Interface Seminar: Unit Operations and the Play of the Imagination

We were lucky enough for this seminar to have a visit by Ian Bogost, author of Unit Operations. It's hard for me to describe the subversive work Ian has been doing lately with the Serious Games initiative, such as the wonderfully funny video game about Kinkos employees slacking off on their jobs. Ian Boghost is mainly interested in trying to use the idea of unit operations - i.e. a discrete, finite number of operations in a world of "objects" as a counterbalance to the sort of fuzzy thinking going on insome versions of postmodernism. In particular, in "Unit Operations" he is challenging the ideas of "rhizomes" and "somooth open-ended" spaces of the two French theorists, Deleuze and Guattari. I would object this sort of fuzzy thinking is really sometimes a good thing, and often Deleuzian thought can be done well - it's just easy to do poorly!First, Ian describes Deleuze and Guattari in pretty heavy detail: "Deleuze and Guattari oppose nomad space with state space; the former is "smooth" or open ended, whereas the latter is "striated" or fixed to a grid. State space forcuses on organization...occupyng nomad space is away to evade or protest statist machines."And the notion of the rhizome and deterritorialization - which are fancy woays of saying "network" and "multiple uses of an object besides the one it was intended for""The rhizome is the structure along which activity moves between plateaus. These heightened energies inject themselves into other actions through a moment of deterritorialization, along what Deleuze and Guattari callclnes of flight. Deterroritarization is the uprooting of a thing along the vector of a rhizome that decodes it, or changes the circumstances and actions affecting it. Deterroitoriziaton leads to reterritorialization,in which the thing is reimplanted and reencode in a new cirsumstance. This recoinding called an "overcoding."He thinks unit operations - everyday discrete operations like "drive the car" and "Rachael Brady, the person" better describe what leads to emergent properties:"A fungible theory of unit operations requires a commitment both to the individualism of discrete units and to the meaningful and durable connections between those units."He continues, "put differently: the type, and not the degree, of emergence is the deciding factor in the expressive potential of a complex system."Lastly, he thinks the vast variety and interconnections between unit operations best describe why the game "Grand Theft Auto" is so popular, because it leads to complexity!"The Grand Theft titles offer more practice in complex relations than Friendster, because the games facilitate and require players to reflect on each individual action they take."Overall, Ian's thought is a real challenge to Deleuze and Guattari, and he did a good job of summarizing their often difficult theories. As for whether he will somehow offer a theoretical alterantive, a paradigm shift, that supplants them, is to be seen. However, he is definitely a man of his times and one of the more intellectually powerful video game theorists I've ran into yet. To return to the notions of massively multi-player games and synthetic worlds, we also looked at John Seeley Brown's "Imagination of Play" work. Note that John Seeley Brown, fairly famous as one of the directors of Xerox PARC, is going to be the keynote speaker for the HASTAC conference. They allow for what Dewey described as the play of imagination the means by which people are able to learn and experiment without the risks associated with real world decision making." (15)JSB (John Seeley Brown) basically thinks that these online games (Massive Multiplayer Online Games - MMOGs, especially World of Warcraft) are actually great training for the postmodern world and workforce, because they blur the lines between fantasy and reality, offer a "goal-driven" environment, and force large-scale social collaboration. JSB thinks play is a good thing, not distinguished from serious study: "More than simply a means to learning, play is a way of thinking about more than what we know. It is, following Gilbert Ryle's (1949) notion of mind, a disposition towards the world, a way of not only seeing the world, but of seeing ourselves in it and the various possibilities that the world presents." (11)He's also quite into how these games are so flexible they surprise their players, and how reflection has to be used. "These are moments of emergent collective action, where players accomplish something they thought was impossible, often with little or no knowledge of how they accomplished it. They are also moments of simultaneous joy and reflection, where players are elated at the accomplishment, but also likely to wonder how it is that they accomplished it."He considers this joining a social group online and the large-scale temporal co-ordination that have to be done to be excellent skills for future managers, including corporate ones. Indeed, the new feature of these games is exactly this focus on social co-ordination."Those elements of guild membership, which mirror closely notions of communities of practice, are the precursor to the possibility for meaningful collective action. Accordingly, the more deeply embedded one is in guild or clan culture, the more definitive the shared moments of collective action are likely to be. The importance of game events is tied less to the event itself than to the people with whom it is shared." This last note touches on the fact that the important social dimension to online games is very serious indeed. One would do well to look at the work by Clark and Grush on simulation in robotics and cognition to see how important of an evolutionary development it was. In an increasingly dangerous world, the use of simulation and the ability to navigate complex social networks are worth their weight in gold.