Professor Bogost, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, continues to be one of my favorite contemporary thinkers on matters digital. Following close on the end of MLA 09, he has weighed in on recent ruminations about the direction of the humanities with a brief, simmering note. He writes:
Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.
And again,
We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists’ clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.
It’s important to note that the acidity of Bogost’s language is not run-of-the-mill Internet hyperbole: In my estimate, at least, it is a calculated and careful rhetoric. And that makes him worthy of our attention.
Read The Turtlenecked Hairshirt at Ian Bogost’s blog (n.b. that there are several comments worth reading, too). Bogost’s assertions are timely, but not unprecedented, and it is important to reflect on the simultaneity of the rise of the digital, the death of Theory, and recent interest in a philosophy that exceeds conventional anthropocentric bounds. It follows, inevitably, that it is time to ask what all of this means for the university, and for academe. To my mind, it is Greg Ulmer who has already done some terrific — if sometimes uncanny — thinking on the matter.
Now Playing: Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes
What we play as scholars is as important as what we read. Gaming is experiential, and there is no substitute for this activity. Many — if not most — of the best thinkers in the field recognize this, and a wealth of books and articles on the topic of games and digital play are sustained by myriad first-person references to in-game experience. This is not idle boasting: This is the digital.
For the sake of contrast, take a moment and reflect on how frequently the average specialist in, say, the contemporary novel talks about her personal experience as a reader. Or, more pointedly, how often she explicitly roots her critique in first-hand knowledge of the construction of fiction.
While this approach may meet with skepticism in conventional academe, the most compelling contemporary scholarship in fields like game studies comes, in fact, from scholar-hybrids, whose intellectual production is not limited to (or by) the written word. See, e.g., Ian Bogost, DJ Spooky, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Jane McGonigal, and a host of others. This blurring of conventionally distinct intellectual categories (theoria and praxis) is, I think, a demand of digitality, and merits further consideration (indeed, it is not unrelated to the issues raised in my last post).
But I want to use this post to innaugurate a new “feature” of this blog, Now Playing. With it, I intend simply to make mention of the games in which I am currently invested, and offer perhaps a word or two about them.
The low-res graphics, tiny sprites, and ambiguous puzzle are well-served by the detailed narrative, which works to define and re-define the specifics of the puzzle in order to keep you engaged, even as you are seeing (quite literally) the same tiny icons on the screen, again and again. I am just over 20% of my way into the game, and it remains a compelling play.