not downloaded by researcher. Additional source data came from that pdf file. AT
PERSONAL
Born December 30, 1976; married; children: a daughter, a son.
EDUCATION:Centre International d’Etudes Pédagogiques, diploma in French, 1997; University of Southern California, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1998; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 2001, Ph.D., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Interactive media developer based in Los Angeles, CA, 1995-98; digital media consultant, 1998-99; Media Revolution, Santa Monica, CA, vice president and chief technology officer, 1999-2003; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, assistant professor, 2004-08, associate professor, 2008-11, professor of digital media, 2011-12, professor of interactive computing, holder of Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, professor at Scheller College of Business, and director of Center for Media Studies, all 2012–, director of Experimental Game Lab, 2005-06; also affiliate of Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies, Center for 21st Century Universities, and Visualization and Usability Center. Open Texture (educational publisher), general partner and board member, 2002-13; Persuasive Games (video game developer), founding partner, 2003–. University of Technology Sydney, visiting professor, 2009; Harvard University, faculty associate at Berkman Center, 2012-13; speaker at hundreds of meetings, conferences, and other venues around the world.
Exhibitions: Video games have been widely exhibited and collected internationally, including work at American Art Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Telfair Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Laboro Centro de Arte, and Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
MEMBER:International Game Developers Association, International Simulation and Gaming Association, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association of Internet Researchers, Digital Games Research Association, Society for Literature and the Arts, Modern Language Association, National Council of Teachers of English.
AWARDS:Mindshare Award, gaming category, ELearners, 2010, for Bogost.com; Vanguard Award and Virtuoso Award, IndieCade Festival, 2010, both for A Slow Year: Game Poems; named DiGRA Distinguished Scholar, Digital Games Research Association, 2016; designated lifetime fellow, Higher Education Video Game Alliance, 2016; grants from Georgia Lottery, Intel Research, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Microsoft Research, NASA Classroom of the Future Project, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including foreword to Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Videogames, edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, Routledge (New York, NY), 2009; afterword to Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy, by Jan Rune Holmevik, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2012; and 10 PRINT CHR $(205.5+RND(1)); :GOTO 10, MIT Press, 2012; contributor to dozens of other books including Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012; Inhuman Nature, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Punctum Press (Brooklyn, NY), 2014; and The State of Play: Sixteen Voices on Video Games, edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 2015 . Coeditor of the book series “Platform Studies,” MIT Press, 2008–; and of “Object Lessons” series, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013–. Author of “Persuasive Games,” a column in Gamasutra, between 2005 and 2014, and “Difficulty Switch,” in Edge, 2014-15. Contributor of articles, video games, and reviews to periodicals, including First Monday, Journal of Media Literacy, New Scientist, On the Horizon, Speculative Heresy, and Time. Editor, Game Studies, 2006–; contributing editor, Atlantic, beginning c. 2012; member of editorial board, Configurations, Games and Culture, Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment, Informatics, Journal of Digital Culture and Education, Journal of e-Media Studies, O-Zone: Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, Popular Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Speculations: Journal of Object Oriented Ontology; member of editorial advisory board, American Journal of Play, 2007–. Developer of video games, including Take Back Illinois, Horde of Directors, The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, Airport Insecurity, Sweaty Palms, all exhibited c. 2005; Food Import Folly, Points of Immigration, Arcade Wire, and Cruel 2 B Kind, exhibited c. 2007; Airport Security, Disaffected!, c. 2008; Guru Meditation, Killer Flu, and Jetset: A Game for Airports, c. 2009; Cow Clicker, 2010; and Simony, c. 2012.
Bogost’s work has been translated into Russian and Polish.
SIDELIGHTS
Ian Bogost wears several hats. He is not only a respected philosopher and professor of media studies, an international speaker and magazine writer, but also an award-winning videogame designer. He joined the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004, after ten years of developing interactive media in Los Angeles. In an interview at the Entertainment Software Association Web site, Bogost explained that his original interest was in the arts: literature, painting, and philosophy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in comparative literature. Coming of age “in the early days of the microcomputer,” he also dabbled in computing, back when it was still “possible to wrap your whole head and hands around the simplicity of computing.” He told his interviewer: “I wanted to put those two worlds together somehow, and later games suggested themselves as an ideal place.”
Bogost may be best known in the gaming community as the developer of Cow Clicker, an intentionally boring parody of social media games like Farmville that ironically became a popular Facebook game in its own right. According to his home page, however, he has also developed videogames as a medium for grappling with relevant “social and political issues … as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform.” Bogost was an officer of Media Revolution and a founding partner of Persuasive Games.
Academia beckoned, and Bogost became a full professor at Georgia Tech in 2011. He also became an active affiliate of the Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies and other university research units. He was increasingly invited to speak at meetings and conferences in the United States and abroad, and his articles appeared in dozens of magazines. At the same time, Bogost was publishing books with deceptively disarming titles about videogames and the concept of play and what it’s like to be a thing–the latter of which is actually an academic work on philosophy and phenomenology.
In his interview for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), Bogost recalled his early exposure to games like Rygar and Lode Runner: “Games like these … facilitated total submission, a complete acceptance of the preposterous world the games asked you to operate.” In Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames he analyzes the power of videogames to reflect social or cultural positions and even to persuade players to change their minds on trending issues. He focuses especially on the persuasive power of videogames in the areas of politics, advertising, and learning. In fact, Bogost posits that videogames represent new, bona fide forms of rhetoric, both visual and procedural.
How to Do Things with Videogames
In recent decades, computer games have evolved into a prominent entertainment medium but, according to Bogost, their potential has remained relatively unexplored. In How to Do Things with Videogames, he acknowledges that their applications now extend far beyond idle mental exercise and mindless relaxation. Videogames have been developed as educational tools, history tutorials, and promotional advertisements. They have been deployed in the serious pursuit of business, political, and even journalistic objectives, which Bogost wrote about in Newsgames: Journalism at Play. He also experimented with videogame poems in A Slow Year: Game Poems, which was packaged with its own CD-ROM disk. As he told his ESA interviewer, the ultimate value of computer games will not be measured by user numbers or sales figures, “but from the diversity of uses to which they are put,” and he believes that “we’re still nowhere near that.”
Bogart calls for developers to move beyond technical innovation, beyond virtual reality, in fact beyond the “cloistered” world of videogames altogether. “Pay attention to anything but games,” he urged in the interview, “and then connect those interests to games, and vice versa.” Dan Golding told readers of Digital Culture and Education: “While this could not quite be described as a ‘pop’ book of videogame theory, it is certainly Bogost’s most accessible book.” He described How to Do Things with Videogames as “a nimble structure that allows him to engage with areas that traditional academic investigations do not.”
Play Anything
After a more academic foray into Alien Phenomenology; or, What’s It’s Like to Be a Thing, Bogost returned to the world of fun and games. In Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, he tackles some common misconceptions regarding what it means to engage in play. He emphasizes that, while fun and games may go together, games don’t always have to fun, and fun isn’t always limited to mindless recreation. Bogost’s concept of fun requires “concentration and engagement,” observed David Z. Morris in the Washington Independent Review of Books, and games provide the rules and limits that fulfill these requirements. Furthermore, almost any activity can become an exercise in play: even a walk to the store or a laundry-folding exercise. As Morris explained: “Bogost is essentially arguing that our problem is not the world as it exists, but our perception of it.” In other words, he continued, “the mundane horrors of our time could be turned into joys if we simply appreciated them more deeply.” That should not imply that every act can or should be enriched by a sugar-coated layer of gamification, Bogost told an interviewer at the London Observer Online: “It’s a way of taking what you’re already doing and paying a different kind of attention to it.” The readers who accept Bogost’s challenge could, by addressing the world around them, explore new ways to add meaning and novelty to their lives and their relationships.
Bogost told Julie Beck in an Atlantic interview: “I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it’s this thing that’s in stuff, it’s not in you. … It’s the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what’s possible.” Then, he explained, “you train yourself to be able to find it almost anywhere in almost anything.” Toward the end of the interview, Bogost observed: “If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you’re able to find them in more places.” Given the current world around us, he concluded, “looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Ennis, Paul J., Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews, Zero Books (Hampshire, England), 2010.
PERIODICALS
Afterimage, January-February, 2007, Ilana Swerdlin, review of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, p. 41.
Choice, August, 2009, review of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, p. 2364; May, 2011, N.A. Baker, review of Newsgames: Journalism at Play, p. 1682.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Paul Stenis, review of Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, p. 98.
Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, February, 2014, Janet M. Harkin, review of Newsgames, p. 181.
Publishers Weekly, June 13, 2016, review of Play Anything, p. 87.
Reference & Research Book News, October, 2011, review of How to Do Things with Videogames; June, 2012, review of Alien Phenomenology; or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (September 13, 2016), Julie Beck, author interview.
Digital Culture and Education, http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/ (December 15, 2012), Dan Golding, review of How to Do Things with Videogames.
Entertainment Software Association Web site, http://www.theesa.com/ (March 10, 2017), author interview.
Ian Bogost Home Page, http://bogost.com (March 10, 2017).
Ivan Allen College Web site, http://www.iac.gatech.edu/ (March 10, 2017), author profile.
London Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (September 18, 2016), author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, http://lareviewofbooks.org/ (November 19, 2013), Kate Marshall, review of Alien Phenomenology.
New Orleans Review, http://www.neworleansreview.org/ (March 10, 2017), review of Alien Phenomenology.
Roger Whitson Home Page, http://www.rogerwhitson.net/ (April 27, 2012), review of Alien Phenomenology.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (September 1, 2016), Alan Levinovitz, review of Play Anything.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (October 28, 2016), David Z. Morris, review of Play Anything.*
LC control no.: n 2005077139
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3602.O429
Personal name heading:
Bogost, Ian
Birth date: 19761230
Found in: Unit operations, 2006: CIP t.p. (Ian Bogost)
Newsgames, 2010: ECIP t.p. (Ian Bogost) data view
(videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as
an author and entrepreneur; professor at Georgia Tech, a
founding partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame
studio), and, a board member at Open Texture (an
educational publisher)
How to talk about videogames, 2015: E-CIP t.p. (Ian Bogost)
data view (b. Dec. 30, 1976)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic.
He is author or co-author of ten books:
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Newsgames: Journalism at Play
How To Do Things with Videogames
Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living With Apple
How To Talk About Videogames
and Play Anything
Bogost is also the co-editor of the Platform Studies book series at MIT Press, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury.
Bogost’s videogames about <
His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 IndieCade Festival.
Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He lives in Atlanta.
Contact
I’m always happy to hear from you. Some tips before contacting me:
Usually the best way to reach me is by email.
I enjoy giving interviews or opinions to the press, but if you’re a journalist on deadline please send me specific questions so I can help you.
I am available for consulting and speaking engagements. Feel free to contact me for more information, but please don’t send me unsolicited game or product ideas.
I get a lot of requests, so please forgive me if I can’t respond.
All that said, here’s how to reach me:
Ian Bogost
Georgia Institute of Technology
Technology Square Research Building
85 Fifth Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30308-1030
+1 (404) 894-1160
ibogost@gatech.edu
@ibogost
Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Professor
Dr. Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing. He also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following a career in software and videogame development, he joined the School of Literature, Media, and Communication in 2004. Bogost is the author or co-author of ten books: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press, 2006), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007), How To Do Things With Videogames (Minnesota, 2011), Alien Phenomenology, or What it's Like To Be a Thing (Minnesota, 2012), Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2008), Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press, 2010), 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2012), The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living With Apple (Minnesota, 2015), How to Talk About Videogames (Minnesota, 2015), and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (Basic Books, 2016). He is also co-series editor of the Platform Studies book series at MIT Press, co-series editor of the Object Lessons series at The Atlantic and Bloomsbury.
Bogost’s videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 IndieCade Festival.
CV: http://bogost.com/downloads/I.%20Bogost%20CV.pdf
Ian Bogost
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ian Bogost
Ibogost joystick color 2.jpg
Bogost with an Atari VCS joystick
Occupation Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, co-founder of Persuasive Games
Website www.bogost.com
Ian Bogost is an American philosopher and video game designer. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.[1]
He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames as well as the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost also released Cow Clicker, a satire and critique of the influx of social network games. His game, A Slow Year, won two awards, Vanguard and Virtuoso, at IndieCade 2010.[2]
Contents
1 Education
2 Professional career
3 Honors and awards
4 Games
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 External links
Education
Bogost received his bachelor's in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California in 1998. He then went on to get his masters in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2001, and received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2004.[3]
Professional career
In 2008, Bogost became an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2010, he was appointed Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media, a position he held until 2012. In 2011, Bogost became a Professor of Digital Media and an Adjunct Professor of Interactive Computing. In 2012, he was named the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and a Professor of Interactive Computing, both positions he still holds. With Christopher Schaberg, he is co-editor of the series Object Lessons from Bloomsbury Publishing.
His Alien Phenomenology or What It's Like to be a Thing (U of Minnesota P, 2012) critiques aspects of Bruno Latour's Actor-network theory.[4]
Bogost was also a Founding Partner of Persuasive Games LLC Atlanta, GA, and Persuasive Games Latin America SA. He is currently the Chief Designer for Persuasive Games LLC Atlanta, GA.
Honors and awards
TIME Magazine Best 50 Websites 2012, for persuasivegames.org
Winner, Vanguard & Virtuoso Awards, Indiecade Festival 2010 (for A Slow Year)
Finalist, Indiecade Festival 2010 (for A Slow Year)
ELearners.com Mindshare Awards, first place, gaming category, for website bogost.com, 2010
Finalist, Independent Game Festival 2010, Nuovo category
Games
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Bogost has designed and developed a variety of video games since 2003, among which are:
Game Release Notes
Simony[5] 2012 Released as both an iOS game and an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville
A Slow Year: Game Poems[6] 2010
Cow Clicker[7] 2010
Guru Meditation[8] 2009 Also released for Atari VCS as a limited edition[9]
Fatworld 2007
Cruel 2 B Kind[10] 2006 Concept and Design w/ Jane McGonigal[11]
Jetset: A Game for Airports[12] 2006
The Howard Dean for Iowa Game[13] 2003 Concept and Design w/ Gonzalo Frasca[14]
Bibliography
The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture. Seven Stories Press. 2015. ISBN 1609806395. (anthology, edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson) (Bogost contributed the article "The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird")[15]
How to Talk about Videogames. University Of Minnesota Press. 2015. ISBN 0816699119.
Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing. University Of Minnesota Press. 2012. ISBN 0816678979.
How to Do Things with Videogames. University Of Minnesota Press. 2011. ISBN 0816676461.
A Slow Year: Game Poems. Open Texture. 2010. ISBN 1933900164.
Newsgames: Journalism at Play. MIT Press. 2010. ISBN 0262014874.
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. MIT Press. 2009. ISBN 026201257X. 2nd edition (with Nick Montfort)
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press. 2007. ISBN 0262026147.
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT Press. 2006. ISBN 026202599X.
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, where he writes regularly about technology and popular culture.
Q&A with Ian Bogost
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) recently interviewed Ian Bogost, Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, to gather his insights on video games. Bogost’s latest book, “How to Talk about Videogames,” explores the medium’s unique storytelling ability and examines game critique as both serious cultural currency and self-parody.
Thanks for speaking with us, Ian. Could you introduce yourself and your work?
ianI’m an author and game designer, and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I’ve authored or co-authored a bunch of books on games, computing and culture, including “Persuasive Games,” “Racing the Beam,” “How to Do Things With Videogames,” and the new follow-up to that book, “How to Talk About Videogames,” which has just been published. I’m also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where I write on technology, business and culture. As a game designer, I’m known for my supposedly serious games work at Persuasive Games, and my independent work on titles like the IndieCade-winning A Slow Year and the infamous Cow Clicker.
You’ve been involved in the game industry for quite some time. How did you first become interested in working with video games?
I didn’t. Some people have these stories about how they always knew they wanted to work in games, they’d been designing games since a young age, they’d been playing them with fervor and relish on tabletops and computers and consoles. I wasn’t like that. I played games, sure, and I tried my hand at making them early, too. But my fundamental interest was some combination of the arts and computing. I didn’t know it at the time, at least not in those terms. But I was interested in the fine arts, in painting, in literature, in philosophy, and then also in computing. Those of us who grew up <
What is it about your day-to-day job that you enjoy?
I have a weird job, or even, a lot of jobs. I teach, I write, I edit, I code, I consult, I speak. But I think the thread that runs through all of these to produce excitement on a day-to-day basis is the sense that we haven’t discovered everything there is to know about the world. I don’t mean that in a disruptive innovation, hail all novelty, damn the torpedoes, into the future sort of way. Most often I’m looking back, or looking down at all the things we don’t notice or notice only in passing. So, care and attention to detail and respect and wonder for the world. Nothing that has anything to do with technology or games, actually.
Where do you see video games in 10 years? What broader applications across society can we expect in games’ future?
I’ve spent the vast majority of my career advocating for broader applications of games. In education, advertising, business, politics, journalism. In my 2011 book “How to Do Things With Videogames,” I argued that the real maturation of games comes not from the numbers of players or the quantity of dollars-worth of sales, <
What trend, either in the industry or in creative applications of game technology, do you think people should pay more attention to?
The most important thing that creators, players, and critics of games can do is to care deeply about many other things that have nothing to do with games. It doesn’t even matter what it is. Knitting or car racing or woodworking or small-batch spirits or historical preservation or soccer or German Enlightenment philosophy or cinema or gardening or anything else. And ideally many things. And not just your own, either. The gravest worry I have about games writ large is that we are too <
OK, now a fun one. What is your favorite video game and why?
Pac-Man was the first game I really loved. As a kid, there was just something about piloting that circle around, amid the din of the arcade. It was so different from Donkey Kong, which felt awkward, bumbling, like piloting the world’s dumbest robot. Later: Lode Runner, Turbo, Mario Bros. (ordinary and Super), Rygar. Rygar! What was even going on in Rygar? <
Games designer Ian Bogost: ‘Play is in everything’
The video-game theorist has turned his attention to play in the real world, and how it can improve our lives
Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an Atlantic contributing editor, Ian Bogost is one of the foremost writers on gaming culture – though he’s probably best known for the Facebook game Cow Clicker, which, despite being a satire, became a viral hit. In his new book, Play Anything, Bogost takes his expertise away from the screen and into the real world, arguing that in the 21st century we’ve lost track of what it really means to “play”.
You’ve become known – as you put it – as the “Cow Clicker guy”. But now you’ve written a book warning against the dangers of indulging in such aimless fun…
In some ways the Cow Clicker thing is an example of the kind of crisis that I hope the book offers a little bit of a help in addressing: that feeling of being stuck inside an ironic orientation to the world. It made me stop and say: OK, what is it about games that might actually be useful and good?
One of the moments for me as an individual is realising that maybe the most interesting thing about games is not the “games” part; it’s the way that they allow an excuse for setting up and respecting these arbitrary limitations, and working with them.
The call to turn anything into play could be taken as a call for gamification – the practice of giving rewards such as points and prizes as a motivation for performing simple tasks. But you’re actually scathing about gamification. Were you worried you might be taken the wrong way?
It is a subtle problem, and of course subtlety is not what we deal in when we talk about ideas generally, and especially when we talk about gamification. This is a lesson I learned over many years: games are a kind of play. But actually, play is in everything.
We know that games are powerful and keep people’s attention. They become obsessed, maybe unhealthily obsessed, with them, and we want that obsession in our lives, in many different ways. But not so you can transform the boring into the extraordinary. Take your job: now you’re getting points for operating your desk properly, and suddenly it’s enjoyable? That’s not really the answer.
<
Ian Bogost
Did gamification get anything right?
We were on the right track when we pursued looking into this domain that’s called “games” for something to extract and bring to errands, or bring to home life, or bring to work. That was not a mistaken idea, but you know, maybe the way we’ve been going about it hasn’t produced the result we desire.
It’s not like you take this miserable world and then you add this sugar-coating, this layer of games atop it. It’s a way of taking what you’re already doing and paying a different kind of attention to it.
Why is now the right time for this book? Play is old, and none of your advice explicitly relates to video games. One of the key examples in your book is your daughter playing the game of “don’t step on the cracks” as you lead her around a shopping mall.
We’ve been in a series of socioeconomic moments for some time now that are uncomfortable, that we need resolution for. One of the touch points in the book is Barry Schwartz’s idea of the paradox of choice: the enormous surplus of capitalism, and the fact that we have all these choices and it puts the burden of decision on the chooser, who then is of course doomed to be disappointed, and then to blame him or herself for their disappointment.
It was 2004 when Schwartz’s book was published, and even then we had been living with that condition for a long time. Now we’re adopting coping mechanisms: the rise of asceticism, this Marie Kondo [bestselling author of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up] stuff: “I’m going to throw away all my stuff, I’m going to move into a tiny house, I’m going to live in a dumpster, I’m going to get rid of all my possessions, I’m going to live on a dollar a day.”
Some of those responses have been tied to the rise of technology culture. You now don’t have to go anywhere in order to experience the existential dread of a thousand shampoos at the grocery shop. I open up my computer or my mobile phone and there are just as many different ideas to contend with.
Bogost speaking at the Wired by Design retreat at Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, 2014.
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Bogost speaking at the Wired by Design retreat at Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, 2014. Photograph: Lester Cohen/Getty Images for Wired
Is there a risk that some of the advice could become self-help for the already well-off? You discuss your elaborate ritual for making coffee in the morning as a form of play, but it’s a very expensive form of play, involving a lot of specialist tools.
Right, there is this risk. But I think the book goes behind the kind of first-world problem level: the quantity, the size, the financial investment, these are incidental features from the perspective of play. The argument is that you can take anything and you can play with it.
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If you look at these day-to-day things, part of it is rhythmisation – you get up in the morning, and you do the same thing over and over again, you make your tea, or your coffee, and the boredom of that sameness, you have to face that boredom and make it meaningful again. That’s not an income balance problem, that’s something that affects everyone equally.
David Foster Wallace hovers throughout this book, both positively and negatively. He wrote a famous essay on irony, where he suggested that the answer was a sort of universal empathy. You vociferously disagree with that, but it still feels like he is your icon of irony.
It was The Pale King that did it. I just thought: “Wow, this book is really getting at some of the same ideas that I’m interested in.” The problem of repetition, of boredom, trying to make the day-to-day palatable while also recognising that you yourself are only a small component of a much larger social and cosmic system. I just thought it was a lovely project.
I mean, if anything, one of the interesting things about the conversation about irony that we’ve been having in popular discourse over the past five to 10 years is how few people cite Wallace as an example. Even though he wrote this fairly influential essay that for a long time was one of the great touchstones.
Wallace lays out the problem in such a clear way, and then gets it wrong, in such an equally clear way. The answers in The Pale King are better answers for me than the answers in his irony essay, which is this kind of dream of perfect empathy. “I’ll just imagine that this is a reasonable world for me to live in.” The cognitive burden of that act can’t be underestimated.
Aside from Wallace, the other stars are your daughter and your lawn. Your daughter, because of the inspiration she provided walking through that mall, and your lawn because of your frustrations with trying to keep it lush and alive in Georgia – and your attempts to see the play in that, too. Was it a personal book?
The book is the process of me coming to terms with the advice that I’m giving. If you take my advice in the book and accept the invitation to “play anything”, then the first thing you have to do is look around yourself.
This is not a dream for the future, this isn’t setting goals for some vacation or other life, this is a matter of your actual life today, and tomorrow, and next week. I hope those examples help show that it doesn’t matter what it is, there’s always something possible, but sometimes we have to look harder to find it.
Play Anything by Ian Bogost is published by Basic Books (US) $26.99. Click here to buy it for £17.99
How to Use Fun to Find Meaning in Life
Ian Bogost's book "Play Anything" advises looking outside yourself to see the world as it really is.
Play Anything by Ian Bogost
Basic Books / Gregory Miller / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic
Julie Beck Sep 13, 2016 Technology
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Ian Bogost is really into things. He’s been my colleague for the three years I’ve worked at The Atlantic, and in that time, there have been a lot of chats in our work Slack-room about video games and Soylent and Tab and typewriters and the new iPhone’s missing headphone jack. He also edits Object Lessons, a series that goes super in-depth on the history and meaning of things, like cardigans and meatballs.
So it’s not surprising to those who know him that his newest book, Play Anything, is mostly about stuff, all the stuff that makes up the world, from the duct tape at Walmart with the boys of One Direction printed on it to his lawnmower. (He talks about his lawnmower a lot.) By paying attention to this stuff instead of just dismissing it, we can find meaning, he says.
Rather than turning ever more and more inward, if we get out of our heads and pay attention to the abundance of stuff in the world, we learn things and make discoveries. According to Bogost, that’s what it means to play with things. (This applies to intangible things, too, like relationships or ideas.) In this way, play, he says, is a defense against irony and meaninglessness.
“This demand to make something wholly from nothing, by sheer force of will,” is eating away at us, he writes. Instead, he suggests that “you accept that meaning can come from outside of you rather than from within. Perhaps, even, that it must.”
I spoke with Bogost about what fun and play mean for adults, and how taking the world as it is instead of struggling against it can provide some relief. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.
Julie Beck: I see now why you wanted me to be the one to interview you about this book, because you start from the premise that the universe is indifferent and life is an unending hellscape of disappointment and we have to find a way to get through it anyway! And that is 100 percent my thing.
Ian Bogost: [Laughs]
Beck: You really zero in on a big problem in our culture: [The belief that] you are supposed to be able to somehow generate everything you need to be happy and content from within yourself.
Bogost: It’s interesting because it’s a very secular worldview. It’s not that you’re looking to God, and it's also not that you're looking to some other source of outside meaning, and we have those sources—our families or our jobs. But the modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It’s not like “This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family.” We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we’re malcontent.
Beck: The answer to every dissatisfaction always seems to be to just work more on yourself, or take better care of yourself. Practice gratitude, or exercise more, or take more baths. Just change how you feel. If you’re lonely, just figure out how to enjoy being alone more! If you can’t have the things you want, just don't want those things anymore!
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Bogost: We’re so trained to think of life that way, that it circles around us as individuals. Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say “What if I took the world at face value?” and then ask “What can I do with what is given?” it’s an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.
Beck: The way you define “fun” and “play” in the book aren’t the ways that most people would define them off the top of their heads. Can you explain what you mean by them?
Bogost: I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there’s play in a mechanism. For example, there’s some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.
Beck: Play as a noun rather than a verb?
Bogost: That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it. Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do. But if you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.
“For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.”
Beck: Quick sidebar: What do you think of the phrase "Work hard, play hard?"
Bogost: Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that’s the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time. Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?
Beck: It usually means drink.
Bogost: Right, it means people get totally drunk and go do foolish things. I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides. You can experience play at work, not because you’re messing around or wasting time or something, but because you’re looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?
Beck: Then can you define fun?
Bogost: The problem with fun is we really don’t know what fun means at all. If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say “Well what do you mean?” it’s almost impossible to answer. Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, “How was your evening?” “Oh it was fun.”
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life. Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new. When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether. Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts. When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.
Beck: So can it be both novel and horrible? Can a fresh horror be fun?
Bogost: Fun doesn’t have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people. Because we're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure. A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
But if you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there’s a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle. With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, “Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered.” That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.
There's a whole bunch of stuff about mowing the lawn in the book. It’s an example I love because it’s the kind of thing that no one would intuitively call a fun experience, but then when you do it you discover something you haven’t seen before. Maybe this way of using my equipment will produce better results, or when the weather's like this I have to respond in that way. It's almost like, the more you’re drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing—the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be. It wasn’t you who had to come up with that meaning. It was given to you by the world. You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
Beck: A lot of times you do see articles where people are complaining that adults don’t play anymore. And it’s weird because often those arguments are like, “Remember when you used to run around your backyard and pretend to be a princess or a cowboy? Isn’t it so awful that you don't do that anymore, and you’ve lost that creativity and freedom?” But I don't want to run around and pretend to be a princess. I'm not sad that I don't do that anymore. So what does play mean for adults? I mean, some adults LARP. But other than LARPing, how do we play?
Bogost: I think what you’re honing in on is that you don't want to be told, “Hey, do whatever you want.” That's what we think of when we think of play. It’s the thing where you get to do whatever you come up with in your own mind, all bets are off, there's no boundaries. But even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. “Oh, we’re gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners,” or whatever. The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
“The playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It’s rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.”
<> Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. <
Beck: So you do stuff and then you sit back and see what happens.
Bogost: What happens and then what do you learn? Once you turn that corner it’s not even necessary to say “I’m playing,” the verb isn’t important. The playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It’s rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.
Beck: You mention this in the book, how people talk about making things fun, or gamifying things, as a way to make shitty tasks less shitty. So it’s just in service of doing more work.
Bogost: I definitely think that's one of the ways people have misused these notions of play and fun. We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there’s not fun or play to be found in the work itself. We have to always spread sugar on top of it in order that we can tolerate swallowing the things we’re supposed to do, which is an incredibly depressing way of thinking about living your life. Not just that your work or your home life would be so miserable that you have to slather sugar on it, but then the sugar is all you’re tasting. If that's the only way that I'm finding meaning, then we have this sort of mental diabetes that we're descending into.
Beck: I listen to podcasts while I clean, or I watch Netflix while I'm folding my laundry. Am I doing it wrong?
Bogost: Well, maybe, maybe not. Everyone is different. But I think that is a good example of an opportunity to stop and say, “What would it be like if I took this thing for what it is rather than trying to slather that Mary Poppins sugar on top of it?” It’s not so much that there's some sort of Protestant work ethic that dictates that you must not watch Netflix while folding your laundry, but rather that the experience of folding laundry also has its own pleasure. That might just be like “Oh I know the size and shape of these garments and I can get better at folding them into neat piles.” Or the individual packing of the dishes into the dishwasher such that they are efficiently inserted but yet not so full that they don’t clean properly. These are dumb things. They're silly things. We think they couldn’t possibly be as interesting as listening to that interview on the podcast, or watching Netflix. Until you realize that actually a lot of the supposedly serious and meaningful and worthwhile content on the podcast or on the television is no more or less meaningful than the clothes in the laundry basket or the dishes in the sink. It's more a matter of the attention you’re willing to bring to them, where you’re willing to allow meaning and pleasure and the light to escape.
It’s not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful. And once you get yourself on that path where you're willing to find something delightful in laundry and in dishwashers, it means that <
Beck: Nothing is more fun than television!
Bogost: I kind of agree.
Beck: I get it in terms of like objects, but a lot of people’s sadness comes from more ephemeral things. They want to make more friends, or they’re dating and it sucks. How do you “play” with these intangible things?
Bogost: It feels gross to talk about people with the same kinds of language that we talk about things with, but you and me and everyone, there are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don’t possess, habits we have that are good or bad. Normally if you're dating, you’re looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, “Well, swipe left on that, let’s just keep looking.” In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It’s just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change. My lawnmower can’t change in the way that my son can or that I can. But the idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.
“This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn’t mean that you get what you want.”
I'll just give you one example. This is going to sound rudimentary. My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn’t see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn’t. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course. But there are also many things she can’t stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities, and it's just much easier for me to do the chores that I can find tolerable, that bring me bizarre pleasure. Like the dishwasher, or whatever it is.
It’s allowing those properties of individuals to structure your relationship with them. This produces a greater depth of understanding and empathy. There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.
I think fundamentally this honesty, this willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn’t mean that you get what you want. Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals. The question becomes not how can I change someone, or how can I change myself? But what about me doesn't change? What is true about someone else's nature? How can I work within those limits, how can I respect them, how can I understand them? Which doesn’t mean being happy about it. Then I'm not worried so much about “maybe this time will be different.” No, it won't be.
Beck: It never will be. There's this quote from this Jesse Ball book, and I definitely quoted it when I interviewed Heather Havrilesky, so sorry for double dipping, but I seriously think about it all the time. It says:
I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.
I think about this in terms of relationships, yes, but also in terms of trying to write a story: You try to find what exists and you try to see what it is. Even though I think about that all the time, I’m really bad at doing it.
Bogost: It’s hard because we have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you’re quite small? Not in a powerless way, but there’s so much that is not you. There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.
Part of the reason is that the universe is not particularly concerned with you. We don’t like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force. I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility. We’re stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don’t have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say “I did my best given the circumstances.” It releases you from the burden of thinking of all the infinity of things that you could have done or all the ways the world could be different.
Beck: The thing I appreciate about this idea is that it's sort of in the middle of two weird tendencies that humans have. One is what we've been talking about this whole time, which is you just struggle so hard to try to make things happen the way you want them to and obviously that's never going to work. But then the other side of that, and this tends to be sometimes a more religious thing, is, “Oh you should just accept what is handed to you or just accept that that is the plan of the universe.” And you’re sort of saying, you can do what you can with what you have, but you're not going to change the whole world with it.
Bogost: Yeah, there's some kind of happy medium here. There’s some sort of meeting point, and to me that meeting point is much closer to the world than it is to you. The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited. So it’s helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that’s quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable. It’s a lot like the stupid example of lawnmowing, because no one wakes up and says, “Yay I get to mow the lawn!” But if I can find meaning there, then there’s nowhere I can’t find meaning.
It’s not that we’re out of control. It’s not fatalistic. It’s not something where the thing that I am meant to do will be given to me. God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today. But<< if you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you’re able to find them in more places.>> To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.
We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow. But I think for everyone, nowadays in particular, it becomes harder and harder to deal with that day-to-day, and so l<
Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
Paul Stenis
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p98.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. Basic. Sept. 2016.288p. notes, index. ISBN 9780465051724. $26.99. PHIL
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What is play? How do you define fun? Bogost (Ivan Allen Coll. Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, Georgia Inst, of Technology; How To Talk About Videogames) has poured a lot of thought and work into answering those questions. His book doesn't argue for gamifying your life; it explores the conditions necessary for play and fun and convinces us to change how we think about these concepts. Bogost analyzes the everyday--lawn maintenance, golf, navigating a crowded shopping mall--and debunks long-held notions of pleasure. He takes on ideas from high and low culture, challenging in one breath the works of novelist David Foster Wallace and German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and in the next taking down the "spoonful of sugar" from the musical Mary Poppins. Along the way, he examines play in the contexts of creativity, asceticism, boredom, pleasure, and novelty, and in the process challenges readers to rethink its applications. Perhaps Bogost's most trenchant move is pinpointing irony as fun's most powerful archenemy. VERDICT An essential read for those seeking to understand how a new idea of play can be positive for our lives.--Paul Stenis, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stenis, Paul. "Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 98+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805048&it=r&asid=9c64dfe93bb2504d361081f8e08d3152. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805048
Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
263.24 (June 13, 2016): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
Ian Bogost. Basic, $26.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0465-05172-4
It's difficult to imagine a book that takes on David Foster Wallace, Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice), Mary Poppins, and a host of philosophers under one premise. Yet Bogost (How to Talk About Videogames), professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at a video games company, has done so, with moderate success, while dissecting the notion of play. He defines playgrounds as "structures we discover," fun as "the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation," and play as "carefully and deliberately working with the materials one finds in a situation." Irony, the book's principal antagonist, is described as a "fundamental affliction of contemporary life." Bogost doesn't fully deliver on his grand promise to offer "a perspective on how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude." Statements like "boredom is the secret to releasing pleasure" and "fun comes from wretchedness" are challenging to comprehend, much less credit. The book is abstract, interesting, complicated, confusing, and baffling, sometimes all at once. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games." Publishers Weekly, 13 June 2016, p. 87. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458871753&it=r&asid=464db51ef5177450877a8c414accc778. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458871753
Bogost, Ian, Ferrari, Simon and Schweizer, Bobby, Newsgames: Journalism at Play
Janet M. Harkin
.150 (Feb. 2014): p181.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.uq.edu.au/mia/
Bogost, Ian, Ferrari, Simon and Schweizer, Bobby, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, ISBN 9 7802 6201 4878, 248 pp., A$38.95. Distributor: Footprint Books.
Newsgames: Journalism at Play explores the potential to harness a new medium for journalism to provide a richer experience than offered by traditional media, including web publication. Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer (p. 6) maintain the journalistic practices that characterised print media were transported to broadcast and online platforms. Newsgames, they argue, are different, based on computer software and combining features of both video games and journalism rather than presenting a digitised version of print news.
Definitions here are important. Bogost et al. (p. 180) define journalism as a practice in which 'research combines with a devotion to the public interest, producing materials that help citizens make choices about their private lives and their communities'. The term 'newsgames' is not to be confused with 'gamification', which ProPublica news application developer Sisi Wei (2013) explains refers to the inclusion of gamelike elements in something that is not a game.
The strengths of Newsgames are its explanation of game design and the overview of the broad range of applications considered 'newsgames', from web-based simulations such as Cutthroat Capitalism to playable infographic Budget Hero and current events game Super Obama World, based on old favourite Super Mario Bros.
Less convincing is the inclusion of 'puzzle newsgames', and the argument that games with in-game news sources, such as the radio in Grand Theft Auto, educate players about how to become a good journalist or the importance of journalism to a community.
Bogost et al. point out that print news has a tradition of including crosswords and puzzles for reader entertainment. But to imply puzzles are 'news' by including them at the intersection of journalism and video games, even with their broad definition of journalism, is questionable. The authors acknowledge that a web-based game offers a limited version of a situation that can be explored more fully in an article, describing pirate simulation Cutthroat Capitalism, for example, as lacking the subtleties of Wired's associated print article (p. 5). They offer the game as proof that 'videogames can do good journalism' (p. 5), as a news medium and supplement to traditional formats. 'Can' is important in this context. Modal verbs such as 'can' and 'might' are frequent in Newsgames, and that is an issue.
Newsgames' speculation is interesting, but I expected empirical evidence--for example, on the effectiveness of newsgames in simulating news production for journalism students. In this I was disappointed. However, the authors' appraisal of the field is grounded in reality, pointing out that many early attempts to include editorial games on news platforms, such as the New York Times' trial run with games such as Food Import Folly, were not sustained (p. 176).
Bogost was keynote speaker at the 10th 'Games for Change' conference in New York in June, an event that revealed how fast the field is evolving. Despite the rapid expansion of games since Newsgames was first published, its exploration of basic game design remains a valuable addition to the field, useful for anyone interested in exploring newsgames' potential for journalism.
--Janet M. Harkin, Film, Media and Communications, Monash University
Harkin, Janet M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harkin, Janet M. "Bogost, Ian, Ferrari, Simon and Schweizer, Bobby, Newsgames: Journalism at Play." Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, Feb. 2014, p. 181+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA363973230&it=r&asid=b9e5fddf86cbb10eaaab6f612e851cd7. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A363973230
Alien phenomenology, or what it's like to be a thing
27.3 (June 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9780816678983
Alien phenomenology, or what it's like to be a thing.
Bogost, Ian.
U. of Minnesota Press
166 pages
$19.95
Posthumanities; 20
BD331
Bogost (digital media, Georgia Institute of Technology) argues for new ways of appreciating "what it's like to be a thing" with his reading of Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology (OOO). OOO flattens the age-old hierarchy of subject/object and does not presume anything special about humans as beings or their interactions with other objects. Bogost speculates on the rich variety of beings revealed when the epistemological tide of human access recedes and how to articulate something of the inner life of things. Drawing on his background as video-game designer, Bogost explains how philosophers can (and why they should) make things that do philosophy. In the end, Bogost addresses some objections to OOO. (A[c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Alien phenomenology, or what it's like to be a thing." Reference & Research Book News, June 2012. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA291873064&it=r&asid=f2f8a2576d9707fb00c735e6a7bf1854. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A291873064
How to do things with videogames
26.5 (Oct. 2011):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
9780816676477
How to do things with videogames.
Bogost, Ian.
U. of Minnesota Press
2011
180 pages
$18.95
Paperback
Electronic mediations; v.38
GV1469
Taking the position that computers and technology are tools that will neither save nor destroy civilization, Boost (digital media, Georgia Institute of Technology), explores video games as a modern cultural medium. Suggesting that content is not as inessential as McLuhan had claimed, and that the message and the medium are not necessarily one and the same, Bogost uses lots of examples from the spectrum of video games and video game history to show the art and playfulness in video games, and how games can be used for many purposes including relaxation, titillation, as advertising and branding, in work, in politics, and in many other creative and sometimes surprising ways.
([c]2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How to do things with videogames." Reference & Research Book News, Oct. 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA268249218&it=r&asid=1a1abc573978687179221355e3dabee8. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A268249218
Bogost, Ian. Newsgames: journalism at play
N.A. Baker
48.9 (May 2011): p1682.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
48-4908
GV1469
2010-11990 CIP
Bogost, Ian. Newsgames: journalism at play, by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer. MIT, 2010. 235p bibl index afp ISBN 9780262014878, $24.95
Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) introduces the concept of "newsgames"--an emergent form of work in which journalism and videogames exist in symbiosis. Together with Ferrari and Schweizer (both doctoral students at Georgia Tech), the author first creates a typology for such journalism/videogames. For example, they classify current events newsgames into sub-facets such as editorial games (the digital equivalent of opinion pieces and editorial cartoons), tabloid games (brash digital opinions), and reportage (which aims for polish and apparent objectivity). Subsequent chapters take up infographic newsgames, which are predicated on data visualization and interactivity; documentary newsgames, which approximate documentary filmmaking in their scale; puzzle newsgames; literacy newsgames, which reflect on journalism itself; and community newsgames. Including myriad references to prior gamestudies scholarship, this book suggests that to retain financial and cultural solvency, journalism needs to stop merely translating "old media" into digital forms and instead embrace videogames. The arguments are cogent and the numerous examples of newsgames are illustrative. Unfortunately, the concluding call to action for journalists is all too brief and general in its recommendations. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.--N. A. Baker, Earlham College
Baker, N.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baker, N.A. "Bogost, Ian. Newsgames: journalism at play." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2011, p. 1682. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA255989493&it=r&asid=9444ab5e044d11c6f383b1b670f821ee. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A255989493
UNIT OPERATIONS: AN APPROACH TO VIDEOGAME CRITICISM
Ilana Swerdlin
34.4 (January-February 2007): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Visual Studies Workshop
http://www.vsw.org/ai/
UNIT OPERATIONS: AN APPROACH TO VIDEOGAME CRITICISM by Ian Bogost. MIT Press/243 pp./$35.00 (hb)
Though not a gamer myself, the evergrowing culture surrounding videogames drew me to this book. I expected Unit Operations to provide a visual criticism of the art of videogames; however, this book offers an educated look into the history on which gaming is built and a model of critique for the role videogames will play in the future.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Ian Bogost's approach to videogame culture in Unit Operations is certainly academic. Gamers posting reviews on the Internet found this voice to be exclusive, and almost paradoxical due to videogame's roots as a subculture entertainment. Bogost's claim from the beginning is to compare literary criticism to computation so it is no surprise he pulls his views from historical resources. He introduces the reader to the best of the philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, media theorists, and computer developers in a way that dissolves heady discussions and simplifies theory. Bogost touches on many subjects within Unit Operations, comparing ludology (the study of gaming) and narratology, unit operations and system operations, and the need for the humanities to intersect with science and technology at earlier stages than the finished product of the videogame--even suggesting the restructuring of university departments. Bogost believes in "... criticism's ability to vault videogames toward a status higher than entertainment alone" (xiv), and suggests that "videogames, like art of all kinds, has the power to influence and change human experience" (89).
Unit Operations crosses intellectual borders--especially in Bogost's range of examples in both high and low art forms: from The Sims to Charles Baudelaire and The Terminal (2004, by Steven Spielberg) to Marshall McLuhan. This book would make an ideal text for an introductory or interdisciplinary humanities course.
Swerdlin, Ilana
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Swerdlin, Ilana. "UNIT OPERATIONS: AN APPROACH TO VIDEOGAME CRITICISM." Afterimage, Jan.-Feb. 2007, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA158838896&it=r&asid=163824b3fbc2bdce7178d0a561637053. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A158838896
Montfort, Nick. Racing the beam: the Atari video computer system
A. Chen
46.12 (Aug. 2009): p2364.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
46-6853
TK6681
2008-29410 CIP
Montfort, Nick. Racing the beam: the Atari video computer system, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. MIT, 2009. 180p bibl index afp ISBN 9780262012577, $22.95
In this first of a new series of books ("Platform Studies") that examine the systems underlying computing, Montfort (digital media, MIT) and Bogost (literature, communication, and culture, Georgia Tech) provide a fascinating look at the Atari video computer system (also known as the Atari 2600) and six video game cartridges chosen for their significant contributions to video game design and development. Instead of trying to present a comprehensive historical overview of video game history such as Steven Kent's The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon (2001), Montfort and Bogost drill down on the Atari hardware and expose the technical limitations and allowances that drove game designers to innovate between 1977 and 1983. The authors concisely explain the various workarounds, concessions, and design decisions that ultimately influence modern video game design. The technical portions of the book are presented in an approachable manner and generally do not detract from the historical narrative. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** All levels of undergraduates and two-year technical program students in game design hardware and software development programs, researchers/faculty, and professionals/practitioners.--A. Chen, Cogswell Polytechnical College
Chen, A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chen, A. "Montfort, Nick. Racing the beam: the Atari video computer system." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2009, p. 2364. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA266634035&it=r&asid=5057f2748bf13e8f39c2208a5de1650a. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A266634035
How to Play Your Way to a Fun Life
302
44
26
Just don’t expect to enjoy everything all the time, says Ian Bogost in his new book, Play Anything.
By Alan Levinovitz
play anything review.
Game designer Ian Bogost’s new book is called Play Anything.
Coprid/Thinkstock
The real value of philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost’s new book, Play Anything, didn’t hit me until I made several failed attempts to write this review. Since the central theme is play, I felt compelled to offer readers something fun—to fashion what Bogost describes as a playground.
It did not go well.
My first inspiration was drawn from Bogost’s account of an artistic school known as Oulipo, which crafts its products according to arbitrary constraints. Using a constraint that found popularity through Oulipo, I would try to dash off a manuscript without using our most common symbol (as I am in this paragraph, starting with My) and wax rhapsodic about how imposing random limits is actually magical, to show how Bogost’s approach in Play Anything can transform boring forms of writing into fun!
Alas, I quickly found that I’m not as skilled at writing without the letter e as, say, the French writer Georges Perec, who managed to write an entire novel without the vowel—nor his intrepid translator Gilbert Adair, who gave us A Void, the English version of Perec’s La Disparition, while also sticking to the same constraint. Bogost uses their accomplishments as support for his convincing and counterintuitive claim that play isn’t about freedom from constraints but rather the opposite. “Play is an activity we associate with freedom, with being able to do whatever we want,” he writes. That’s a mistake, and it can lead to perpetual dissatisfaction because reality is fundamentally constrained. In fact, Bogost says freedom itself isn’t about freedom from constraints. True freedom, the freedom we experience in play, is not “an escape from imposed restrictions.” It’s “a practice of working within adopted constraints.” The result of this practice: fun.
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So if not Oulipo, what constraints could I adopt in this review? Maybe it would be better to focus less on myself and more on building a game for the reader. I contacted my editor and asked if we could turn the review into a contest, a classic game. Another compelling part of Bogost’s argument is that successful play happens when we take the mundane—work, chores, the daily commute, a typical book review—and “defamiliarize” it by willing ourselves to see the potential for meaningfulness and engagement that we hadn’t noticed before. Bogost describes the process of defamiliarization as creating a playground. We’ve all done this. Washing dishes becomes a race to finish each dish before the song that’s playing on your headphones. Your commute becomes an opportunity to hunt for hidden acronyms in license plates.
I had it! We’d make the review a game by offering prizes for the most liked comment on this review. There would be one rule: Comments could only use words from the review itself, and only as many times as they appeared here. Suddenly the whole review would be defamiliarized, the words transformed from mundane sentences to raw material for a competition. Perhaps there’d be another rule—that comments had to be written as sonnets, since Bogost provides detailed treatment of sonnets as another example of artificial constraints. Or haikus, since we live in the Twitter age. Play! Fun!
And then, while waiting for my editor’s response, it hit me. I was missing the central point of Play Anything. After all, Bogost is also the author of “Gamification is Bullshit.” He loves games, but he doesn’t want to turn everything into a game. To do so is to reject the constraints already built into the world, as if reality is deficient. But usually it’s we who are deficient in our ability to appreciate it: “A job is made fun not by turning it into a game, but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job.” Here I was, straining to turn work into play, to turn a book review into something else. Yet for Bogost, the key to play and fun is the ability to embrace a book review for what it is—to understand the restraints and respect them. My mistake was taking what he refers to as the Mary Poppins approach—the idea that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down—and applying it to life. Bullshit, says Bogost. A better way to make the medicine go down is to deeply appreciate its identity as medicine, its ability to cure you. Getting rid of the bitterness is a misguided attempt to create false freedom. But understanding that the bitterness comes from the active ingredient and embracing it will result in real freedom.
In rejecting the book review as book review, I was falling prey to what Bogost sees as a serious disease of modernity.
In rejecting the book review as book review, I was falling prey to what Bogost sees as a serious disease of modernity, dubbed “ironoia.” Like paranoia, ironoia is an attitude born of fear—fear that the things we encounter and the choices we make and the work we produce will be boring, or worthless, or tasteless, or immoral, that all of everything that is will, in the end, let us down. Book review? Boring! Who’d want to read my book review? The ironist’s response, like mine, is to hold the object of fear at a distance, through parody or transformation of its essence. Instead of a book review, an Oulipo exercise. Instead of reading a book review, entering a contest. Instead of commenting on the content of an article, comment on the act of commenting on an article. (I love you, Slate readers!)
Bogost learned firsthand about people’s extraordinary ability to have fun through embracing constraint when he designed a Facebook game called “Cow Clicker.” Meant as a parody of games like “FarmVille” and not something for anyone to actually play, “Cow Clicker” distilled social games to their essence and then poked fun at them by making the game intentionally boring. Click on a picture of a cow every six hours, get a point called a “click.” Invite friends to join your “pasture,” and each time they click, you get a click too. Pay for in-game currency (“mooney”) and you can buy more cows. It was like a first-person shooter with only one weapon, one door, and an endless stream of zombies, each one bleeding a little more than the last when you killed it.
To Bogost’s surprise, the game became “easily the most successful game [he] ever produced.” Tens of thousands of people played it. They sincerely appreciated his creation, meeting friends through “Cow Clicker,” having fun within constraints that had been created specifically as an object lesson about the predatory hollowness of social gaming.
As a result, Bogost came to further appreciate a fundamental philosophical truth that he emphasizes in Play Anything: Objects and experiences, in and of themselves, are shot through with potential meaning even when they are designed to be meaningless. Ironoiacs, fearing meaninglessness in the world (or thinking themselves superior to the world), attempt to create meaning by mocking the original intent of a given experience, game, or other endeavor. Yet that layer, says Bogost, is thin and egotistical—it can only sustain itself through ironoiacs’ embrace of their own ironic distance from whatever they’re mocking. More importantly, in doing this, the ironist is only really playing with his or herself. When you actually play a game, like the earnest Cow Clickers did, you don’t mock the rules—that’s what a spoilsport does. Nor, in most cases, do you invent your own rules—that’s the job of the game designer. To play a game properly is to recognize and respect the game’s constraints, and the result is fun.
I said earlier that defamiliarizing the world happens in the act of creating playgrounds. But create is a deceptive verb that suggests you are at the center of the act. In successful play, you simply discover or acknowledge the playground that’s already there. The fun that results, cautions Bogost, won’t necessarily make you happy. Fun and funny sound the same, but fun can happen without jokes or laughter. As anyone who has had fun playing a serious game of soccer or chess can tell you, fun isn’t the opposite of sadness or seriousness. Fun is instead the opposite of boredom, and play is attitude that produces it.
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When I began writing this review, I was trying to be playful according to my old preconceptions of play. But when I really listened to Bogost, I remembered that to play, we must “pursue a greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us.” Part of the reason I ignored lines like that one is that I, too, am afflicted by ironoia. Ironoaics are constitutionally allergic to self-help—it’s too earnest for them. My guess is that Bogost knows his target audience is filled with people like me, and he does his best to conceal the self-help or deliver it obliquely. But honestly, one of the book’s great virtues is the self-help. Reading it helped me to realize I didn’t need to treat self-help ironically, that the reason I wrote an entire essay mocking self-help was, in part, born of my inability to respect and appreciate self-help for what it is. Since I couldn’t play it, I ironized it instead.
Top Comment
A contest that the author will pick To make work fun would be quite the trick! To get the top comment He says, "write a sonnet" But we must compete in Limerick! More...
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So. At the very least, I can tell you that a great way to have fun with the job of writing a book review—to play while writing it—is by pursuing it earnestly and seriously as a book review. A humble, highly constrained genre. You tell people about the book. You tell them whether you think it’s worth reading. (Yes.) And then, instead of allowing your ego to ruin everything by trying to make it cool, you move on in search of the next playground.
Review of Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost
April 27, 2012 Roger Whitson 5 Comments
Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s Like to Be A Thing. Ian Bogost. U of Minnesota Press, 2012. pp. 168. $20. ISBN: 978-0816678983
My father’s dog died soon after I finished reading Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology. And I also found myself angry with Ian’s discussion of The Wire in his final chapter, the displacement of the seriousness of social realism with the battered-realism of Cake Boss and Good Eats. I don’t know how, but those two events seem tethered in my brain at the moment, because I feel that (for a number of reasons that I am not conscious of yet) Alien Phenomenology is a game-changer. Ian’s book represents a real turning point in object-oriented philosophy. Whereas Latour and his lists abound in several of the books published by Bryant, Harman, Bennett, and many of the other OOO-philosophers, their work has still been primarily about human philosophers. Ian’s book forced me to wonder: could an engine piston actually practice philosophy?
I say this as someone who talks to animals. When I carried one of my childhood cats into the vet for the last time to euthanize him in 2004 (he had been suffering from a number of increasingly intense strokes, was crying softly. And my mother was whispering to him “almost there, almost there”), I remember feeling guilty for having treated him as a child – for having, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words – oedipalized him. I don’t know if it was a case of Bennett’s strategic anthropomorphism or not, but I kept apologizing to him – over and over again. Even as I heard the news on Facebook from my father, I tried to understand what feelings Leo had for our family, what it was like to smell the scents he smelled everyday, how it felt to be petted. He was named after the Spartan king Leonidas – but wasn’t like him at all.
Cats, dogs, and animals are, of course, not the only thing Ian covers in his book – but the idea that both of my pets withdrew from me (yet also communicated with me) is at the heart of the work Ian does. When, in the last chapter, he critiques the brand of social realism espoused by The Wire and celebrates the “unseen stuff of cookery,” he opens up a strange world where our most cherished humanistic values are overturned in ways that seem flippant, even irresponsible. And yet there is a bizzare, and powerful, ethical stance underlying the book. Consider the following:
Midgrade dealer D’Angelo Barksdale, detective James McNulty, kingpin Avon Barksdale, police lieutenant Cedric Daniels, stevedore Frank Sobotka, mayoral Gus Haynes: these are the objects of concern for the drug scene. These are the actants that form the network of its operation. Yet despite the show’s rhetoric of inclusiveness and complexity, others are summarily ignored: the Maryland Transit Authority bus that trundles through the Broadway East neighborhood; the synthetic morphine derivative diacetylmorphine hydrochloride, which forms the type of heroin powder addicts freebase; Colt .45 (the firearm), and Colt 45 (the malt liquor).
I wasn’t prepared to go this far. The Wire is one of the best television shows of all time. Could Bogost be mocking us? I had heard the argument before. The chapter was part of a presentation that Bogost gave at the 2010 OOO symposium at Georgia Tech that I attended, and one of my colleagues was very disturbed that Bogost didn’t reinscribe the seriousness of The Wire at the end of his talk. He wanted at least a short gesture of “well, we all know that The Wire is important,” but Bogost never made that gesture. Instead, he replied that there should be other stuff that scholars focus on in addition to the tried and true categories of race, gender, and class.
I didn’t really get that until I found myself confronting all of the conflicting feelings that came out of reading Alien Phenomenology. Who cares about the phenomenology of a chicken wing, really? It seems like such a useless and meaningless thought. But, then again, I’m reminded of the fact that the category of the human is simply a category of privilege – something we use to ignore the fact that we’ll all be trash and refuse at some point in the future. We think we’re special, and philosophical discourse has closed itself off to thought by reinscribing that special status again and again – by submitting to the cultural theorists and saying “Yes, human beings are the most important part of narrative; yes, animals and plants don’t matter; yes, culture is here and nature is there.” The most powerful message to come out of the OOO movement is the idea that, no, actually, we aren’t special. The Wire is an essential drama for understanding the lives of people in Baltimore, but there are other dramas equally worth paying attention to – and it is a useful exercise to try and imagine just what it might mean to base an entire novel on the perceptions of a Bat, for example, or a philosophical system on whatever experiences (if we can call them that) happen to tree bark or air molecules.
This is not to say that I didn’t find some of the chapters more compelling than others. For example, I’m less convinced about Bogost’s theory of metaphorism – especially since the Blakean/Deleuzian in me is not all that interested in allegory or metaphor. I had a wonderful conversation with Bogost, Steven Shaviro, Ron Broglio, and Levi Bryant about just that distinction on Facebook. The conversation is Storified here. I also found his genealogy of the OOO movement at the beginning of the book rather stale, but that may be because I’ve read several OOO treatises – from The Speculative Turn to Tool Being to The Democracy of Objects. I wanted burgers and grass, bricks and blood vessels, rather than Plato and Kant. In fact, I skipped most of Bogost’s philosophical genealogy to get to his more interesting descriptions of objects and ecologies. I loved how these descriptions threw readers into alien worlds without philosophical anchors and forced them to create their own conceptual apparatuses.
Having said all that, the chapter on “Carpentry” is, perhaps, the most powerful philosophical statement I’ve read in many years. Philosophers and literary scholars love to gab. But Bogost, not surprisingly given his hybrid identity as both academic and game developer, sketches an alternate form of scholarly productivity – one that I believe is becoming increasingly vital in an age where people want to see material outcomes. His description of what a metaphysician should do, is particularly apt.
If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology. Just as one would likely not trust a doctor who had only read and written journal articles about medicine to explain the particular curiosities of one’s body, so one ought not trust a metaphysician who had only written books about the nature of the universe. As Don Ihde puts it, ‘Without entering into the doing, the basic thrust and import of phenomenology is likely to be misunderstood at the least or missed at the most.” Yet, ironically, Ihde is forced to explain such a sentiment in a book, just as I am here. What else can be done?
To respond, Bogost gives a needed shout out to Hugh Crawford’s class on building a wooden hut “as part of their study of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.” Crawford is probably one of the most innovative philosophic minds to flirt with the OOO movement (though he’d probably respond with suspicion to my claim). I did think that, given Bogost’s work at Georgia Tech, he should have included a mention of the innovative Writing and Communication Program and their multimodal WOVEN curriculum: especially the work of Brittain Fellows Kathryn Crowther (who has her students construct Steampunk artifacts as a way of engaging with the genre’s obsession surrounding mechanical tinkering) and Jesse Stommel (who asked his students to create zombie films to explore the horror film industry). I’m obviously biased, since I worked in the WC program for two years, but I firmly believe that OOO is a movement that often inspires people who work in very different areas and yet do not explicitly engage in the types of philosophical conversations that most OOO books highlight. Bogost fully admits this. “Real radicals,” he argues, “make things. Examples aren’t hard to find, and some even come from scholars who might [not?] be willing to call themselves philosophers.”
The question of what makes a philosopher philosophical is at the heart of this impressive short tome. If we can imagine cats looking at trees in wonder, we can surely call car tires philosophical. As a critic of 19th century British Literature, I’ll still read Dickens and cry every time Little Nell dies. But I also feel that I’ll be more attentive to the non-human entities that populate novels and films and all the little curiosity shops I encounter each day.
How to Be an Alien: Ian Bogost’s “Alien Phenomenology, or, What It's Like to Be a Thing”
By Kate Marshall
THERE’S A MOMENT in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, in the famous set piece “The Lives of Animals,” when Coetzee’s eponymous protagonist pauses to think through the problem of sympathetic understanding between beings who are not alike. To do this, she turns to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” — a 1974 essay she summarizes as a “denial that we can know what it is to be anything but one of ourselves.” To Nagel, she says, “a bat is a fundamentally alien creature, not perhaps as alien as Martian but certainly more alien than any fellow human being (particularly, I would guess, were that human being a fellow academic philosopher).” Part of Costello’s concern about the essay, whose desire to approach the likeness of being she otherwise appreciates, is its hierarchization of alienness, a gesture that she argues makes acts of sympathy more about the object than the subject. For Costello, this act of knowing what it’s like to be an alien, regardless of what might constitute that alien, is without limit.
Coetzee’s text provides one fictionalized example of a profound decentering of the human that has taken place in cultural and intellectual life. This decentering has as its goal the broader repositioning of the human within systems that are environmental, social, or material. What has emerged is an uneven but rich dialogue surrounding the category of the nonhuman, of which the animals of interest to Costello constitute one part. Amid the philosophical, literary, and critical turn to the nonhuman by writers and scholars interested in environments, animals, media, and systems are those loosely organized by the category of speculative realism: philosophers dedicated to the project of describing the world without connecting that ability to describe to the ultimate anthropocentric resource, the human mind (and for more on speculative realist thought, see Brian Kim Stefans’s reviews of Graham Harman’s Weird Realism and Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren.)
It’s squarely within this matrix that we find Ian Bogost’s punchy, provocative Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like To Be a Thing. Positioned as an extension of the nonhuman turn and a critique of its limitations, Alien Phenomenology diagnoses an anthropocentrism lurking underneath familiar arguments against it: environmental discourse focuses either too much on human survival or on life as a reference point, animal studies on human intersubjectivity. The discourse of something like posthumanism, Bogost suggests, “is not posthuman enough.” The nonhuman alternative he proposes lies in the creative attempt to apprehend the experiential world of objects, inclusive of but not restricted to our interactions with them.
But what does it mean to claim that objects have experience, and moreover, how can our meagerly human descriptive resources possibly capture it? Why would we want to? It’s not like things haven’t been having their say in recent years. Responding in part to the “Thing Theory” both described and enacted by Bill Brown, W. J. T. Mitchell begins his discussion of objects in his 2005 What Do Pictures Want? by invoking a broad cultural, aesthetic, and critical obsession with the most trivial of stuff, and asking why it is that “things” have suddenly become so interesting, and to so many. But while the disciplines to which Mitchell refers have provided an impressive attention to what might be broadly described as material culture, Bogost outlines two key problems with this general move. First, things in these accounts of culture imply too much materiality, and second, it does not describe philosophy’s state of affairs, which Bogost claims remains in “an era in which ‘things’ means ideas so often and stuff so seldom.” In material culture, objects are too material, and for philosophy, they’re not material enough: for Bogost, the philosophical legacy of Kant results in a restrictive understanding of objects, which exist for only the humans who encounter or perceive them. Bogost advocates throughout Alien Phenomenology for alternatives to idealism afforded by speculative realist and object-oriented approaches to philosophical thinking. One of the book’s narrative motivations involves Bogost’s role in the ascendancy of speculative thinking in the academy and more specifically the nuances between his approach to such thinking and philosopher Graham Harman’s.
Though qualified with terminological objections and alternatives, things and objects remain the largely interchangeable protagonists, and possess remarkable capaciousness in Bogost’s book. One of the book’s favorite stylistic moves is to list them in what Bogost winningly calls “Latour litanies,” and then to delight in the relations simultaneously implied and obscured by the sparse grammar of the list form. A list reveals many things about the objects within it. Take the following, arriving early in Alien Phenomenology:
Quarks, Harry Potter, keynote speeches, single-malt scotch, Land Rovers, lychee fruit, love affairs, dereferenced pointers, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, bozons, horticulturalists, Mozambique, Super Mario Bros.
This list/litany demonstrates the wide view of thingness underwriting its every evocation. (The objects can be material, abstract, intentional, and fictional, or, as Bogost says, “anything is thing enough to party.”) It also suggests but does not reveal how any one thing relates to another thing. It’s not just that a quark, Mozambique, or scotch experience the world in this account in a way that’s fundamentally alien to the human, but that their experiences of and appearances to each other are incomprehensible to us. Aliens in Alien Phenomenology both are and are not to be found in places like Roswell or Mars — E.T. is as likely a candidate for analysis as anything else. Trapped as we are in our humanity, the urgent demand is nevertheless to get as close as possible to understanding what will remain stubbornly incomprehensible to us, or to engage explicitly in the “practice” of alien phenomenology. Given how frustrating that sounds, it’s lucky that the majority of the book presents a how-to guide.
¤
Bogost is a professor of interactive computing and holds a chair in media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his work as a videogame designer requires him to be something of an expert in the difficult genre of practical instruction, one he engagingly exploits in his aptly named 2011 book How to Do Things with Videogames. One of the most remarkable aspects of Alien Phenomenology is the clarity with which it outlines practical steps for thinking like or with the everyday alienness surrounding us. To understand in greater detail what might be at stake in doing so, it helps to turn to two of the book’s sources of inspiration, both from 1974: the Nagel essay cited above, which was published that year, and a photograph from Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places series, “Room 28 Holiday Inn, Medicine Hat, Alberta, 1974.”
Nagel’s weird little essay has been receiving renewed attention from philosophers and cultural theorists in this time of the nonhuman because of the way it combines a distrust of human explanations of nonhuman forms of experience with the clear hope and tentative confidence that alternative methods, concepts, and modes of description may yet be possible. These methods, Nagel suggests, would not exhaustively capture the experience of the nonhuman, but could begin to. When he asks what it’s like to be a bat, Nagel insists on a fundamental difference between the way I might go about trying to understand what it’s like for me to be a bat and how I could instead think about what it’s like for the bat to be a bat. Because the bat’s phenomenological experience of the world is so alien to mine, he says, employing the resources of analogy or even thinking in terms of something like “point of view” are completely inadequate. When Bogost adapts Nagel’s question to examine instead what it’s like to be a thing, he’s doing more than insisting on expanding the reach of the alien from alien forms of life to the wider range of objects his invocation of “thing” implies. Rather, Bogost’s intervention is more subtle and significant. The key difference lies not in the substitution of thing for bat, but in the use of the word “like.” Nagel relegates to a footnote a crucial distinction guiding his essay, for which the specificity of rhetorical form remains central, if often unacknowledged. He says that “the analogical form of the English expression ‘what it is like’ is misleading. It does not mean ‘what (in our experience) it resembles,’ but rather ‘how it is for the subject himself.’” Alien Phenomenology certainly takes up the sense of “like” activated here, with all of its ontological resonance, looking throughout for ways to describe what it’s like for the thing to be a thing. But precisely because the beingness of things involves their perceptions and experiences of themselves and their relations with other things, what it’s like to be a thing, we learn, ought rather to be explored through the analogies Nagel deplores. And more than that: likeness here can be a simile, the stranger the better. If Nagel calls for an “objective phenomenology” that avoids the anthropomorphizing and mediating tendencies of figurative language, the alien phenomenology Bogost describes deliriously embraces it. “In a literal sense,” says Bogost, “the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy.” Likeness and other forms of representing the inner lives of things via degrees of distortion or mis-representation are the best chance we have of understanding or being able to communicate something about those inner lives. As Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello puts it, “If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster.” There’s something about fiction, about analogy, about metaphor, that allows for a kind of thinking that might not otherwise be available.
In a somewhat rare move for a work of philosophy, Alien Phenomenology contains a rich color insert that includes several photographs by Stephen Shore from the 1970s. Shore’s images are known for what Michael Fried calls “the labor of construal” they require their viewers to undertake in order to understand the relationships between the objects contained within them. I’m pausing on the book’s specific use of “Room 28 Holiday Inn, Medicine Hat, Alberta, 1974” primarily because of its mostly superficial simultaneity with Nagel’s 1974 essay — there may not be much more immediately relevant about that simultaneity, and yet it operates what Bogost evokes as “the dense meanwhile of being,” a meanwhile he sees appearing forcefully within Shore’s photographs themselves. “Room 28” (see image) depicts a set of mundane objects — a lamp, a television, a chair, and ashtray, brocade curtains — yet their everydayness, Bogost suggests, is not what matters. Instead, the image’s composition “underscores unseen things and relations” between the objects, or “register[s] the world.” Instead of the list of objects I just provided, here’s how the photograph looks to Bogost the alien phenomenologist: “In Alberta, a textured, rust-colored lamp with shade sits near the edge of a table, while an ashtray holds down a motel survey. Nearby, a window lever emerges from behind curtains.” These are objects that “tousle” one another, that have “secret lives.”
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Shore’s photographs operate here as examples of one strategy — importantly, an aesthetic and inscriptive strategy — for actively practicing alien phenomenology. They appear as examples of what Bogost calls ontography, one among three techniques or methods he proposes for those committed to speculation that would “amplify” rather than contain “the black noise of objects.” The three methods he describes — ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry — all work to reveal aspects of the object world. Ontography is largely a method for exploring the relations between objects, metaphorism a strategy for understanding their perceptions, and carpentry a kind of making that produces objects that in turn say something about how objects are themselves engaged in a process of making their world.
Ontography, the first of Alien Phenomenology’s three methods, provides an alternative inscriptive strategy to narrative. In a counterintuitive move for a scholar with a background in comparative literature, Bogost opposes ontography to what he sees as the “flowing legato” of the literary, a domain he finds too attached to the aspiration to identification and resonance rather than the “jarring staccato of real being.” It’s a reductive account of literariness, but a knowing one. What he offers instead is “aesthetic set theory” or an inscription strategy that gathers objects without ascribing too much of a human concept to the nature of their relations. Examples of ontography include the gathering work done by Shore’s photographs and the rhetorical form of the list, a “group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma.” Catalogues in language or image are presented as useful, even virtuous methods for gesturing to the relations between objects, but such lists, artworks, and diagrams can also be reflexively exploded — their ontographic qualities made operational within the artifacts themselves. Bogost is most interested in what he calls “ontographic machines” such as games and puzzles that depict, simulate, or perform the relations between objects.
From ontography, the description and enacting of interobject relations, the book moves to metaphorism, or techniques of creative distortion for revealing how objects perceive and experience the relations captured by ontography. For a text so determined to avoid anthropomorphic modes of thinking, the turn to metaphor may seem surprising, but here is Bogost at his best. He outlines metaphorism as a truly speculative practice — a way of characterizing alien experience that is not identical to that experience. This strikes me as a more broadly powerful and urgent move at a time when so many forms of critical practice reach ever more insistently for objective forms of description. Instead, Bogost offers what he calls “the clarity of distortion,” active use of the sidelong glance or the forms of likeness rejected by Nagel’s objective phenomenology. Much like ontography, metaphorism becomes most interesting when it turns in on and refers to itself, and after a labored (but necessary) discussion of the impossibility of conducting an ethics of objects using these methods, Bogost moves to the pinnacle of distortion, or metametaphorism.
“Metaphorism of this sort,” he says, “involves phenomenal daisy chains, built of speculations on speculations as we seep farther and farther into the weird relations between objects.” He sees these kinds of chains governing the structure, for example, of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, in which metaphors compete with and jostle each other to the point where a clear, comprehensible mapping of their relations remains elusive. Metaphor here is an acknowledged anthropomorphism, necessary for humans who use language to communicate to objects like themselves. But it’s also a vertiginous one, describing a world not simply resting on an infinitely receding metaphoric chain of turtles, but constituted by it: metaphors all the way down.
Alien Phenomenology maintains a gleeful fidelity to metaphor throughout its pages, making metaphor a practice it elaborates and relentlessly enacts. Consider just a few:
Fleeing from the dank halls of the mind’s prison toward the grassy meadows of the material world
For too long, philosophers have spun waste like a goldfish’s sphincter, rather than spinning yarn like a charka
An imbroglio is an intellectual kind of predicament, a muddle to be sure, but a muddle wearing a monocle
The tradition of human access that seeps from the rot of Kant
These uses of figuration get at a paradox that underscores the book’s discussion of carpentry, or the practice of making things rather than simply talking about them: the fact of its status as a book, or its engagement with the (in this view, limited) practice of writing instead of other forms of making. The philosophical practice of carpentry, for Bogost, is craft, construction, or assemblage. His examples of carpentry move from the construction of buildings to the writing of software, including software that creates games, digital installations of abstract art, or a program that operationalizes the Latour litanies described earlier. It’s worth noting here, too, that Alien Phenomenology reaches out to the forms of carpentry with which Bogost most happily engages — it invites readers to use the “Latour litanizer” he created to produce lists of objects (“people, places, organizations, ideas, fictions, groups, media, durations, and even other lists”) taken from Wikipedia, and to engage more fully with the public debates he participates in with his contemporaries on blogs and social media platforms like Twitter, in dialogue with more traditional academic publications such as this one. And while I worry about how easily calls for work “unburdened by theoretical affectation” can be mobilized by more malign anti-intellectualisms, the calls expressed here for an “applied” form of philosophical speculation are compelling and convincingly enacted in Bogost’s wider range of work.
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In a recent essay in The Atlantic (“The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder”), Bogost offers a brief précis of the kind of aliens running amok throughout Alien Phenomenology. It’s a mistake to consider the alien in political or cosmological terms, he suggests, because aliens from other countries or planets imply too much intersubjectivity. Bogost’s aliens are equal opportunity (“everything is alien to everything”), and he helpfully calls the process of speculating about their inner experiences a combination of “evidence” and “poetics.” A poetics of the alien could very easily describe what Alien Phenomenology, at times despite itself, is up to. The book concludes, however, with something a little different: a final chapter on “wonder” that outlines not the techniques for practicing alien phenomenology, but rather the attitude to have while doing so.
While the moves of alien phenomenology have until this point been dynamic, full of distortions, manipulations, and making, the attitude of wonder appears startlingly passive. “One does not ask the alien, ‘Do you come in peace?’” we are told, “but rather, ‘What am I to you?’” Bogost describes wonder as a “posture” taken before the alien, one that embodies a “respect” for things. As a rebuttal to what he sees as an unproductive self-seriousness plaguing philosophical practice, he amusingly demands: “Let’s leave rigor to the dead. Let’s trade furrows for gasps.” This raises what seems to be a growing affective split between approaches to the nonhuman, especially the speculative and object-oriented approaches with which Bogost is in most direct conversation. On the one hand we have wonder, allure, democracy, and vibrancy attached to alien objects, and on the other what Eugene Thacker has elsewhere called “the horror of philosophy.” It’s not like demands for wonder and respect can’t be seen in the negative, but the world described here remains a decidedly sunny one. The question left is whether it’s necessary to choose between them.
What is it like to be a thing? We can only speculate, and this book makes a compelling case for why we probably should. And it certainly sounds like fun: deploy metaphor with abandon, disrupt traditional narratives, play games, make things. Use these techniques to become, or rather become for a moment, a little more like the aliens surrounding us. If that likeness remains metaphorical, then all the better.
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Kate Marshall is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), and is at work on a new book, Novels by Aliens.
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, by Ian Bogost. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $19.95, 168 pages.
What do computer microchips, chicken wings, baby pandas, and packs of cigarettes have in common? For one, they are all pictured on the cover of videogame theorist Ian Bogost’s new book Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, in which Bogost argues that these objects (and literally everything else) hold just as much philosophical import as human beings. Bogost uses contemporary philosopher Graham Harman’s term object-oriented ontology as an umbrella title, under which he places his own philosophy, alien phenomenology. To break this term down, Bogost defines “alien” as “anything—and everything—to everything else” and phenomenology as “the area of metaphysics concerned with how stuff appears to beings.” So although the theory may sound dense, alien phenomenology is simply the practice of considering how everything appears to everything else—Bogost calls the process “carpentry.” An alien phenomenologist creates “carpentry” that must “capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience.” The possibilities of Bogost’s theory applied to fine arts, theater, music, education, and even science are endless.
Bogost puts his work into context, citing the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, and Latour, to name a few. At the basis of these and Bogost’s theories is the rejection of anthropocentrism and the argument for considering things (or “units,” as Bogost prefers) and how they interact with each other outside of their existence for or in relation to human beings. Luckily, readers need not obtain an advanced degree in philosophy to enjoy Alien Phenomenology. Bogost breaks up long discourses on the nitty-gritty details of object-oriented ontology with “litanies,” such as “plate tectonics, enchiladas, tourism, digestion” or “quarks, Elizabeth Bennett, single-malt scotch, Ford Mustang fastbacks…,” that demonstrate his theory in action: “Lists of objects without explication can do the philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them with greater attentiveness.”
As he explains how we must reject a “hierarchy of being,” he juxtaposes the ordinary with the extraordinary, and the massive with the minuscule. Because Alien Phenomenology addresses anything and everything, enthusiasts of all kinds, not just of philosophy, can appreciate Bogost’s call for broader consideration of the world around us, instead of just the world as it pertains to us.
Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
By Ian Bogost Basic Books 288 pp.
Reviewed by David Z. Morris
October 28, 2016
This interesting read asks us to skip cynicism and enjoy the moment, but ignores exploitative systems in the process.
Recently, I’ve been playing two very different video games. One, Bloodborne, is brutally demanding and dreary, and I love it. The other, Destiny, is a Technicolor lightshow of bullet-spraying power-fantasy, and it gives me all the joy of a rat repeatedly pressing a lever.
Ian Bogost sees a life lesson in that counterintuitive response, and his new book is dedicated to explaining it. Play Anything marshals thinkers from Wittgenstein to Marie Kondo to Bruno Latour on a quest to define and challenge what Bogost argues is our culture’s increasingly perverse relationship to the idea of “fun.”
He’s uniquely suited to the task, a programmer and videogame designer who is also an insightful, jargon-averse cultural critic (his Lacanian analysis of the McDonald’s McRib sandwich for the Atlantic is a minor masterpiece).
First and most effectively, Bogost skewers our contemporary tendency to think of “fun” as something easy and pleasurable. Paralleling Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided, he lambastes the “gamification” of things like routine work, which attempts to mask drudgery with smiley-faced points systems and prizes. Instead, he argues powerfully that “fun is the opposite of happiness” — that real fun involves not sparkly pleasure, but <
Bogost also faults what he calls “ironoia” — a resistance to fun that takes the form of cynicism, condescension, and refusal to engage with the world. To counter the tendency, he illustrates ways in which real, challenging fun can be found in his local mall, a trip to Wal-Mart, and in his struggle with his suburban Atlanta lawn.
Bogost points out that contemporary “ironoiacs” tend to see these moments as corrupt or beneath them. Instead, he says, we should dig into them — learn the ins and outs of lawn maintenance, “embrace the stupidity of mall floors,” and marvel at the wonder of jumbo-sized Wal-Mart ketchup jugs.
We should embrace these things “as they are” and learn to “play” them like games, making up rules within temporary “magic circles” built around our experiences. For instance, he catalogs an array of bizarre and banal products he finds in Wal-Mart, turning consumerism into self-conscious play.
But there is something deeply dangerous about this aspect of Bogost’s argument. Because, while a temporary magic circle may enrich our experience of going to Wal-Mart or traversing the mall, those aren’t just transitory experiences — they’re manifestations of entire systems. And Bogost’s call to take joy in those systems often seems like a call to simply accept our entrapment in them.
This flares up most disturbingly when he says that those who mock suburban lawns are doing so only because it is “easier to avoid even wanting to own a house you can’t afford anyway.” Rather than rejecting convention, he says, we should explore the “endless ways to circumscribe and address the perverse and fundamentally idiotic burden of owning and managing a meadow you have coerced to flank your property.” He does so by putting copious amounts of money and labor into maintaining his.
That’s a hell of a reactionary way to respond to criticism of suburbia, implicated as it is in car culture, and, lest we forget, a global catastrophe that threatens human society. I’d say a little less proactive accommodationism and a little more critical detachment is exactly what’s called for.
It’s clear, here and elsewhere, that Bogost is missing a major aspect of the nature of irony. Certainly, it can be the kind of blasé capitulation he describes — “Not knowing and not being able to know is the meaning of irony today.” But irony is also a form of performative critique. It is, in fact, its own kind of engaged play, a Hegelian making-use-of, but one that challenges the rules of the game. Take Nirvana, a band whose affected indifference superficially exemplifies Bogost’s critique of ironoia — but who were, in fact, social satirists, their sloppy dress and unkempt hair sending a message about what they saw as the twisted values of the culture around them.
Somehow, though, Bogost doesn’t see the “game” of ironic critique and deconstruction as its own kind of deeply thrilling magic circle. To walk into a Wal-Mart and delineate the absurdities it houses, the crimes it masks, the exact nature of the sickness at its heart — that is not just a socially useful act, but, yes, an invigorating joy. That our denatured education system has made the game of critique inaccessible to most only makes belittling it more dangerous.
And Bogost’s call to turn the world into a series of magic circles risks an even deeper kind of detachment than the ironoia he opposes. He argues, for instance, that simply framing a Chee-To a little differently — putting manufactured food-shaped poison in a magic circle of fancy words — would make it a smash in the fine-dining world. He says we should “allow lawns and malls and soccer pitches to show us their desires.”
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But these things don’t have their own desires, and they are not made up merely of perceptual frames — they’re the product of human planning, and often, human power. It’s telling that Bogost approvingly name-checks Robert Moses, a sadistic dungeon master of the urban-planning game that made those perverse lawn-playgrounds possible.
But there’s more than one game in town — the last five years have shown us that the magic circle can be turned inside out to encompass the whole world. Occupy Wall Street took play deadly seriously, but would have had no use for Bogost’s call for a renewed commitment to everyday life. Black Lives Matter is finding ways to change the game not just for some, but for all. Because the rules are real and they were not all written in our best interest, and self-deception won’t do anything to change them.
David Z. Morris is a writer and researcher focused on media, transportation, technology, and culture. He covers technology for Fortune Magazine, and his journalism has also appeared in the Atlantic, Aeon, Pacific Standard, and Wired. He holds a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Iowa, and has served as a research fellow with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the University of South Florida. He lives in Queens.
Book Review of Ian Bogost’s (2010) How to do things with videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
December 15, 2012 1 Comment
Dan Golding
Published Online: December 15, 2012
Full Text: HTML, PDF (402 KB)
Bogost, I. (2011). How To Do Things With Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978 0 8166 7647 7.180 pages. USD 18.95.
How To Do Things With Videogames is Ian Bogost at his most McLuhan-esque. The book, a collection of very short essays on a variety of deliberately diffuse topics to do with videogames, is a play with both the form and structure of intellectual writing and the form and structure of videogames themselves. It is ostensibly an examination of a medley of ‘things’ one can do with videogames, from “Empathy” to “Kitsch” to “Titillation” to “Disinterest,” each chapter briefly suggesting how videogames ‘do’ these things before moving on to the next.
The theory component of How To Do Things With Videogames is only stated plainly in the framing introductory and concluding chapters; however, the theory of the book is frequently argued obliquely and through example throughout its entirety. It is a book deliberately structured to make Bogost’s point through practice—in a way, more of what Bogost in his more recent Alien Phenomenology (2012) has identified as “carpentry:” an artifact, and not just a piece of writing, that does philosophy. Might we then more justifiably place How To Do Things With Videogames alongside Cow Clicker (2010), Bogost’s satirical Facebook game and his most famous (or perhaps infamous) example of carpentry thus far? Perhaps this comparison is not so strange after all, as we shall see.
In How To Do Things With Videogames, Bogost intends on doing what he calls media micro-ecology. That is to say, if media ecology, taken on from the likes of McLuhan and Neil Postman, is the study of how various media arrange and buttress against each other at a level equivalent to a global ecosystem, then media micro-ecology “seeks to reveal the impact of a [single] medium’s properties on society” (p. 7). Hence Bogost uses How To Do Things With Videogames as an incomplete catalogue of sorts for the kinds of types, roles, and effects associated with the medium of the videogame: “how videogames have seeped out of our computers and become enmeshed with our lives” (p. 8).
The central point of How To Do Things With Videogames is this: if we can “understand the relevance of a medium by looking at the variety of things it does” (p. 3), then for videogames to be most relevant, they must do a variety of things. This is not an argument for a gamification-like approach, where the properties of a media form are filtered outwards to other activities. Instead, what Bogost is suggesting here is that we can measure the relevance of videogames by the spread of the medium itself, and that implicitly, limiting videogames to being either Call of Duty or a serious game designed to cure cancer is not good enough.
Bogost comes at this point mostly with an agnostic approach—it seems that he states this more as an observation rather than an argument for how things should be. There is a feeling throughout How To Do Things With Videogames that Bogost is merely identifying a stage in the life of a media form, and is using it as an opportunity to explore hitherto uncharted landscapes. Yet it is ultimately difficult to view a book like How To Do Things With Videogames as anything but an appeal for the medium’s diversification. As Bogost concludes,
Soon, gamers will be the anomaly. If we’re very fortunate, they’ll disappear altogether. Instead, we’ll just find people, ordinary people of all sorts. And sometimes those people will play videogames. And it won’t be a big deal, at all. (p. 154, original emphasis)
There is something strange in witnessing an academic arguing for their object of study to become more normal, more mundane, and less unusual. As Bogost himself puts it, a focus on the mundane and unremarkable uses of a media form is “not a popular sentiment in our time of technological spectacularism. It wouldn’t play well in a TED talk or on a Wired cover” (p. 3).
In this respect, it is interesting to contrast it with another book that How To Do Things With Videogames will surely share shelf-space with, Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters(2012). Anthropy’s book argues for the adoption of simple and sometimes crude tools of videogame creation by “freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, dropouts, queers, housewives, and people like you”, so that videogames can have more “weird shit” (2012, p. 135). It would be easy to place these two books at odds, and to some extent they are; however, it feels more like they end up arguing similar points from different angles. Where Bogost sees mundanity, Anthropy sees “weird shit”—yet they both argue for a large-scale creative diversification for videogames. It may be easy to criticise Bogost’s How To Do Things With Videogames from the perspective that mundanity is a strange thing to strive for; yet for Bogost, mundanity and diversification are concepts that are tied up with one another. A media form does not achieve diversification in one strata alone, he seems to suggest: it is not that videogames will be incapable of the extraordinary, but that videogames as a media form will no longer have the extraordinary aura they currently possess.
Moreover, if by his micro-ecology Bogost means to draw a sketch of how the medium fits into society, then perhaps it is the role of the reviewer to attempt to draw a sketch of how How To Do Things With Videogames fits into the literature of videogames, or media studies, or other such microsystems. This is no easy task. In fact, more so than any of Bogost’s prior books (or his even his following publications), it is difficult to pin down exactly where How To Do Things With Videogames fits. Is its audience a general one, or academics, or interested enthusiasts, or is it genuinely a how-to guide for rank outsiders, as its deliberately naive title might suggest?
As I have noted, in How To Do Things With Videogames, Bogost is at his most McLuhan-esque. <
This approach is reflected in the style of the book, and not just its framing. The extremely short chapters of How To Do Things With Videogames (all are less than ten pages) gifts Bogost <> Consider Bogost’s(2011) examination of videogame kitsch through the lens of painter Walter Kinkade (pp. 83-88), or of the rhetoric of disinterest around gun safety in the target shooting game NRA Gun Club (pp. 134-140). These are new areas interestingly framed by Bogost, and his compact style here makes for interesting analysis.
How To Do Things With Videogames’ nimble structure also means that readers expecting the usual level of academic scrutiny—for all claims to be tested, explored and supported—will be left wanting. This is a book that features a potted history of music in three short paragraphs. Theorists and intellectual frameworks fly past the reader like songs in a ‘60s disco remix: here comes Slovoj Žižek on page 35, followed by the Dadaists on page 41. There goes Walter Benjamin on page 46, with Wolfgang Schivelbusch in hot pursuit on page 47. How To Do Things With Videogames is not a book that lingers.
Yet we must consider that it is not so much the content of each chapter as the form of How To Do Things With Videogames that is important. Despite Bogost’s warning that “the medium is the message, but the message is the message too” (p. 5), it seems that the structure of How To Do Things With Videogames is reflective of its central argument. It is not so much the content of the short, individual chapters of How To Do Things With Videogames that is important as what their structure can point towards.
If we can “understand the relevance of [the videogame] by looking at the variety of things it does,” then How To Do Things With Videogames is a book that spirals outwards, constantly pointing towards fresh uses for the videogame before moving on to the next. It is a book that revels in unfulfilled blank spaces and the pathways not taken, for it expects that the reader—or maybe even videogame culture—will filter outwards to fill these spaces on their own steam. As I suggested earlier, How To Do Things With Videogames thus feels a bit like a media object in itself, its very structure reflecting Bogost’s central argument. Perhaps, returning to the McLuhan comparison and Bogost’s own philosophy of ‘carpentry’, How To Do Things With Videogames is not most like Barr’s How To Play a Videogame or Carr’s The Shallows, but rather McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (1967), another book that utilises the form of publication in order to mount an argument obliquely through structure.
Thus, the key to How To Do Things With Videogames is plain and clear in the book’s own title. This is a book that is interested in what kind of things you can do with videogames, but it is more interested in how this diversity shapes the form itself within a micro and macro ecology perspective, and this is reflected in the book’s structure. It is therefore not what you can do with videogames that is especially interesting here, but how.
References
Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You are taking back an art form. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Barr, P. (2011). How To Play a Videogame. Wellington: AWA Press.
Bogost, I. (2006). Unit Operations: An approach to videogame criticism. Cambridge; London: MIT Press.
Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge; London: MIT Press.
Bogost, I. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York; London: W. W. Norton.
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1969). The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects. New York: Penguin.
Shirkey, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York: Penguin.
Biographical Statement
Daniel Golding is currently completing a Ph.D. in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, where he also teaches in the fields of cinema, culture, videogames and digital media. As a critic, Daniel writes commentary on videogames and gaming culture for Crikey.com.au.
Email: dangoldingis@gmail.com