Objects and Videogames

Like every sane person who does anything in public, I egosearch to see how people are reacting to things I’m doing. I use a few tools, but mostly Icerocket, which offers a condensed view of blog, Twitter, news, and Facebook reactions to search terms. The latter results are new, thanks to Facebook’s recent privacy “upgrades” that allow wall posts to be viewable by everyone by default. Here’s one that I ran across this week:

Adrian Forest thinks it’s a shame Ian Bogost has dived headlong into philosophy, because now I can’t make any sense of any of his blog posts.

This came right after I posted two lengthy and somewhat technical posts on object-oriented rhetoric (1, 2). Reactions like Forest’s offer timely, gut-level reactions, a useful type of feedback. In my case, I get a lot of different readers of my books, articles, and blogs, from philosophers to media studies scholars to game developers to entrepreneurs to ordinary people. How do I balance their shifting interest and patience with my own clusters of work? It’s a question with no immediate answer.

It also got me to thinking that blogs have become more professionalized over the years. Back in the early 2000s, blogs tended to be more catch-as-catch-can in their subject matter. One might post about philosophy one day, videogames or local eateries the next. That’s still quite common of course, but I have the sense that both author and reader expectations have shifted toward the single-subject approach as the diarist function of blogs have been eroded by Facebook, Twitter, and other forms.

Perhaps most importantly, Forest’s off-the-cuff reaction reminds me that I can do more to explain my connected interests in object-oriented ontology with my interest in computation and videogames. Actually, his quip surprised me a little, since philosophy’s always been a part of my work in one way or another. Yet, the connection between games and OOO is not obvious on first blush.

Perhaps the most extensive version of this response I’ve given is in my interview with Paul Ennis, which will appear in Post-Continental Voices this fall. Here’s an excerpt:

To me, the attraction of object-oriented philosophy seems like a given to any scholar of media interested in the thingness of their objects of study in addition to their production, uses, and meaning. In the case of computing, we’ve done so little collective historical work on material underpinnings that we now have decades of very active productivity in a variety of domains that have ripened without being picked, so to speak. Yet, save the relatively broad-based approach we can inherit from McLuhan, no good critical approaches exist that would invite questions about the media themselves in addition to the messages they carry. (As a sidenote, McLuhan does take things too far when he insists that the content of media doesn’t matter). In particular, media studies of all kinds have settled on an implicit obsession with various theories of political economy and reception, some interesting and some outmoded, but none of which take “materialism” to mean “realism.” I suspected there would be productive connections with object-oriented philosophy, and I remember waiting for Graham Harman’s Tool-Being to be published in 2002 so I could read it and apply it in my dissertation. It seems that potential conjunction of interest is finally being realized.

The application to game studies and new media studies is already present in spirit, if not always in name, in parts of Unit Operations and all of Racing the Beam. But I’m also interested in looking beyond those fields, to media and technology studies more broadly. The fundamental question that interests me is how speculative realism can help us address specific objects, like McLuhan does, but without the correlationist burden, without always relating them to human experience.

The upshot of all this is as follows: the experiences of media objects like videogames are themselves worthy of consideration, but infrequently considered. What is happening for the Wiimote, for the HDMI cable, for the texture decompressor, for the ferroelectric liquid crystal in the display? When it comes to computational media, these aren’t the only questions that interest me (matters of representation for humans still do too!). But they are surely questions that aren’t posed often enough, if indeed anyone asks them at all.