Readings in Game Studies: Unit Operations

Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006.

While I did manage to pull several relevant quotes from Bogost's book, I have to admit that I found it largely unhelpful. Bogost's book outlines a critical framework wherein a "text" is looked at as a larger structure built up of individual base units. He relates this critical approach to object-oriented programming.

While I got very little out of this book myself, I thought I should perhaps outline his approach here anyway, in case it will be useful to anyone else. (And so I have some place to keep track of the quotes I do intend to use.)

One of the central tenants of programming is the idea of breaking up large chunks of code into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces. I may have a difficult time writing a single program that simulates a queue at an airport counter, but it will be much easier if I write, for instance, a single function that models a person entering a queue, another function that models someone leaving a queue, a function that models the process of the first person in the queue being served by the counter attendant, and so on. Each individual piece is easy to write, and by combining them all together, I can make my larger program with far greater ease. There are two ways I break up code into smaller chunks: I can create sub-routines that do pieces of the work, or I can create "objects" - units that describe smaller pieces of the simulated "world," and can be interacted with in simple, easy-to-understand ways.

Bogost proposes looking at criticism in this way - having single, simple concepts that can be built up to create larger, more complex wholes. This approach in relation to criticism leaves me with many questions. How are we to determine what these base units are, precisely? How far is it acceptable to go downward into taking pieces apart? (In one chapter, he presents the base unit for a particular set of critical analyses as the "chance encounter." It seems to me that this unit is still made up of smaller units such as "character," "location," etc.) What impact does this form of structuring have on our greater conclusions? (I did not see much of one, personally, but perhaps I missed something.) What is to distinguish these units from tropes, or from standard story elements?

On the whole, I think this sort of rigidly functional approach does not lend itself as well to literary (and thus, the narrative aspect of video games, although it certainly relates to the software, computer-science-related side) criticism as Bogost argues that it does. Formal systems, like computer software, are built on rules - rules that define and, importantly, create the system they describe. On the other hand, creative works such as literature, while they may be described by rules, are created in an absence of them (even sometimes of the fundamental spelling and grammatical rules of the language containing them, especially in the case of more modern poetry), and often specialize in breaking these rules, or finding ways around them. You can't find "a way around" a programming syntax without invalidating any program written in that language. However, you can strategically break rules of, say, the detective novel genre and generate a new and innovate work that nevertheless still belongs to the genre.

I've always thought of the central difference between the sciences (in particular, computer science) and humanities as the difference between a binary relation and a gradient. In computer science, there is a Wrong answer. Your program either works or it doesn't. Sure, one working program might work more efficiently than another, or the coding style might be more readable, but if the program doesn't compile, or gives faulty output, then it is Wrong.

On the other hand, creative works such as writing tend to operate more on a gradient. We can tell, for the most part, when a work is Good and when a work is Bad. But there is almost never a single error or failure that we can point at and say, "look, if this was fixed, then the story would be Good." It might be better, but there's no clearly-drawn line to cross between success and failure. There is wiggle room. Furthermore, an author's particular technique might be successful in one way, but fail in another, which requires a subjective "was that sacrifice worth it" judgement on the part of the critical audience. You can't argue that one program is better than another because it sacrifices the successful completion of its goals for a neater, more readable coding style. Your program no longer works - therefore it is objectively not as successful as a program that does work.

I realize that there is much creative thinking that must go into the sciences, especially when you get to higher levels of thinking. Just as I realize that there are certain things in literature which are generally considered good and bad according to formalized rules. But no matter what, I can always say that a faster program, all other things being equal (including the program's end goals), is better than a slower program that performs the same task. Whereas in literature, a technique that may have seemed highly evocative and creative years ago could seem stilted or foolish to a modern audience. Some readers may subjectively think that one story is better at evoking sadness, while other readers disagree and point to another.

I think Bogost's "units," while certainly an interesting new way of looking at criticism, and an interesting parallel to point out between vastly different systems, imposes just a bit too much of this discrete, objective framework on an inherently subjective and gradient-based discipline. But that is merely my opinion; others who read Bogost may disagree.

Below are quotes that I found useful from Bogost. They are, unfortunately, incidental to Bogost's subject material rather than integral to his approach, and therefore probably won't give readers a very accurate idea of Bogost's overall philosophy. Still, they were useful to me, and may be so to others as well.

"Ludology is one way to address this need to explain what games are and how they work. From the Latin ludus, meaning game or sport, ludology addresses "games in general, and videogames in particular."" (xi)

"...DiGRA [Digital Game Research Association] president Frans Mayra offers an especially unambiguous vision of "three theses" for game studies:

'Thesis one: There needs to be a dedicated academic discipline for the study of games.
Thesis two: This new discipline needs to have an active dialogue with, and be building on of existing ones, as well as having its own identity.
Thesis three: Both the educational and research practices applied in game studies need to remain true to the core playful or ludic qualities of its subject matter.' " (52-53)

"The field of "hard core" game studies is thus revealed to be essentialist and doctrinaire, its theorists hoping to reinvent a different kind of isolationist techno-textual criticism that privileges the ludic over the literary, culturing the virulent oppositions of a future whose media ecology we cannot foresee." (53)

"Game engines are no more transcendental than genres, in the sense that one cannot play a game engine but only a game that encompasses and integrates that engine to create a work. However, game engines do enjoy a different status with respect to authorship and criticism. The first-person shooter is clearly a genre of videogame and, for better or worse, perhaps the medium's most common genre. But first-person shooter game engines construe entire gameplay behaviors, facilitating functional interactions divorced from individual games. Genres structure a creative approach to narrative; they describe a kind of story. While one can imagine a conceptual description of any of the film genres just mentioned, it is much more difficult to imagine the unit-operational underpinnings of such a genre. [...] Game engines differ from genres in that they abstract such material requirements as their primary--perhaps their only--formal constituent." (57)

"Especially right now with current technology, there are a lot of limitations in terms of what we can do with character simulation. So, to me that seemed like a really good use of the abstraction because there are certain things we just cannot simulate on a computer, but on the other hand that people are very good at simulation in their heads. So we just take that part of the simulation and offload it from the computer into the player's head." (Will Wright in Bogost, 85)

"Because The Sims is a game, players have an opportunity to explore the conditions, assumptions, and outcomes of the simulation through interaction, something impossible in the poems of Baudelaire and Bukowski." (85-86)

"What the game allows that the literary medium cannot is interactivity, the direct manipulation of the "narrator" in the simuated world. Because the sim waits for the player's input by default, the game affords a unique perspective on chance encounters in the simulated and real world. On the one hand, the player is forced to register the event not only from the perspective of the character (does that sim look like someone I'd like to meet?), but also from the perspective of the simulation (what are the social rules to which my sim conforms?). Otherwise said, the simulation exposes the various strategies the player can choose in approaching his sim's situation." (87)

"...the gaps in the simulation that the player fills in "in his head" function equally well no matter how the player directs his sim." (87)