Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
MIT Press has just published my new book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism!
I try to do two things in the book. First, I describe a kind of criticism that accounts for both computation and critical theory, which I hope will bridge computer science and humanism. "Unit Operations" is my shorthand for a general theory of procedurality that includes computational, literary, artistic, filmic, and plastic expression. Second, I use this approach to perform a series of comparative critiques of a variety of games in relation to other forms of expression like poetry, novels, and film. I also talk about fun and videogames with an agenda, although I'm finishing a new manuscript now that takes on the latter topic more directly.
There has been much work contextualizing videogames in relation to games, or collapsing videogames into digital art or film or narrative, but very little work that tries to understand rule-based systems as a general expressive domain of which videogames are a one. This is part of what I try to do in the book, hopefully opening a space for more comparative videogame criticism.
Click through for the official description from the press.
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.
Did I mention you can buy it now from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller?
Information is Beautiful
The Art History of Games
The Art History of Games
Objects & Things
Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
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