Book•
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
01 Jan 2006-
TL;DR: In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames and argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.
Abstract: In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium -- from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art -- can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of "game studies." The richness of Bogost's comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Joyce's Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.
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Book•
06 Mar 2017
TL;DR: The most successful algorithmic businesses have exploited the gap the authors have been exploring between computation and culture as an opportunity, or what I term algorithmic arbitrage, and the presence of this arbitrage in their cultural lives is rapidly expanding, and beginning to reinvent what the eternal consumer present, the moment of “now,” actually means.
Abstract: Big data allows for more granular abstractions, constructs of consumer markets where we are targeted as individuals, or as part of ad hoc groups that are so specific as to eclipse other important aspects of identity, like OfficeMax’s macabre decision to market products (scrapbooks or other memorial media, perhaps?) to parents of deceased children. In marketing terms, this is the evolution of segmentation: the idea that by clustering consumers into particular categories, messages can be uniquely crafted to address their hopes and fears. The distinction between emerging algorithmic platforms like Netflix, Google, and Facebook and more traditional advertising is in narrative terms a gutter problem. As comics theorist Scott McCloud might say, these systems control not just the message itself, but the frame around the message, reshaping what Habermas calls the “grammar of forms of life” by obscuring most of the computation behind clean interfaces and simple choices. The contexts in which we are addressed by advertisements, political messages, and even financial decisions might now be incredibly specific, but remain invisible. As we live more of our cultural lives online, digital platforms are making new grammatical structures possible through the replication and filtering of content. Both Netflix and Facebook adopt a rhetoric of inclusive cocreation when it comes to the project of filtering media, identifying how particular products or news items arrive on your screen (e.g., “George Smith and five other friends liked this”). Yet these moments of inclusion mask the many other decisions we are not invited to participate in, particularly those that draw the gutter or frame around our activities. These constant invitations amplify what Geoffrey Bowker calls the “invisibly exclusionary” logic of the archive, “which presents itself as being the set of all possible statements, rather than the law of what can be said.” The most successful algorithmic businesses have exploited the gap we have been exploring between computation and culture as an opportunity, or what I term algorithmic arbitrage. As computational systems become more efficient, and the patina of personal data we leave behind us grows thicker, the presence of this arbitrage in our cultural lives is rapidly expanding, and beginning to reinvent what the eternal consumer present, the moment of “now,” actually means. After all, there are billions of dollars changing hands over the question of who gets to construct the present for you. When you access a website, perhaps to find out what is happening in the world “right now,” hundreds of servers are involved in auctions lasting
181 citations
TL;DR: The Subject of Semiotics References Index of authors Index of subjects
Abstract: Foreword Note on graphic conventions 0. Introduction-Toward a Logic of Culture 0.1. Design for a semiotic theory 0.2. 'Semiotics': field or discipline? 0.3. Communication and/or signification 0.4. Political boundaries: the field 0.5. Natural boundaries: two definitions of semiotics 0.6. Natural boundaries: inference and signification 0.7. Natural boundaries the lower threshold 0.8. Natural boundaries: the upper threshold 0.9. Epistemological boundaries 1. Signification and Communication 1.1. An elementary communicational model 1.2. Systems and codes 1.3. The s-code as structure 1.4. Information, communication, signification 2. Theory of Codes 2.1. The sign-function 2.2. Expression and content 2.3. Denotation and connotation 2.4. Message and text 2.5 Content and referent 2.6. Meaning as cultural unit 2.7. The interpretant 2.8. The semantic system 2.9. The semantic markers and the sememe 2.10. The KF model 2.11. A revised semantic model 2.12. The model \"Q\" 2.13. The format of the semantic space 2.14. Overcoding and undercoding 2.15. The interplay of codes and the message as an open form 3. Theory of Sign Production 3.1. A general survey 3.2. Semiotic and factual statements 3.3. Mentioning 3.4 The prolem of a typology of signs 3.5. Critique of iconism 3.6. A typology of modes of production 3.7. The aesthetic text as invention 3.8. The rhetorical labor 3.9. Ideological code switching 4. The Subject of Semiotics References Index of authors Index of subjects
181 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Although its core topic is playing rather than gaming, Homo Ludens remains a standard reference in game design books and influenced modern avant-garde artists like Guy Debord and other members of the group known as the Situationist International.
Abstract: The modern study of play can be traced back to the publication of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's groundbreaking study Homo Ludens (1938). Huizinga's book describes play as a free and meaningful activity, carried out for its own sake, spatially and temporally segregated from the requirements of practical life, and bound by a self-contained system of rules that holds absolutely. Similar assumptions underpin the work of subsequent scholars, notably the French sociologist Roger Caillois (1962), who followed Huizinga in emphasizing the central role of play in human culture. Although its core topic is playing rather than gaming, Homo Ludens remains a standard reference in game design books (Crawford, 2003; Zimmerman and Salen, 2004; Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman, 2004). Its core ideas also influenced modern avant-garde artists like Guy Debord and other members of the group known as the Situationist International (Andreotti, 2002).
139 citations
Cites background from "Unit Operations: An Approach to Vid..."
...The exact meaning and implications of this thesis continue to raise difficult problems of interpretation (Bogost, 2006)....
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...What does the expression "not serious" mean here? The exact meaning and implications of this thesis continue to raise difficult problems of interpretation (Bogost, 2006)....
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Book•
09 Aug 2013
TL;DR: In this paper, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended, drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.
Abstract: Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.
128 citations
Cites background from "Unit Operations: An Approach to Vid..."
...The world is reducible to blobs and flows, hunks and chunks.(20) Inconsistency is gone, along with a lot of other things....
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...We are still stuck with the problem of fully grasping a unit: the cinder block as such, the process as such.(20) If we imagine that objects are inherently self-consistent—being “static” is an aesthetic defect, too, according to modern taste, though that is very much moot— then we may perforce feel the need to supplement our view with some kind of process philosophy that is able to think change and motion (Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze)....
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...Evolution turns a swim bladder into a lung.(20) There are more drastic cases of ghostly half-life....
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...burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.(20)...
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References
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TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals' friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another, and the impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored.
Abstract: Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals' friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.
37,560 citations
TL;DR: The discipline and practice of qualitative research have been extensively studied in the literature as discussed by the authors, including the work of Denzin and Denzin, and their history in sociology and anthropology, as well as the role of women in qualitative research.
Abstract: Introduction - Norman K Denzin and Yvonna S Lincoln The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research PART ONE: LOCATING THE FIELD Qualitative Methods - Arthur J Vidich and Stanford M Lyman Their History in Sociology and Anthropology Reconstructing the Relationships between Universities and Society through Action Research - Davydd J Greenwood and Morten Levin For Whom? Qualitative Research, Representations and Social Responsibilities - Michelle Fine et al Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research - Clifford G Christians PART TWO: PARADIGMS AND PERSPECTIVES IN TRANSITION Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions and Emerging Confluences - Yvonna S Lincoln and Egon G Guba Three Epistemological Stances for Qualitative Inquiry - Thomas A Schwandt Interpretivism, Hermeneutics and Social Constructionism Feminisms and Qualitative Research at and into the Millennium - Virginia L Olesen Racialized Discourses and Ethnic Epistemologies - Gloria Ladson-Billings Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research - Joe L Kincheloe and Peter McLaren Cultural Studies - John Frow and Meaghan Morris Sexualities, Queer Theory and Qualitative Research - Joshua Gamson PART THREE: STRATEGIES OF INQUIRY The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design - Valerie J Janesick Minuets, Improvisations and Crystallization An Untold Story? Doing Funded Qualitative Research - Julianne Cheek Performance Ethnography - Michal M McCall A Brief History and Some Advice Case Studies - Robert E Stake Ethnography and Ethnographic Representation - Barbara Tedlock Analyzing Interpretive Practice - Jaber F Gubrium and James A Holstein Grounded Theory - Kathy Charmaz Objectivist and Constructivist Methods Undaunted Courage - William G Tierney Life History and the Postmodern Challenge Testimonio, Subalternity and Narrative Authority - John Beverley Participatory Action Research - Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart Clinical Research - William L Miller and Benjamin F Crabtree PART FOUR: METHODS OF COLLECTING AND ANALYZING EMPIRICAL MATERIALS The Interview - Andrea Fontana and James H Frey From Structured Questions to Negotiated Text Rethinking Observation - Michael V Angrosino and Kimberly A Mays de Perez From Method to Context The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture - Ian Hodder Re-Imagining Visual Methods - Douglas Harper Galileo to Neuromancer Auto-Ethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity - Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P Bochner Researcher as Subject Data Management and Analysis Methods - Gery W Ryan and H Russell Bernard Software and Qualitative Research - Eben A Weitzman Analyzing Talk and Text - David Silverman Focus Groups in Feminist Research - Esther Madriz Applied Ethnography - Erve Chambers PART FIVE: THE ART AND PRACTICES OF INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION AND REPRESENTATION The Problem of Criteria in the Age of Relativism - John K Smith and Deborah K Deemer The Practices and Politics of Interpretation - Norman K Denzin Writing - Laurel Richardson A Method of Inquiry Anthropological Poetics - Ivan Brady Understanding Social Programs through Evaluation - Jennifer C Greene Influencing the Policy Process with Qualitative Research - Ray C Rist PART SIX: THE FUTURE OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Qualitative Inquiry - Mary M Gergen and Kenneth J Gergen Tensions and Transformations The Seventh Moment - Yvonna S Lincoln and Norman K Denzin Out of the Past
26,318 citations
Book•
[...]
01 Jan 1927
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being.
Abstract: Translators' Preface. Author's Preface to the Seventh German Edition. Introduction. Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being. 1. The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being. 2. The Twofold Task of Working out the Question of Being. Method and Design of our Investigation. Part I:. The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality, and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being. 3. Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein. Exposition of the Task of a Preparatory Analysis of Dasein. Being-in-the-World in General as the Basic State of Dasein. The Worldhood of the World. Being-in-the-World as Being-with and Being-One's-Self. The 'they'. Being-in as Such. Care as the Being of Dasein. 4. Dasein and Temporality. Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards-Death. Dasein's Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-Being, and Resoluteness. Dasein's Authentic Potentiality-for-Being-a-Whole, and Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care. Temporality and Everydayness. Temporality and Historicality. Temporality and Within-Time-Ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Time. Author's Notes. Glossary of German Terms. Index.
16,708 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1988
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a very different view of the arts of practice in a very diverse culture, focusing on the use of ordinary language and making do in the art of practice.
Abstract: Preface General Introduction PART I: A VERY ORDINARY CULTURE I. A Common Place: Ordinary Language II. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language III. Making Do: Uses and Tactics PART II: THEORIES OF THE ART OF PRACTICE IV. Foucault and Bourdieu V. The Arts of Theory VI. Story Time PART III: SPATIAL PRACTICES VII. Walking in the City VIII. Railway Navigation and Incarceration IX. Spatial Stories PART IV: Uses of Language X. The Scriptural Economy XI. Quotations of Voices XII. Reading as Poaching PART V: WAYS OF BELIEVING XIII. Believing and Making People Believe XIV. The Unnamable Indeterminate Notes
10,978 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1984
TL;DR: In this article, the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and how the flow of information is controlled in the Western world are discussed.
Abstract: Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.
10,912 citations