videoludica. game culture 

MIT Press recently released Unit Operations. An Approach to Game Criticism. We spoke to the author, Ian Bogost, who works as an Assistant Professor of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. Ian is also an indefatigable bloggers, speaker, game designer.

What is the real function of game criticism?

Like literary, art, and film criticism, game criticism should give historical, cultural, and personal context to videogames. It should treat videogames as a medium with its own properties, but it must connect and correlate individual games with the broader tradition of expression. Videogame criticism should be comparative, it should not isolate games as a media form. Videogame criticism should explore what a game has to say about the condition of being human.

What is the state game criticism, today? Where will it be in five years from now?

Game criticism today is in its infancy. There is plenty of game research to be sure, but not enough of it has focused on deep analysis of specific games. This is a startling state of affairs really, considering that close readings of poetry, literature, art, film, and photography have been a backbone of academic criticism. Italy takes a unique exception to this rule; I think more close readings of videogames have probably been published in Italian in the Ludologica/Videoludica series than in any other language. I hope that in five years, we'll see a thriving game criticism practice, with more publications focusing on specific games and how they produce meaning. I try to offer an approach to such a comparative procedural criticism in Unit Operations.

What are unit operations?

Unit operations are expressive techniques that build meaning out of configurations of encapsulated parts, or "units." In computing, unit operational expression is akin to procedurality. In games, we usually call them rules. But I wanted a more general concept for discrete, interlocking units of meaning. The book is fundamentally about comparative criticism, and unit operations is my attempt at a concept that allows critics to read literature, film, games, art, and other media as processes.

How can literary theory help us understanding games better?

Literary theory has a long tradition of close reading. This is something I find lacking in game studies in general-we don't see enough sustained, detailed readings of games. Obviously, we can't just adopt the literary model directly; there are material differences between games and literature. But we can adopt the perspective of the literary critic, who is really interested in getting to the bottom of a work's meaning at a very high level of detail.

Do you think that game studies are a marginalized field in academia? Can they break out of the cage or will they remain a marginal pursuit?

It is a marginalized field, but I'm increasingly concerned about isolationism. In the "early days" of game studies, if we can even use such a term, a number of people-folks I respect very much by the way- focused on establishing game studies as a new field. They waged a battle against disciplines like literature and film colonizing games. And they had valid concerns. But if we really want to be serious about understanding videogames as cultural artifacts, we have to address their role in the broader context of all human expression- dramatic, poetic, literary, filmic, artistic-not just play, or non- digital games, or computation.

Link:Unit Operations. An Approach to Game Criticism by Ian Bogost, MIT Press, 2006.

Link:WaterCoolerGames.