The New Inquiry published a review by Michael Thomsen of my latest book How to Do Things With Videogames. It’s just the kind of review an author hopes for: fair, thoughtful, based on a thorough reading, and full of new ideas and observations. I’m grateful to Thomsen for writing it.
Thomsen raises an objection that I’ve been waiting for and expecting, and his review gives me a chance to respond to it:
Videogames aren’t a medium, but a subset of a medium, in the same way that long-form fictional cinema is a subset of the medium we might call “film.” Videogames contain an appreciable microecology of uses while being only a part of the larger medium of interactive systems, a category which includes Microsoft Office, browsers, and social networking systems.
It’s a reasonable claim: videogames are a kind of interactive software system. That’s true. And, we can talk about software as a medium too. Or about computer hardware in general. Or about particular computer hardware, like the Atari VCS. Such is the power and weirdness of McLuhan’s idea of a medium, particularly as I see it through the lens of object-oriented ontology: it’s all-inclusive. It’s fractal. It’s non-hierarchical. Television, after all, could be called a kind of film, or film a kind of photography. Making such claims both opens and closes different perspectives for analysis.
The media ecological argument I present in the book makes a case for construing videogames as a medium precisely to combat the perception that videogames come in one flavor or kind, akin to “long-form fictional cinema.” I make a case for the unique features of videogames, which doesn’t take anything away from other takes on that medium, or any other. Part of the project of media ecology involves choosing what we choose to pay attention to as a medium, and then making good on that choice.
Comments
Elijah Meeks
As a non-media studies type, I’ve always been nervous about discussing a medium for just that reason. I’ve been toying with the idea that Twitter, for instance, is a communication layer/protocol with several different media represented on it due to the vastly different uses of Twitter by different classes of actor based on my own primitive understanding of MacLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message: given that there are several different expressions of community on Twitter, I deduce that it must not be one medium. So it’s nice to read someone with a bit more experience with the theory giving time to acknowledge the ambiguity of the classification.
Tim Morton
I have written music using a videogame. But I have never played a videogame using iTunes.
I can imagine writing a poem with a videogame. But I can’t imagine playing a videogame with Word.
Sure the reviewer is correct. In the same way that a play is a subset of a medium that includes faces made out of sausages, eggs and mashed potato.
Joshua Comer
Without even getting into the important discussion of how the quite human conceptual artist fits into McLuhan’s theory, the idea of McLuhan as a non-hierarchical thinker amenable to object-oriented ontology has seemed to me a somewhat odd attempt at an appropriation of the guy since I heard mention of it on Levi’s blog.
McLuhan pretty clearly seems to premise his considerations on a Russian doll view of media. Here I don’t just mean to make a simplistic reference to his idea that the content of a medium is always another medium – to do so would overlook the significance of the quasi-autonomy of the particular levels of analysis that proliferate in his work which certainly demonstrate some of the affinity with OOO you point to. However, I want to emphasize the quasi.
Mediation as a basic degree of relation is the substance that provides the irreducible ground for McLuhan’s media theory. What’s worse for OOO is that this ground is thought itself for McLuhan, protean in all of the ways with which all but Shaviro in the OOO movement seem to have such great displeasure. The changing scale and endurance of the specific objects he surveys are inextricably shaped and linked by and from this substance, the changing sense ratios he charts reflecting different capacities for this vast and encompassing milieu to take and lend shape to objectifications of humanity, society, history, space, and time. To mix McLuhan metaphors, OOO may well encourage Narcissus to recognize the operational closure of his system of vanity, but that fish would fail to discover the determining role of the water in his reflection.
I can’t see this as an easily sidestepped issue. It is what leads McLuhan to engage in media studies, not medium studies. No matter how much you could emphasize his dialectical inversions and the quasi-autonomy of a particular medium, positivizing a medium in this way means you make it just another object. So be it, perhaps, and maybe media studies could benefit from more work along the lines of Evocative Objects while demonstrating greater philosophical daring, but I worry this trivializes in its specificity much of the significance suggested by the unique features you would highlight in your approach to games.
As much as the McLuhan-esque presentation style I admire is skillfully reflected by you, Harman, and Morton, and your similar desires to unseat established institutional views are needed and appreciated, the evident similarities stop there in my eyes. I look forward to having my blind spots pointed out to me as you and Levi develop your thinking.
Ian Bogost
Joshua, I’m not sure what to do with your comment. Levi and I aren’t interested in making some sort of sacrifice at the alter of McLuhan. We’re interested in taking his work and his thinking, which we very much like, in a slightly different direction. Does that help?
Joshua Comer
Permit me to take another short crack at it.
Acknowledging that your approach is something quite different from a vanilla reading of McLuhan lends some freedom from a tired critique by any orthodox McLuhanites of course, as does your permissiveness regarding other approaches. Following from above, I would like to know what the affiliation with McLuhan really lends to your approach. Or to ask it another way, what does your approach have to do with media as distinct from a thoughtful contemplation of coffee mugs?
Or in yet another way: How can media, not the media nor the plural of medium, the strange society of things at the level of run time for instance, be thought by OOO? How can we think from the perspective of media without reducing it to an effect of culture, code, and hardware, or taking it as something that only finds expression in the interface, or as an essential mediating substance?
Maybe the answer is obvious and spelled out in one of your books (or, given my coffee mug remark, A Slow Year) and I’m just being thick, but I would love some insight.
Ian Bogost
Joshua, the question of how to think about objects is at the heart of Harman, Bryant, Morton, and my OOO work. Not sure if you’ve had a chance to read any of their writing, but my book Alien Phenomenology will be out this winter.
Levi and I are reinterpreting McLuhan’s idea of media as a take on objects, a general one, a metaphysics. McLuhan already inches toward such a general theory of media-as-things, but focuses too strongly (for us, for our purposes) on human influence, use, and effect.
Joshua Comer
I am pretty familiar with their work and your own along those lines. I even hit up the September conference in NYC where I found your video moving, convincing, and concerning. In a large part, that video animates the particulars of my questioning here.
I am fully on board with jettisoning the human pilot in McLuhan. When I ask: “How can we think from the perspective of media without reducing it to an effect of culture, code, and hardware, or taking it as something that only finds expression in the interface, or as an essential mediating substance?” I really do mean to take the issue on as a subscriber to many of the premises of OOO, attentive to the need to avoid overmining and undermining objects. But I don’t see how to approach media without making any of the gestures I list above or vacating media studies.
On the first account, we seem to get over the problems quickly if we are alright with examining media as just a population of objects without any specifically interesting traits or tendencies that may distinguish it from Barbados, butter, or bird droppings. In that case we elect to drag media studies kicking and screaming fully back into the English department with Bill Brown. The use of McLuhan to effect that reversal, reading the killer of metaphysical content as an advocate of piecemeal interpretive philosophy, is either a strange choice or an effective institutional strategy, I can’t decide which.
But, to take your suggestion of an openness to simultaneous analyses at all levels, how can we then go on considering media in the singular as an object of study without seeing your appeal to medium-specific viewpoints as a well-intentioned but irreconcilable gesture of reductionism, a layer from which it conversely becomes impossible to think of media as a system without seeming as though you are in a free fall toward the elemental matter of infrastructure or leaping to touch the substance of communication?
I am sorry for being so wordy, this is a rare foray into blogging for me.
Ian Bogost
Joshua, I’m afraid I still don’t understand the question you are asking. I don’t see or understand the problems that are bothering you.
Perhaps it’s because there are two things going on here, really. One is a media studies sort of thing, which is what the original post was about. The other is an interpretation of McLuhan that adapts aspects of his thinking into metaphysics, under the premise that “medium” is just a synonym for “object.” We can do these two things simultaneously, and we can also allow the second to bleed into the first, wherefrom my invocation of McLuhan in the original post.
Joshua Comer
You’re right that it has to do with the crossed purposes. I suppose it must just be some learned incapacity on my part, but I can’t see how to cross the terms of those approaches without asserting that media is itself not an object and is reducible to discrete layers or a medium-by-medium catalog on one hand or an encompassing substance upon which its objects bubble into existence and perception on the other, both of which seem mutually exclusive and in some way contradictory to the tenets of OOO.
But I’ll stop trying to rephrase it for now and just confirm again my clearly overabundant level of interest in where you’re going.
Tim Morton
Joshua: “positivizing a medium in this way means you make it just another object.”
Right. That’s exactly what OOO doesn’t do.
Ian Bogost
Joshua, I think I see where the overlap arises in the original post, so thanks for showing me where there will be a need for clarification in future work that crosses that boundary.
Joshua Comer
Tim – Yes, that was certainly bad phrasing from the start, particularly given the audience I was trying to address! I hope my wording and intentions became clearer in my later posts, if only slightly.
Ian – Again, I look forward to seeing how you work things out. Trying to state my concerns here has certainly forced me to reckon with some of the foggier areas of my thinking where I have come to instinctively rely on implicit materialist assertions.