in a little while / i'll be gone

Initial responses to my off-hand reference to an analytic/persuasive divide in the critical videogame blogosphere ranged from incomprehension to ardent agreement, and even a blog post ‘In defence of trolling’ (about which I’m still not sure how to respond other than to say I’m flattered the author thought my ideas worth responding to). In my post I attempted to lay out the case for a detrimental propensity towards the analytic in the critical videogame blogosphere. But I don’t want to labour that particular point – I have no axe to grind against anyone interested in analysing videogames in whichever terms produce the most productive and interesting results.

Instead I’d like to argue the immanent need for an addition of videogame writing unconstrained by a slavish or misplaced adherence to analysis and criticism, a writing much more interested in exploring the rhetorics of persuasion. After laying out what I think is the case for this assessment I’ll go on to point towards some examples of both to help make clear the differences between these two otherwise superficially similar approaches.

The difference was highlighted for me recently by Graham Harman’s defence of the rhetorical flourishes and cognitive poetics of ‘continental’ philosophy vs. its dry, ‘analytic’ counterpart. According to Harman,

For the analytics the great enemies of human thought are fuzziness, non sequiturs, lack of clarity, poetic self-indulgence, and insufficiently precise terminology. I disagree with this threat assessment. In my view these are all relatively minor problems in comparison with shallowness, false dichotomies, lack of imagination, robotic chains of reasoning, and the aggressive self-assurance that typifies analytic philosophers at their worst. (Prince of Networks, p.167)

Harman is responding to allegations levelled by fellow philosopher Quentin Meillassoux that a particular argument about the nature of the human/world correlate (basically an argument over whether anything at all can be accessed separate from how it exists to us, that is, subjectively) is one based on a rhetorical trick rather than a substantive or logical argument. Harman’s disagreement stems from seeing the value in rhetoric that goes beyond an adherence to air-tight, steely logical reasoning – a point that is as close as may well be the main point of difference between ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. Harman turns to Alfred North Whitehead for assistance in disassembling Meillassoux’s argument. Whitehead diagnoses an unhealthy influence on philosophy coming from mathematics, and Whitehead being both a philosopher and mathematician in his time, would be one to know:

…the primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy [by contrast] is descriptive generalization. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foistered upon philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. (Whitehead in Prince of Networks, p.169)

For Harman, as I noted in my initial fêting of the idea, “Rhetoric is not the devious art of non-rational persuasion, but the best tool we have for exposing the unstated assumptions that lie behind any surface proposition.” (p.169) Under the influence of mathematics, philosophy has been pressured into conforming to “robotic chains of reasoning” that do little to capture the background reality of a given situation. An interesting point, certainly, but perhaps you are far from ready to diagnose the same issue within videogame writing; if so the connection should soon become clear. A last final quotation from Harman sums up the analytic misstep:

…To say that philosophy is built of arguments is like saying that architecture is a matter of arranging steel girders. It is certainly true that no building can stand with faulty engineering, but there are many ways to arrange steel beams and make them stand. (p.168)

The pieces are now starting to assemble – we have an argument over objectivity and subjectivity; a machine-like adherence to deduction; and a mistake about the nature of a discipline. I’ll borrow another technique Harman uses frequently and address them at length in numerical order:

1. First, ask yourself what is still the number one issue to overcome when writing about games? Is it not the question about objective and subjective reading and response, a question which even though temporarily resolved so frequently reasserts itself with the exhausting predictability of a jack-in-the-box? Why is it that so much writing about games seems timid and content, afraid to reach for the really interesting, the really ambitious arguments that are lying just out of reach of any mere ‘objective’ assessment of the facts? It takes real courage to stretch beyond the realm of pure analysis, beyond assembling a case from ‘facts’, and create an argument that, while perhaps not airtight, contains a seed of inner truth.

Some have succeeded in this area and I will name a few of them here: Tom Bissell frequently reaches lofty peaks in his arguments and while many may (and do) disagree with him, if a reader holds any sympathy at all to the logical base or seed of truth within his reasoning they will not leave unconvinced. Reading Bissell feels like watching the constructing of a mountain of prose that, while often precarious, is never droll or unpersuasive.

I also think Tim Rogers takes a very similar approach, starting from the same intuitive understanding perhaps, even though I personally dislike his style. Rogers’ frequent attempts to build higher mountains than even Bissell comes from with a more ad-hoc, ‘quality through sheer quantity’ approach; a “brute force” philosophy of persuasion. In that regard, I greatly respect his commitment and determination while harbouring little desire to emulate his style.

Jonathan McCalmont is also most commonly found writing in the persuasive or ‘continental’ style. As the author of the blog post I mentioned earlier questions, “Isn’t reading Dead Space as a metaphor for Capitalist Realism perhaps stretching the analysis a bit too far?” Yes, but since the results are so wonderfully imaginative, producing such strange and succulent fruits I want to do more than just nod along approvingly; I want to evangelise it from the rooftops! This is what we should be doing! This is he kind of writing that will convince people (convince ourselves, even) that videogames can actually matter. And before anyone accuses me of it, the continental or persuasive approach does not require, nor result in, a kind of vacation from reality or the truth. Much as analysis does not equate to ‘criticism’, a mere marshalling of the facts plain and simple does not equate to ‘the truth’ either.

Again – no argument here is ever certain and therein lies much of the beauty. Certainty does not resolve itself into the truth, or even always to validity, and I feel that is a crucial mistake we game critic/writer types so often make at our own peril. It’s why in the past I’ve been reactionary regarding some attempts at defining terms. Certainty, definitiveness; these are not, and should not be our goals here. We should listen when Harman cautions us that, “the analytic contempt for rhetoric and metaphor must not be emulated – not just because this attitude leads to boring results, but because it is philosophically false.” (p.169)

2. Next, ask yourself which discipline has been the most foundational and integral to the development of videogames up to the current? Is it not computer science – that tragic mix of mathematics, science and technology that attempts to relentlessly stamp out errant belief in fudging rules with respect to discrete bits and bytes? I don’t blame the computer scientists for foisting onto us an unhealthy reliance on concreteness, definitiveness and finitude – it’s more our fault for letting them.

Like Whitehead for philosophy and mathematics, I feel quite strongly that videogame writing and criticism has allowed itself to be unduly influenced by technologists in the computer sciences. Yes, just because we can point to a very certain fact about a videogame based on discrete bits of data (“The change in sniper rifle reload time had X effect”) does not in anyway mean we should be building arguments about meaning or affect from them. The main way, I think, games writing has tried to escape from the tyranny of this issue has been through New Games Journalism. But sadly this turn follows a similar retreat in philosophy!

When science began to come to grips with explanations for the world, philosophy lost its traditional object to work on and shrank inwards, confining its scope to the human realm of inner experience. This project reached its seemingly final conclusion with the correlationist argument (about which Meillassoux and Harman are mentioned above arguing) that, as humans, we are unable to escape the confines of our nature and existence as subjects. “There can be no access to the world as it is in-itself, but only as it is for-us” asserts the correlationist. Suffice to say, you won’t find many correlationists maintaining this position when faced with the pressing reality of mortar rounds air bursting overhead – and while that fact is not perhaps a ‘logical’ or analytical argument against its veracity, instead a rhetorical one, it is hardly less valid for that fact. (For a more ‘logical’ advancement of an argument against the correlationist position, however, see Meillasoux’s first chapter in After Finitude.)

Harman tells us that a well built rhetorical argument “…still performs genuine cognitive labour.” (Prince of Networks, p.170) The point of a rhetorical argument, he reminds us, is not to poke a logical hole in any given position but “…by suggesting both the need for new options and the possibility of new options” the rhetorical statement does “real cognitive work” (p.171). In Harman’s context as a teacher of philosophy he informs us that even raising the possibility of alternatives “often has a profound philosophical effect on listeners, opening countless new doors and windows” (p.172).

3. I am hoping that by having raised alternative possibilities in the reader’s mind that I can now proceed to persuade you that many of our collective assumptions about the nature of criticism, and videogame criticism in particular, are wrong. We are not out to build an argument, we are out to persuade. We are not out to prove anything, and we should for the most part give up trying. About Philosophy, Harman tells us that Whitehead himself stressed,

…the inability of arguments, propositions, explicit evidence, or tangible qualities to do justice to the world. As Marshall McLuhan might say, to claim that a philosophy is made of arguments is like saying that an apple is nothing but a bundle of qualities – that there is nothing more to the apple than the sum of its explicit traits. (p.175)

For too long we have ignored the cognitive and textual dimension of the aspect of writing and blogging about games, and to our detriment. We can no longer lean on the essay format blog post as a crutch. It is for the slow realisation of this fact that we are seeing the proliferation of writing about games spill out of the blogosphere and into such places as the pages of the excellent KillScreen Magazine and things like Matthew Kumar’s .exp ‘zine. The rhetorical power of print itself over the irresistible mutability of blogs is probably doing more for games criticism than 1,000 posts by Michael Abbott, Mitch Krpata, David Carlton, Leigh Alexander or myself.

Similarly, beyond the form itself, the form of the content (i.e. words) needs to be addressed – as I said, the essay format needs shaking up. How many blog posts about one aspect or feature of a videogame have you read recently that lamely finished a half -second early? I encounter this kind of post all the time, and will readily confess to doing exactly the same in innumerable posts of my own.

Just this past week I read two that did exactly this – and I’m being very unfair to these excellent authors that I am picking on, for which I apologise – the first by Laura Michet at Second Person Shooter comparing the social unacceptability of climbing on low furniture to climbing in Assassins Creed. Reading that particular piece I reached the end and experienced a frustration that could have sent me screaming. “Is that it?!” I wanted to shout. It is this tragic early conclusion of an otherwise potentially stunning and truly courageous argument that I am critiquing here. The analysis is all there – Michet labels it ‘revelation-analysis’ which is as good a name for it as any, yet it ends right at the point of ‘revelation’ when it could have gone on to form an argument about… something. I no longer want to be conveyed information, I want to be persuaded.

The second post was by Jorge Albor of the prodigious Experience Points blog. ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ opens with such a promising premise – an examination of the unstated background assumptions of Civilization V’s Barbarians. A target better suited to some rhetorical elaboration I could hardly imagine. Albor assembles the facts like a curios botanist might overturn a moss covered rock to see what grows underneath, and the facts are indeed worth assembling and investigating, however, Albor closes out the post before taking down any notes on what he finds under there. It finishes before reaching anything like its full potential. Much of the blame for this occurrence I place squarely at the foot of the blog format. It is hardly ideal for the effective persuasion of an audience, as a number of studies of the ‘ideal’ blog post have found. But it is the medium we have chosen to work with, so we must find a way to make it work, or else forever lose the title of ‘critics’.

Before I close, I would like to point to a couple of pieces of game criticism that have successfully gone beyond analysis and deployed persuasion and rhetoric effectively in different ways. Mitch Krpata utilizes visual rhetoric in ‘Using the Sniper Rifle in Killzone 2: A photo tutorial’. Through a few minimalist panels Krpata conveys more about the controls of that game, immediately imparting the frustrations and absurd complexity of using the Sniper Rifle in that game. The extremely short post persuades better than some vitriolic ten thousand word essay describing the same issues in excruciating detail. Equally, that very method is as mentioned above the modus operandi of Tim Rogers. I don’t have a favourite example to link to, but his Kotaku piece ‘Lets Talk About Jumping’ is a good demonstration of his approach.

Tom Bissell has a book, Extra Lives, that is filled with examples of beatific rhetoric and effective persuasion that, to my mind, demonstrates the importance and validity of the approach better than this already lengthy blog post probably ever could. For examples on the internet, try his contribution to the Slate end of year discussion, or better still, his Extra Lives extract published in the UK’s Observer newspaper.

Funnily enough, Jonathan McCalmont told me he was actually trained in the analytic school of philosophy yet he ends up reaching the persuasive position I am upholding here through a double focus: firstly on thoroughly researched topics driven to their extreme conclusion, and secondly by maintaining an unswerving commitment to the bigger picture. From examining the connection between consumerism as self-identification and role-playing game item collection; to ‘The Changing Face of The American Apocalypse’ which is a smart dissection of cultural and political shifts that are working themselves out in videogame spaces. Even when he’s reaching, as some have suggested, his arguments are worth examining for the ‘cognitive work’ they do to expose background assumptions.

Lastly, a thick layer of dust has settled over Dustin Gunn’s ‘Indie Gaming Bingo’, a blog that more effectively skewered indie gaming tropes than any other source. By utilizing the bingo card trope, Gunn disarmed visitors to his site through humour and persuaded readers of the over-use of piano music and the platforming genre in Indie Games. He also did more to undermine the often too-serious tone that indie games can often get trapped into.

To close, I will recapitulate the points I want to get across in this leviathan post: 1. the nature of the subjective reading/response argument gives us urgent and powerful clues about the nature of argument, discussion and persuasion as they apply to games criticism, 2. the conviction of computer scientists of the cold certainty of facts should not be shared by videogame critics, bloggers, and writers, and, 3. having raised the first two points, I think it is now much more likely to be agreed that not only are alternatives to sheer analysis possible, but that they are also crucially important for the development of the field of game criticism. The elaboration of revelatory facts and interesting information has carried us far, but is no longer enough. Whatever form of rhetoric it takes, the earnest persuasion of our audience should be our immediate and pressing concern.

- Ben Abraham, December 19^th, 2010

Last Tuesday I deactivated my Facebook account, resolving to spend less time with the web-based service. I spent a week without the online service and here follows a list of some things the benefit of distance caused me to think about or encounter.

• Firstly, I had completely habituated the automatic process of opening the Facebook page. I found myself doing it completely without any conscious thought. This habit took a couple of days to get over.

• Related to the above: Perhaps this habituation is a way to approach the internet in general. We build a set of websites and frequent them because the internet doesn’t present itself with an easy ‘in’. Just using the internet presents a problem for the human being – there’s too much of it, and where do we begin? So we build habits of use, sites we rely on. Facebook, Twitter, blogs that update regularly, etc.

• It’s very hard, at first, to decide what to use all that new spare time on when you don’t have the instant gratification of Facebook to plug into. Should I read? Or listen to music? Should I cook something? Should I get some exercise? That you are even asking these questions means you’ve already taken longer than the muscle-memory operation of opening Facebook in a new browser tab. That was a frustration for quite some time.

• It requires non-trivial effort to maintain even a similar level of connectivity with people via email, phone/text, etc if you are averse to using Facebook. I had several valuable conversations via email, but the vast majority of people I typically interacted with in any given week on Facebook I didn’t hear from or speak to elsewhere for the duration. There is a whole class of people I only speak to on Facebook.

• Sharing interesting internet things with friends is much harder (if not outright impossible). If I had to pick one thing I really, really missed about Facebook it was the ability to instantly share something with a large group of people. I’m not sure what that says about me, however, and whether I’m alone in seeing the appeal in that.

• Conversely, however, the world doesn’t end when your friends don’t see that crazy video of the latest uncannily-human-looking-robot out of Japan, even if you think, nay know, people would enjoy it. That was a valuable realisation.

• People do miss you on Facebook when you leave, and as above, you become intimately aware that by not using Facebook you’re making yourself just a little bit more difficult to contact. Not on chat, only available by phone or email, etc. You are being a minor nuisance, Is how it feels.

• We are, all 500 million of us, entirely at the mercy of the design of Facebook, and at the mercy of our psychological and evolutionary predispositions. That little red box with a ‘1’ in it is so very, very hard to ignore, and there is no way to change any function of Facebook (aside from privacy controls, etc) and given that they are trying their absolute hardest to monetise and optimise your clicks and eyeballs, I find it dis-empowering that we get no say in these kind of developments. If I could, I would turn off or change the way notifications are displayed.

• Yet I’m also painfully aware that this desire or expectation is not found outside of digital environments – at least not to the same extreme degree. We can (and often do!) complain about things like the fact that our car steering makes driving a chore and gives us sore muscles, but because the technology is so utterly dependent on the function of metal, plastic, oil, gear-ratios, (things that are hard to change quickly, or at all) we tend to grit and bear it. Within the digital environment, everything is instantly and immediately modifiable in a theoretical sense, if not necessarily in a technical one. Is this an unrealistic expectation, wanting to decide or have some say over core software functionality? I do not know. But certainly Diaspora, Crabgrass, et al. look set to cater to more of that kind of expectation.

• Related to the above, I still don’t have an active and viable strategy to mitigate the harm of my constant Facebook usage. I didn’t want to come back until I could somehow ensure that I wouldn’t fall back into the obsessive habits of  constant connectivity. But as Douglas Coupland said, “In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness”. Having now tried it and found a lesser state of connectedness actually and technically possible…. I now know lesser-connectedness is not quite worth the trade off. Perhaps self-discipline is the only answer, or regular de-habituation sessions like this week.

• Lastly, my mum told me that she missed me on Facebook. I think her words were along the lines of “I feel like I’ve lost one of my eyes” (she has only a few friends on Facebook – most prolific are myself and my brother). Facebook as a way to reassure people you’re still alive, know where you are, and what you are doing (both in good and not-unproblematic surveillance kind of ways) is not a new thing, but it’s worth being reminded of every so often.

After a very productive meeting with my PhD supervisor today I want to try distil some of the renewed focus my project has gained.

My PhD project, tentatively called ‘An Actor Network Theory assessment of online community creation’, is all about the critical videogame blogosphere and how it came about.

There’s a bunch of assumptions already present in the title which Actor Network Theory will help me unpack – for starters a massive part of the ‘community’ is its shape and constitution. Who’s “in” and who’s “out”, and that process of contestation will be a big part of the analysis. Case in point – the phrase that was applied to a list of blogs that were all running at similar or related purposes was “The Brainysphere”. The true originator of the phrase is now lost to time and collective memory (I think it may have actually been a Roger Travis invention, and his alternative ‘the middle circle’ remains much more enduring), but it was first deployed with any serious impact by Dan Golding in his “Mapping the Brainysphere: 29 blogs switched-on gamers should read”.

That post, published on January 1^st 2009 was part of a general zeitgeist concerned with making the community more accessible, and in particular, easier to find. That zeitgeist culminated, for me, in Critical Distance which has been (with a few notable exceptions) remarkably well received and an overwhelmingly positive development. Incidentally, those notable exceptions are extremely closely tied to the same issues that got Dan Golding and others into some hot water viz. the shape of the community based on the inclusion/exclusion of certain blogs, voices and perspectives from ‘The Brainysphere’. In fact, the word itself was banished from the vocabulary because it served to place (not entirely unfairly, but quite problematically) Michael Abbott and his blog ‘The Brainy Gamer’ at the centre of the videogame blogosphere.

This is all to say that my research project is a case study in applying Actor Network Theory to the videogame blogosphere, and I recently stumbled upon ‘A brief actor network theory history of speculative realism’ by Levi Bryant, a member of the Speculative Realism blogosphere. Now that particular rhizome of bloggers and the history of their formation, oddly enough, quite elegantly mirrors the story I have told above, with a diverse cast of actors deploying their time and effort in interesting and profitable ways. Bryant summarises the happy and unanticipated accidents that brought together the disparate group of bloggers under the umbrella term ‘Speculative Realism’, and it provides a great blueprint for my own (eventually much longer!) take on the formation of the critical videogame blogosphere.

Bryant also mentions in his brief history, a term used by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the tuche. Here’s Bryant explaining the concept:

Now, the tuche or missed encounter refers to the phenomenological structure of anticipation in our cognition. Tuche is that event that happens when one wasn’t anticipating or expecting it. It can be something like getting in a car accident, winning the lottery, meeting the love of your life, or being hit by lightning. The point is that it didn’t fit the structure of anticipation.

And weirdly enough, this idea seemed to have resonance with my previous posts on ‘the tenor of experience’. The tuche seems to fit the bill exactly for the initiating event that serves to kick off the process of an altered tenor of experience.

To put the concept into a practical example: a fortnight ago I very much had no anticipation of finding myself kissing a beautiful young woman, and it’s very tuche-ness threw my sense of regular experience for the following few days. The aftershocks, if you will, are still making themselves known even weeks later in minor and unanticipated ways. Mini-tuche events happening in sympathy to the original, or something like that.

Conversely, when Michael Abbott said in an IRC chat discussion back in early ‘09 “Ben, why don’t you make it happen” (referring to the creation of a website or aggregate portal site that organised and cemented the critical blogosphere, i.e. Critical Distance) I had already anticipated to a degree performing that kind of role. I had not, however, wanted to volunteer feeling as I did as though I were a bit of a minor player in the community.

That early insecurity probably played a big part in some of the early mistakes I made (and which I perhaps continue to make) but the technological environment of the internet itself also had a hand. There is no middle-ground to including or excluding a website in a blogroll or list of ‘must read’ articles – it either ‘makes the cut’ for relevance or it doesn’t, and that at times has placed an unbearable burden on my own judgement. I’m as fallible as anyone, and I’ve failed in that judgement before. I probably will again as I continue Critical Distance, but my failures are amplified by the nature of the technology. To use Latourian vocabulary, the technology is as much a formant of the blogosphere and its formation as I am. The inability for some to recognise that technology itself played a hand (or my inability to communicate this point at the time) caused me no end of grief, and serious personal anguish.

But that insight into the nature of the network that plays out between ‘people’ and ‘the internet’ is what’s driving my PhD project, so I should also be extremely thankful. My PhD research has already taken me to some wonderfully interesting places and I hope that insight or intuition or hypothesis continues to act as such an exemplary guide in future.

Two quick links both worth reading for their applicability to my previous idea of the tenor of experience: the first, Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland ‘A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years‘. Too many points to mention them all here, but the list is deeply unsettling and perhaps suggests that our collective tenor of experience is going to continue pitch-shifting upwards into a higher register as we get further and further into the future.

Interestingly, my comments when linking this piece on Facebook were quite reflexive, both commenting on my embrace of “the radical contradictions that will be necessary in our beautiful future-topia” and noting that my linking embodied “the principles of points number 10, 17 and 37″.

Speaking of Facebook, this brings us to the second piece worth reading: an interview with the always interesting Geert Lovink. There’s a strange push-pull dynamic in much of Lovink’s interviews and writing. It’s like he’s aware of the techno-determinist discourse that so often infects new media (or Net Critique as his blog says) talk, especially from the silicon valley, tech startup types, and yet he can’t seem to resist falling into some of it’s tendencies. There’s a certain teleology in the following excerpt that I can’t help but wonder about:

…we have seen the development from blogger.com to the stand-alone WordPress, and now we’re back again with the centralized, easy-to-use Tumblr platform. These things go back and forth. The next wave will be decentralized Twitter services. So what?

So what, indeed. How, as the budding Latourian social theorist that I am, can I interpret Lovink’s interview? Is he privvy to some secret of a new “decentralized twitter” version in development at TwitHQ? And even if so, how can he reasonably say what will happen when the several million users of Twitter are presented with the choice to move toward some kind of distributed twitter?

And yet Loving is as much an actor in the field as anyone else, so it’s possible his own efforts can do more work in terms of constructing the future of the net than would happen if he said nothing of the sort. But the whole network of associations is much, much larger than even the reasonably influential Lovink’s circle of influence extends, so he leaves himself open to the possibility of being mistaken about the future “decentralized Twitter”.

Then again, when he is proven “right” perhaps he stands to gain more than he would lose! If correct, his status as internet “guru” is reinforced, and always open is the possibility of having one’s earlier mistaken predictions forgotten about (or argued out of).

To return to the tenor of experience, Lovink’s interview is a kind of ambivalent, equivocating  rumination on the future of the social network – and the role of social networks in altering the tenor of experience (see Coupland’s piece and point #10 about being unable to “go back” to a state of lesser connectedness) is extremely important.

The tenor of experience is not just determined by extraordinary events, but by the shape and texture of day to day happenings. Coupland again with his point #29 – “You will have more say in how long or short you wish your life to feel”.

Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

That seems like a very apt point, and one I’ve been considering ever since starting my PhD research (it’s a grain of a thought present in Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”). Right now I’m typing this, listening to some very excellent electronica on the radio and hearing the sounds of my housemate and his girlfriend playing Bomberman in the loungeroom. And that’s before accounting for the process of thinking as an activity in itself.

Anyone interested in exploring the change of tenor that less layers of activity brings? I’m going to suggest listening to some music and doing nothing else, for starters. Close your eyes if it helps you avoid distraction (it helps me).

There’s a young man living in Brisbane who wears a sweet hat, talks really fast and with his weekly videos critiquing and criticising videogames draws multiple millions of views from around the world. His name is Yahtzee, he’s a British-born Australian, and he’s the king of videogame critics.

My thesis is about online videogame critics like Yahtzee and the communities that have grown up around them over the past number of years. Videogame criticism is still a pretty new deal – as recently as 2006 Chuck Klosterman noted in Esquire magazine that “There is no Lester Bangs of videogames”. Bangs being a bit of a rock star music critic of the 60’s and 70’s. Today there are literally hundreds of amateur and semi-professional videogame critics writing for hundreds of blogs and websites, and since 2007 when I first included myself in their number, I have seen the community explode with activity. My research will look into the particular community I’ve been involved with, document its emergence and characteristics, and use it as the focal point to examine three broad themes.

The first is inspired by an increasing wealth of literature that spells out the co-dependent relationship the human mind has with technology. It is becoming evident that far from simply shaping technology as in the great enlightenment narrative, rather human cognition is to an equal or greater extent shaped by the technology it engages with. How we evaluate the beneficial, detrimental, or ambivalent nature of those changes is an area still in development.

The technology central to my research, and the second broad area of investigation, is the internet. The globalised space of the internet would at first seem to repel or diminish expressions of nationality, but mounting evidence and my own observations suggests that the actuality runs counter to this. For a nation of a mere 20 million, there certainly seem to be a heck of a lot of Australian videogame critics operating on the internet – and Yahtzee, who I mentioned earlier, is just one of them. Why and to what extent the online community of critics attracts or encourages expressions of nationality will be investigated.

Thirdly and finally, I will attempt a reading of the critical videogame community on the internet as a place of resistance to neoliberal principles of capital. I will attempt to argue that internet communities, and the critical videogame community in particular, presents itself as an expression of disillusionment with and resistance to, “the right of capital to exercise its sovereign power wherever and over whomever it chooses” to quote Terry Eagleton. Nine times out of ten these critics do their work and give it away for free, and I think that’s significant.

In conclusion, the arrival of these communities of like-minded authors and critics, working together to develop ideas and expand a field of criticism, expressing cultures and identities that are both global and locally based, has been enabled by one of the most revolutionary technologies of the past hundred years. The Internet and the videogame critic, that’s the subject of my research.

Capitalist Realism is the name of a rather new book by Mark Fisher, author of the K-Punk blog. Between the book’s quite stylish covers and in a relatively small number of pages Fisher outlines the pervasive, totalising power of capitalist realism, a political economy that says “Capitalism may not be the best, but there’s nothing better”. Built into the system is an inherent anti-capitalism that on-the-ground, that is, where it affects real people, makes the acknowledgment that “yeah, capitalism causes lots of problems but there’s nothing we can do about it”. Accordingly, that has become a realistic fact-of-life and no one is to blame since, after all, “Who really is it that actually wants poverty?”

Capitalist realism’s decentered existence (there is no-one to blame when it fucks up) deflects the issue from one of systemic failures and onto issues of personal responsibility; onto “What we can practically do”. It’s only suggestion is that if we bought the right products, like Bono’s product Red brand, then we could solve the world’s problems. It’s not capitalism’s fault that we’re so selfish!

In his final two chapters, Fisher points out that the political left needs to undertake a massive re-imagining or reinvention of a “collective will” to replace the methodological individualism that is a cornerstone of Capital with a big C. One of capitalist realism’s great successes has been in making the “alternatives” (note the deliberate use of scare quotes) appear untenable and unworkable, rather than replacing capitalism with a system that actually works, the end result being the current situation where we have a system that doesn’t work but we all have to pretend that it does.

Cynicism and pragmatism are the abiding dispositions of capitalist realism because it has embedded itself in our imaginations as the new natural order – as just the way things have to be done now. Fisher points to Lacanian psychoanalysis’s principal of “The Real” which “is not synonymous with reality” for our first warning that this is not the case. When we protest the failures and excesses of capitalism, we acknowledge the real-existing-reality and it’s incongruity with the vision of The Real as presented by capitalist realism. But for ‘the system’ to work, someone (or something) has to believe in its convenient fiction, and this is what Fischer describes as the big Other (another Lacanian term).

About a third to half-way into reading Mark Fishers incredibly thought provoking and quite punchy little book, I felt myself getting more and more depressed by capitalist realism’s pervasive irresistibility and it’s accepted position as natural or inevitable. The inability to resist capitalist realism’s seduction is a further amplifying affect, and I began to spiral into a kind of despair that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seriously faced the impossibility of the end of their own existence. To escape the spiral of despair, I got to thinking about alternatives, of which Fisher seems to only hint at in his final two chapters.

A lot of the books I’ve been reading lately about culture and technological change talk about artists and artisans pioneering ideas before philosophers come in to neatly colonise the ground they’ve ploughed with their tools (and that’s not meant as a criticism of philosophers). As a bit of a self-styled artist, working primarily in the medium of words, I thought I’d employ a little bit of bricolage as an attempt at a new strategy to figure out the name for an alternative to replace/supersede/expose capitalist realism before actually nailing out what it will actually do. So here are a few quick ideas and notes on them:

- Capitalist Absurdism
In this absurd political economy we would value (perhaps value is not the right terms here for it carries connotations of money) the most outrageous, the most provocative and the most absurd. This could even be a part-time political economy where we occasionally throw everything up in the air and go “to hell with it all”. While there is no doubt this political economy contains the potential for catastrophe, so does capitalism so we’re about even.

- Equality-nomics
Perhaps in this economy we could banish the profit motive and instil a rigid commitment to equality of income. No one earns any profit from their work above and beyond an arbitrarily decided amount which everyone everywhere receives equally. Neoliberal economists would most shrilly decry; “But no one would have any motivation to do anything!” to which we reply, “You don’t even believe your own axioms about the relationship between money and motivation, so why should we?”

This political economy has the added benefit of disestablishing the protestant work ethic which has proven so exceptionally and comprehensively destructive to individuals, families and communities for at least the past hundred years or so. If Art for Arts sake was the slogan of Modernity, Work for Works sake is certainly capitalist realisms. The social stigmatization of the unemployed and fetishisation of the figure of the “dole bludger” in Australian society is proof enough of this. While the unemployed get railed against for being freeloaders, not once do the railer’s themselves stop to consider whether the unemployed should participate in an economy that by all accounts is environmentally unsustainable (let alone whether they could – I would have thought that the dream of employment for all should have been recognised as such long, long ago).

- Dada Capitalism

Political economy for its own sake. Despite the fact that I called out ‘Work for Works sake’ earlier, this is perhaps the one I’d be most interested and perhaps the one with the most potential for implementation (not least of all by artists). Self-organising communities of artists could resolve to act (purchase?) based on Dadist ideals of being “anti-war… anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature.” If you’re noticing a trend in that these are all starting to look a bit the same, you’re right, and that perhaps speaks to my lack of imagination. Dada capitalism may also look quite similar to the next political economy called…

- Capitalist Nihilism
Think Fight Club and destroying or undermining all the capital you can possibly get your hands on – think also of The KLF burning £1m in the 1980’s, itself perhaps the most grand send off for the pre-neoliberal era imaginable.

- Capitalist Denialism
Think refusing to acknowledge the existence of money and living as such. Granted, capitalist realists will say “you won’t get far living like that!” but that close-minded inability to even consider alternatives to capitalism, that acknowledgment that it’s “the only game in town” is precisely what I’m trying to transcend. In actual fact, there is a man in the UK who has lived most excellently for a year without having anything to do with money.

And before you go thinking (and I know you’re thinking it, because I am too – it’s symptomatic of our conditioning to capitalist realism that we self censor like this) “none of this is realistic” or “we couldn’t all live like that” or any number of other thoughts about the relative plausibility of these or other political economic alternatives – just stop and realise that you’ve probably become complicit in capitalist realism.

We can un-think these kinds of thoughts, we can transcend the tendency to put so much stock in them that we fear to even consider the possibility of alternatives to capitalism. We just need to have a little bit of faith and imagination.

I joined Formspring to examine the practices and implications of a particular social technology, as it falls generally inside the area of study I am focussing on with my PhD. Formspring seemed like a good opportunity to practice analysing the socio-technical structures of a budding social network.

I tried to come to Formspring with as few prejudices as possible, or at least being as aware of the ones I possessed as much as could be. I initially considered Formspring a “fad” and my assessment of it has almost gone full circle. At least having tried it out I feel rather more justified about making the following assessment. As things stand, I find that as a piece of social technology it’s remarkably asocial, though not quite anti-social, and at least fails to promote social connections to the extent other social media has.

The first effect or change I noticed Formspring engendering in me was probably reasonably predictable, but the strength of it surprised me. Immediately after finishing up answering a bunch of the first questions I was posed by anonymous questioners I tabbed back to Facebook and noticed a status update about a friend stranded in a car-park in Penrith with a flat tyre.

The “answer questions” mindset stuck with me outside of the Formspring page, and I began to “answer” the non-question that was this friend’s status. My instant reaction short-circuited rational thinking, causing me to volunteer actual assistance which I would not have been so forthcoming with otherwise since I didn’t know this person exceptionally well. Lets just say that venturing out into the cold night stretches only so far for even my best friends… somehow I was still in “proffer information” mode and it was persisting beyond the Formspring site.

After typing my super-helpful comment where I offered to come help this (rather recently acquired friend) in his predicament, I checked myself. Did I really want to go help this person? It was cold and late. Realistically… no, probably not. Being in the Formspring mode made me at least temporarily more inclined to offer something. The first question raised by this is one of motive – if I was on autopilot was I even motivated by a selfless desire? (Whether that really makes a difference is an ontological debate we’re skip for now)

Certainly some have accused the motivation behind setting up a Formspring account to be one of ego. Simon Ferrari tweeted recently, “So yeah I know I always said I wouldn’t do Twitter, then caved. But I’m never gonna make a fucking Formspring. Seriously.” In a similar vein Michel McBride added comment, saying first “I always just saw it as an ego thing, like people with Twitter accounts who never respond to replies” and then clarifying by adding, “I mean formspring is ABOUT responding to people, but creating one in the first place is pure ego. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not”.

When people say that Formspring is ‘narcissistic’, I presume they’re often expressing doubt at the worth of having a service that allows people to ask you questions – surely if you have a burning desire to ask a question, you just ask someone. There’s nothing inherently narcissistic about being asked or answering a question. A bit of a stigma is attached to Formspring however (as demonstrate above) because using it requires the creation of an account, which seems to say something about the user when they join. That their opinion of themselves includes either, a) thinking that people might want to ask them questions and b) that their answers are worth reading or caring about.

One aspect of the service the importance of which often gets minimised, however, is the ability to ask anonymous questions. This feature needs to be underscored because of the impact it has on both the questioner and the answerer. Allowing for anonymous questions seems to have the main benefit of eliminating the sign-up barrier that would turn a lot of people away from asking a question. Anyone on the internet who knows the users account name can ask an anonymous question, provided that the user has agreed to allow for this.

For the person receiving the questions this adds a lot of confusion in question and answering. Interestingly, of all the questions I was asked on the first evening, only one was by a fellow Formspring user (and even she remained anonymous at first!), the rest were all anonymous (or other Formspring users asking anonymously).

Anonymity means the user has no way of knowing ‘who was who’ in current and previous questions. My natural tendency however, was to guess or infer who was behind each question and it influenced my answers each time. Furthermore, the anonymity fragments any conversation that may happen, and the lack of an ability to “comment” or reply to specific answers felt like a shortcoming. Somewhat interestingly, some of the other users (and I myself on one occasion) found ways around this inability – either through referring back to earlier questions in their answers, or by turning the act of asking a user a question into a comment on a previous answer. But unless a user is signed into their account and poses a question visibly then conversations get fragmented fast. Users answering questions may as well treat every question as though it were from a completely different person, but this goes against our natural instincts to guess who the anonymous person is.

The ability to ask anonymously makes the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory only completely applicable to Formspring. The percentage of people receiving (and answering!!) rude and downright abusive questions was very close to 100. I asked a few inappropriate questions anonymously myself, just because I could. The seductive nature of anonymity is indeed a near irresistable force.

And lastly, the most importantly thing for anyone interested in the composition and make-up of Formspring to realise is that it rolls out a decidedly Socratic (or rhetorical) method of persuasion. The aforementioned inability to comment on an answer, which would turn it into a threaded discussion, means that a question is posed and the user is charged with answering it in a decidedly rhetorical manner while a near-silent audience looks on. The Socratic method has it’s pro’s and con’s, but it’s hardly the manner that I want to employ on a social network. As an aside, this exercise has actually been extremely valuable as it has led me to discover that I greatly prefer a dialectical method, involving a back and forth between parties in an attempt to reconcile differences of position and opinion.

It’s important to note that this Socratic method I’ve identified here is being employed by Formspring as a conscious and deliberate choice. Formspring as a piece of technology was designed and that design did not just fall from the heavens. It behoves us to examine and question both the implications and the validity of this approach. For me, and in light of Formpsring’s perceived role as a piece of social software, it meant an unwillingness to continue using the service, and I have since deactivated my account in response. As I said on twitter, I may not have been the first on the bandwagon, but I can still be one of the first off it.

In a widely cited and talked about study from last year Stanford University researchers found that “media multitaskers pay a mental price” for their ability to consume so much media concurrently (the Kaiser Family Foundation said that kids between 8 and 18 “manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes  worth of media content into…7½ hours”). This is generally seen as a negative, as best exemplified by the case of driving while talking on the phone and the potentially disastrous consequences for such divided attention.

However I’m interested in the potential upside of our increasingly fractured and non-structured engagement with media. I don’t think anyone would argue that the incidence of media multitasking has decreased since the 90’s and so I’ve been reading Sherry Turkle’s 1997 book ‘Life on the Screen’ with increasing interest for it’s relevance to this very topic.

Turkle’s thesis is that “technology [specifically computation] is bringing a set of ideas associated with postmodernism” to its users. One anecdote that Turkle uses to illustrate her point is the story of a student in the MIT computer lab who has the following to say about his simultaneous connection to several MUD’s (this was ’97 after all),

I split my mind. I’m getting better at it. I can see myself as being two or three or more. And I just turn on one part of my mind and then another when I go from window to window. I’m in some kind of argument in one window and trying to come on to a girl in a MUD in another, and another window might be running a spreadsheet program or some other technical thing for school… RL is just one more window, and it’s not usually my best one.

The aforementioned Stanford study would seem to say that the result of such multitasking is “a big mental price” and that they become “suckers for irrelevancy…everything distracts them.” Unfortunately, the study doesn’t seem to test for whether these distractible media users are more enlightened and open to postmodern ambiguity. Obviously, I’m biased in my opinion that adopting a postmodern perspective is inherently a good thing, but the researchers said, “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it” – perhaps they were looking for the wrong thing entirely?