Some time ago, I remarked that I intended to “do theory after Sokal.” By this, I meant a commitment to certain principles of discourse. It wasn’t meant as an enthusiastic endorsement of Sokal’s project–not only are there certain weaknesses in his hoax (that Social Text was not truly peer reviewed being one, and that he was, indeed, actings as a representative of a ‘guest discipline’ being another), as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies, and the hoax took a lot of its rhetorical power from this sense of real intellectual vulnerabilities in the constellation of ideas against which his prank worked. (As a note, any physicist who took his hoax as some sort of vindication should be directed to the even more-damning Bogdanov Affair which continues to vex physics; this hoax, if it is a hoax–the “perps” have not called their hand if it is–has divided professional opinion, and gone far beyond one case publication in an extra-disciplinary journal.)

Since then, I’ve learned a bit more about some of the more recent tendencies in theory. I have a phrase to place on these premises: critical realism, a critique of both hermeneutic and positivist traditions that has its origins in the work of Roy Bhaskar. (Bhaskar has since had a religious turn, but the critical realist idea has an independent trajectory.)

To date, Bhaskar’s effect is mostly felt in social sciences and the philosophy of science/science studies. To the extent I can, I’m going to see how I can inform my work in the humanities (specifically, exegetical and interpretive work with texts, particularly games) with the same commitment to questions of efficacy and fallabilism.

Some of the key elements of Bhaskar’s work may not actually migrate into the humanities very smoothly. But I think I’ve found a cluster of ideas from which I can build a container-theory which allows me to position my own work in a coherent relationship with that others. (Since many of my colleagues are still working largely with post-structuralist models, it is pretty important that I have some footing for my work which is often outside those models.)

OK, I’m a little late to this party. Sony Japan has Turntable software for the PS/2. Been out for about a year now, no US release on the horizon. Rather than thinking of this as convergence, I think it’s more of a cross-interface passage. An experienced gamer has a rich vocubluarly of gestures and reactions that they can simultaneously channel through the game controller. It may make more sense to turn the controller into a musical instrument than a keyboard.

Nice send-up of Bemania games in this video made by Keith Schofield for DJ Format et al. Not only do they swim upstream from the performance-to-play gesture, but they also get in a couple digs at some of the more routinized cliches of hip-hop performance.

Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky have completed Soft Cinema, a work at the intersection of database forms and film, which generates films algorithmically from a database of narrative elements, visuals, sounds, etc. The “upstream” motion from newer forms to older ones – the remediation of vidoegame tropes back into film, for example – had largely been worked along the surface of the texts, by evoking the experiential logics of the new media into onto the experience of film (e.g., repetition and learning in Run Lola Run).

And of course, video games have drawn on cinematic methods (often problematically, sometimes well); to redraw cinema on the material basis of new media – on algorithms and databases – is another matter.

MIT Press is releasing the book + DVD; also, this Saturday, at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhatten, the release presentation (execution?) of the work will be accompanied by a panel. I’m not going to be able to go, unfortunately, but it looks intriguing..

There’s more information at the soft cinema site.

While keeping up on the response to Michael Crichton’s recent book on RealClimate, I caught a reference to a literary feature known as “the Mary Sue.” Identified initially in fan fiction, it is the overweeningly self-indulgent placement of an author-surrogate in a text, particularly on a text which is derived from someone else’s diegesis.

The phenomenon is rendered with loving viciousness on Making Light.

Postscript: the worst of fanfic Mary Sues are being policed by this LJ community.

From Slashdot games, a report about New Game Journalism. It’s sad that decent writing requires a manifesto to achieve what is taken for granted elsewhere.

A great example cited is the piece Bow, Nigger from Alwaysblack.com. The personalization of game-play, the fluid movement of the report from the ludological to the interpersonal to the critical – hopefully, it’s prescient. When we’ve seen this kind of conscientious writing about games in the past, it’s often been about writers and journalists approaching games from the outside, and giving us boring first-person accounts of their fumbling with the interface. In this case, the writer has enough mastery of the ludic regime to write and work through the game, instead of just hacking at it from outside. My FFXI play has hammered home to me just how central the mechanics and logistics of fighting together, levelling, solving missions etc. is to the experience of supposely “non-game” elements, like sociability and aesthetics – in the MMO environment, immersion is not necessarily created by versimilitude, but by multimodal engagement in tasks with shared meaning, and the mutual expectations and obligations therein. But, of course, writing about the game and not the session of play is also the boring route taken by traditional game journalism. It’s good to see the evolution of the form – and of the reception of the form – at work.

This article on technology in Asia isn’t exactly novel, but it does touch a couple of my favorite bases: gender and techno-culture, the effect of big-box retailers in homogenizing consumption and diminishing novelty in the US, and high-tech toilets. Really, the toilets are amazing.

I found a link to this short piece by Slavoj Zizek in Andrew Sullivan’s blog, of all things (why do I read Andrew Sullivan’s blog? It’s a long story, but I’m sort of fascinated by the crisis of the gay conservative in America – perhaps I suspect that it runs to the heart of the crisis in American thought in the collapse of continuity between its scientific/technological sophistication and its religious/repressive impulses.)

One of the facets of the videogame/new media ascension that strikes me as both elusive and important is its relationship to the cognitive turn itself. Videogame pleasure occurs across of cognitive spectrum that prior forms of discourse – the poem, the novel, the film – left relatively untouched. The function of learning as pleasurable, across a number of cognitive and perceptual systems, is key to the motivation behind the game, and is, along with simulation and other more traditional elements of artistic production, constituent of the game itself (specifically the videogame in this case, and I’m willing to make this case later.) The videogame subject-position in toto, even more than the player position in any game, is explicity cognitive, is articulated by its fluencies, is held accountable for their navigation through the game-text-space by those fluencies.

I’ve seen works that try to exploit superficial aspects of videogame logics by people who simply do not have experience in engaging the variform cognitive demands into a game experience (whether pleasureable or not) to any real extent, and they suggest to me the same kind of crisis in ethics which Zizek discusses in relationship to biological intervention: the impulse is to protect the humanist, holistic conception of the subject against this segmentarity of function and post-humanist demand that the current subject as such is not the end of the story: the player who begins the demanding game is not yet good enough to finish it, and only in navigating through frustration and learning, and often somatizing skills or turning them into rotes outside of conscious awareness, do they become something they were not at the beginning of the experience – a qualified “reader”/player/gamer. The inadequacy returns at the beginning of the next game.

Works could be made the challenge that position, that subjectivity – or can exploit it as a canvas, as the substructural prerequisite to utilize the game-form in another type of discourse act. But that challenge is problematic when it simple comes from exteriority or an impatience with frustration – or simply a defense of older, humanist subjectivities in texts.

I have never been more impressed with Zizek, even if at times he abuses the idea of the cognitive tradition by conflating it with a kind of nativist determinism that doesn’t fit most of the cognitive scientists I know (he himself is repressing the history of his own lineage, I think – Dennett never was opposed to the notion of social relations as fundemental in subjectivity, it is largely a question of scope of analysis.) His own curiousity – too rare a feature among contemporary humanist thinkers – has lead him to a point of breakthrough.

I’m getting my footing here at UCSD. If there’s a slogan for my immediate future, it’s interdisciplinarity. In order to do the kind of deep-playing that I want – to access (some)games as richly as I think they can be accessed, I am now looking back at social cognition, learning theory, developmental models, even some cognitive semantics. At the same time, I intend to write historicizing texts and work in a critical tradition, not a primarily analytic one. I just need a theory of the playing subject that I can use, and I am starting to feel that those based on old psychodynamic models aren’t adequate.

Not that I’m some brave pioneer in this: I think I see James Paul Gee’s footprints on this beach, among many others. Before he wrote specifically on learning theory and video games, he wrote a number of books about discourse analysis, ideology and language. In my not-too-distant past life as a student of cognitive science, I had some inkling that its insights could be harnessed for more critical work, and it seems that James Gee was way ahead of me already.

Fortunately, I’m being encouraged to build connections and take seminars across a number of disciplines, from cognitive science to Japanese area studies. The problems are going to be plentiful, and methodology will not be the least of them.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just sent off my acceptance of an admission offer to the art history/theory/criticism PhD program at UCSD. I’ll be moving to San Diego at the end of the summer.

It’s a little early to be completely sure of what my program will look like, but my primary interests will probably remain in the study of videogames as texts and cultural artifacts, on transnational cultural flows in new media, and on borders, migration, and hybridism in/after globalization. Not only is San Diego a great place to study – with resources like the Pacific Rim Institute, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, and the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, the whole SoCal area is just brimming with possibilities.

Before then, I’m heading to E3 – there should be a small contingent of Ludonauts there.