dropouthangoutspaceout:

So as Cristian Mccrea said yesterday “So, that sure happened”. It’s off gamesnetwork and in your face.

I’m going to start by saying that I’m not going to tackle some of the core issues that Sicart attempts to assail. I feel that at times he has reduced the nuances of proceduralism to a characature, but I will such responses to those who actually wrote the books. I have only read them.

I also should say that I have an awkward dog in this race. I happened upon proceduralism as a way to study videogames as an interesting approach to address value for videogames in my own work on the political economy of videogames. I used it in my Master’s thesis (coming to a file hosting site near you!), despite one of my committee members having some reservations about it. I have found it to be intellectually stimulating, but I don’t believe it to be some kind of ironclad unrefuteable theory. It has its limitations as a method of study and I think would benefit from continued introspection on our part. I also don’t think that most of those who work with it or created it would believe it unassailable or perfect.

Anyways, I found value, by thinking about videogames as objects that exist in the public sphere as much as any other piece of media, that they construct meaning. They argue, play, and frolic around our world. And how do they do this, so many in academia will ask? They do this by work through procedure, which I thought was ontologically significant. Nobody can suggest that videogames can function without procedure. They do. I decided to focus more on proceduralism because I honestly believe that, in general, we need to look to ways of speaking about the value of cultural artifacts beyond the mythological and historical, because as we see every day, neoliberal capitalism has no respect for myth or history, as it can’t understand value beyond the commodity form. I’m interested in working through theoretical questions of what constitutes a public good in a different way, and proceduralism is just one way of addressing value, in a very specific way, differently. But by finding value here, by thinking about how exactly videogames function, and how that might be important, I didn’t mean to suggest that there aren’t other factors at play. Of course there is the entire cannon of ludology, Huizinga and Caillois that we need to grapple with – the socio-mythological approach. This is what political economy as a field stresses, that there are always competing senses of value (social, material, spatial, economic) that circulate around objects.

So on to Sicart. Thing is I can’t find where exactly proceduralism turns into an academic and design totality that seeks to subsume all approaches under its ‘formalist’ banner. Instead, I see it as an object oriented approach that sits happily alongside other methods of study. I don’t see Ian Bogost, Mary Flanigan, or anyone else for that matter, suggesting that proceduralism effectivly renders moot the socio-mythological/historical approach to games and play. Instead I feel like Sicart is attacking a straw man: a non-existent formalist proceduralism that hates sociology and comically dislikes multiplayer games, which would be worth attacking if it existed in any structured way.

I find this awkward in part because Sicart then makes an attempt at linking Horkheimer and Adorno’s longstanding critique of the Enlightenment as an way to deal a moral and ethical blow to proceduralism. The argument is that if we think that videogames are valuable because they make rhetorical arguments, we are just reproducing the system by which capitalism and the enlightenment, in the service of rationalism, have dominated, repressed and dehumanized human existence. To put it mildly, this is a huge jump to make.

I work in critical media theory, and I appreciate Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on the political economy of the culture industry. I also think that their critical observations about relationships between capitalism and media industries in general are foundational, but they are not without their many problems. What’s interesting about Sicart utilizing them as a take down of proceduralism is that their work would never have any room for videogames in the first place. Their argument that all culture was effectively debased by various forms of mass production, that only the avant garde or folk rituals left over from the agrarian, pastoral life were redeeming, meaningful cultural practices that which could operate as a resistance to capital’s ongoing enclosure of the life world. By these standards, videogames, and the meaning that players would be worthless because they are utterly imbedded and stamped by the logic of capital. It’s all false consciousness that they trade in, capital’s distraction for us so we don’t rise up against it’s inherently inhuman nature.

The thing about Horkheimer and Adorno is that their work is all encompassing in its scope. It reads all culture as the superstructure of capital, and has little room for the cultural studies inflected sort of approach that Sicart wishes for game studies. I can’t really see why he uses this particular critique, trying to link talking about rhetoric and computers as an open door to a totalitarian way of thinking about culture. If anything, I find Horkheimer and Adorno to be more totalitarian in their approach to culture than any of the aforementioned proceduralists.

Anyways, as it stands, I disagree with the very premise of this critique, in that it constructs a reductive reading of the source material that never existed in the first place. Finally, it ends on a call for more focus understanding games as play, fluid objects, divorced from their ontological status or materiality. Even though Sicart suggests that this is not the end goal, I believe that is difficult to read the article any other way. If proceduralism is totalitarian in approach and a servant of the rationalization that debases all of human existence, why would I want to have any part of it?

Instead if we want to question proceduralism we don’t have to erect a straw man, but rather dig deep inside the very premise of its theoretical core. Why not instead tinker with Bogost’s interpretation of Badiou’s set theory and the ‘eventual site’ or discuss the long tradition and arguments in the field of rhetoric? That seems more useful for all of us.