Ian Bogost - Arch-Obscurantist In the House

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Arch-Obscurantist In the House

A note from my critics

November 25, 2009

short url: http://bogo.st/37

tags: cynicism , philosophy , videogames

I have many critics. Critics are helpful, wonderful creatures who produce as much pleasure as ire, partly because they provide amusement as often as commentary. Normally I don't respond to the more vocally invective ones, but I'm making an exception for "videogames bitch-site" Remedial Waste. They offer the Remedial Lexicon, a list of "unsound videogame terminology." It's mostly vituperation sans cleverness, with the obvious exception of this gem:

Bogostese: (pron. Bog-ost-eez) po-faced highbrow bullshit, beloved by Gamasutra, and invented by soi-disant videogame “academics” to describe parts of games that could be understood perfectly well by a six year-old: “narratology”, for example means “plot” (or studying it), and “procedural rhetoric” means “making your point using a videogame”. Named after the arch-obscurantist ludo-philosophe Ian Bogost, who is gaming’s answer to Jacques fucking Derrida.

I could point out the erroneous claims, such as the fact that narratology is a term of Todorov's in widespread use, or that my Gamasutra articles are easily the least effective example of esotericism in all of my writing, but what's the fun in that? At the very least, my posting of this should prove that I can't be called po-faced! All your obscurantism is belong to us!

Comments (7)

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'Jacques' - 'fucking' - 'Derrida'??

Brilliant.

However, rather than rolling around in his grave I think Derrida would have been quite proud of those concluding three words.

Robert Jackson on November 26, 2009 4:51 AM

Robert: since just yesterday I wrote about another Derrida hater I was quite irritated by those words. Then again, I read your comment, and I think you are quite right.

Fabio Cunctator on November 26, 2009 7:29 AM

Plus it's nice to know your on some kind of radar. My own personal enemy is someone from the UK who keeps doing google searches for my name + some term of abuse about 10 times in a row. This then appears via my academia.edu ''who searched for you bit leaving me confused/terrified/bemused all at once and on a daily basis.

Paul Ennis on November 26, 2009 8:05 AM

Fabio, Robert, I even considered censoring my reprint of the definition, but then I reconsidered and left it as-is.

Paul, that's a bit creepy indeed. It's like stalking/abuse-by-proxy.

Ian Bogost on November 26, 2009 9:27 AM

Paul writes:

Plus it's nice to know your on some kind of radar. My own personal enemy is someone from the UK who keeps doing google searches for my name + some term of abuse about 10 times in a row. This then appears via my academia.edu ''who searched for you bit leaving me confused/terrified/bemused all at once and on a daily basis.

I confess that I sometimes get a Mark David Chapman (killer of John Lennon) vibe from some of these cyber-stalkers. The sheer amount of energy that goes into their stalking, writing diary after diary on you and never missing a chance to post an ugly comment is just plain creepy. I find myself wondering "is this guy going to show up at one of my talks one day and shoot me?" "Will he abduct my daughter?" Clearly I need to stop watching crime documentaries on the Investigation Discovery Channel, but the psychological parallels between these sorts of obsessives and cyber-stalkers can be extremely disturbing, and I can never figure out what motivates such folks or how they can get so worked up about lil ol me.

Levi on December 2, 2009 11:32 AM

Ian Fucking Bogost, is what.

The good story I heard was from a friend who was visiting a movie set where Judi Dench was practicing her craft. She had a side project, for her down time. She was embroidering on a pillow, "Judi Fucking Dench"

c2588 on December 7, 2009 7:20 PM

...my Gamasutra articles are easily the least effective example of esotericism in all of my writing

Indeed, Racing the Beam is filled with obscurantist mumbo-jumbo like "NUSIZ0", "matrix of diodes" and "RIOT registers" (the latter presumably some sort of techno-revolutionary fantasy).

Mark N. on December 14, 2009 7:43 PM

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