Unit Operations: An Appoach to Videogame Criticism

by Ian Bogost

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.

Genres: Games, Game Design, Nonfiction, Video Games, Gaming, Theory, Philosophy

243 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2006

About the author

Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.

He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames as well as the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost also released Cow Clicker, a satire and critique of the influx of social network games. His game, A Slow Year, won two awards, Vanguard and Virtuoso, at IndieCade 2010.

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is how interdisciplinarity is done: Bogost weaves Madame Bovary, Grand Theft Auto, cellular automata and Deleuze together into a powerful theory cutting through the my-piece-of-the-elephant scholarship which dominates games studies.

If you have a particular need to feel uncultured and slow witted, this is definitely a 5 star recommendation: it's terrifyingly erudite while being, if not a stroll in the park, at least a manageable uphill hike through difficult terrain.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some people say 5 stars aren't meant for anything with 'videogame' in the title. I am not one of those people.

Bogost nails the fusion between philosophy, poetry, videogames, television, film, marketing strategies, computer science and much much more as he explains his phenomenal framework of unit operational logic in developing a common approach to videogame criticism. He unites the humanities and hard sciences in a fascinating way just as he sought to at the outset. LOVELY! (very hard jargon tho)

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bogost outlines his theory for videogame analysis: games should be interpreted in terms of unit operations, the discrete, disconnected actions that make up the game. The book is divided into 4 sections. The first establishes unit operations as a theory, and explains how it relates to structuralism, computation, humanism,and object technology. The second section focuses more on application: it outlines the videogame field in general and it performs a transmedia analysis of the unit operation of the chance encounter. The third section goes back to broader concepts, providing a thorough outline of the simulation in regards to play, cellular automata, and real-world simulation as opposed to video game simulation. Finally, the last section addresses the notion of complexity as compared to unit operations, including a comparison of Flaubert's Madame Bouvery to Grand Theft Auto.

At one point in the book, Bogost acknowledges a critic's complaint of Zizek's "Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jaques Lacan through Popular Culture," which was that the title should be the other way around; it was an introduction to pop culture through Lacan, as the main focus was on pop culture, not Lacan. In that sense, Bogost's book is an introduction to unit operations through video games, as the focus is much more on the former than the latter. There's an impressive range of theorists here; DeLeuze and Guattari receive a lot of attention in the final section, new media people like Turkle and Murray come up regularly, and there is a focus on Badiou throughout. While I would have preferred more a focus on games, Bogost's general theory (not a system!) on unit operations makes a useful conceptual addition to the field of critical studies.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a work at the absolute pinnacle of its field. While I usually reserve the 5-star rating for aesthetic masterpieces, I just couldn't imagine this book being any better. In its disciplinary breadth and clarity of presentation it resembles the excellent Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, and indeed some of the same figures appear in both: Heidegger and Gadamer, Maturana, von Neumann. Bogost, however, ranges much farther afield. In addition to providing an excellent foundational text in video game studies, he creates a framework suitable for analyzing just about any collision of technological and humanistic endeavor.

After months of slogging through lazy MMOG ethnographies, bloodless Nordic "ludology" texts, and the weighty pronouncements of media studies experts who obviously don't play video games, this book gave me relief and a feeling of rejuvenation. It is a common, and generally correct, opinion that video games deserve better criticism than they get; I wonder, though, if they yet deserve criticism quite this good.

[Robert Cooksey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bogost has a remarkable balance of academic rigor, relaxed approach, and breadth of analytical understanding. He is knowledgeable across numerous disciplines and brings that to focus on questions concerning games. In this work he cites Badiou and Zizek as well as Von Neumann and Turing. He'll address Baudellaire and Benjamin's figure that fascinates and follow it's trail to Grand Theft Auto. I love this book. I found it incredibly readable, though I've been told by those who don't already have a background in some of the theorists and models that it is dense and difficult. If you find it so, check out his other work. It's aimed at a more general audience.

This book is good and important.

[Sam Crisp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, okay.

[Alper Yılmaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ian Bogost is more successful in his subsequent effort ("Persuasive Games") in providing a useful outlook on analyzing and criticizing games. In Unit Operations, however, his arbitrary and by no means self-evident ontological assumptions (largely based on 20th-century postmodernism) muddy waters that could well be clear, and do a disservice to the craft of game design by making it out as though game developers are "bricoleurs," people making use of disparate odds and ends to put together something cohesive, which is a slap in the face to the concept of an "artistic vision."

Bogost does seem to believe one can work up to a cohesive vision through this bottom-up methodology, but this is, in my limited but still qualified practitioner's opinion, going about it the entire wrong way. Sure, a player or critic engages with a work from the direction opposite to that taken by the creator, which does reveal that this approach is useful to criticism, but to suggest that this it's inherent to the process of creation is either partially ignorant or dishonest, at least in a large enough number of cases.

This approach also discounts the value of the non-procedural aspects of media. How a mechanic plays out in when interacted with a videogame makes a difference for its interpretation, sure, but what in-game narrative elements, locations, presentation and side mechanics say about an instance of that mechanic's application are just as important, in fact even more important in some cases. These variables create the exact kind of top-down context that Bogost's method conveniently, and to its detriment, side-steps in its seemingly semi-ideological pursuit. For instance, a Jungian perspective to balance out his Lacan-informed method could have gone a long way in remedying this.

I should lastly acknowledge that Bogost's assumptions and philosophical foundations must surely have played a part in his later, to me more persuasive (pun unintended) efforts, but they didn't make the mistake of making claims like universality or generally applicable insight into the process of creation, which would entail that the assumptions were carried too far, as they do here. His method clearly works to an extent, but doubts definitely remain about his tendency to generalize without relevant information, his ontology and even his ideological motivations.

["Nico" · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF (20%)

Bogost is concerned here with discussing his (often apocryphal) views of classical (often outdated) philosophy and psychoanalysis. That's fine, a waste of a powerful medium with its own rich structure, but fine. The problem is that he is also frequently wrong, and brazenly so, in his characterization of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

At one point he refers to Deconstruction as a 'totalizing system', when Deconstruction is merely a family of methodologies which destablize the presumptive stability of a given text via the workings of language, (inter)textuality, and particularly the structure of the sign. In 'Of Grammatology', Derrida not only describes but also /diagrams/ the way that texts can never be closed systems, never totalizing enterprises. His career-long refusal to provide a totalizing definition of Deconstructuon further casts Bogost's audacity into question.

At another, Bogost explictly refers to Lacan's 'objet a' (the object cause of desire) as the 'little other' (literally, someone who is not you). Objet a is not an object (as he also contends) so much as the distortion or barrier /to/ the object of our desire, it is the impossibility of direct and unmediated perceiving of the object of desire as our perception is always sustained by the desire which distorts it (to paraphrase Prof Doris McIlwain, all knowing is motivated knowing in psychoanalysis).

Maybe it gets better, maybe it doesn't, but Bogost's insistence on treating video game criticism via the lens of classical philosophies is perplexingly erroneous for how doggedly dry it is in presentation.

[John Chronakis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice review of unit operations: their definition, utility, interconnectivity, and how they can compose and facilitate analysis and criticism of science, art and media. I expected video games to have a larger role in this work. A handful of examples do make sense, but there's arguably a longer gamut of permutations to touch. Even the final part of the book (mentions of interdisciplinary academia and its ambling progress) seems to beg for a modernized vol.2.

[Satu · Rating 3 out of 5]

im about to approach criticism so hard you wouldnt believe

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than video games, Bogost's book delves into memes, movies, travel, and reference to classic morphologies in this quest to explain the definition of "unit operations." Which in short are defined as "characteristically succinct, discrete, referential, and dynamic" ... "nonpredictive individuated functions."

While certainly a pleasant and interesting read, that will make you feel clever and allow the reader to delight in their knowledge of the references, at times tangents take too long to tie back into the central theme. However amidst the anecdotes and pop-culture are multiple gems of wisdom and insight that inspire and delight.

The tone, delivery and ease of reading are in character with the rest of the authors works and just as delightful.

[Joe Nelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bogost manages to present a critical approach that is both comprehensive and non-deterministic. It opens up video game criticism beyond the inane arguments of ludic versus narrative, of configurative versus interpretive. It embraces the potential intertextuality of video games. It discusses games as systems comprised of individual units, such as the game engine and the various coded objects and properties therein, and as units within larger systems of genre, narrative, and network representation. If you have any interest in the discourse surrounding video games, this is a must-read.

[Ansh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bold and dense read that's ultimately rewarding due to how well it manages to connect different parts of literary and critical theory as well as philosophy and computational systems. Sometimes, gets a bit too preoccupied with the eponymous concept of unit operations and tries over-complicating it by making it seem universal with mixed results.
That said, it is probably my favorite book written by him and something I personally found relevant whether you're a critic, artist or a consumer.

[Vinícius Sztibe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bom. Bem mais denso do que o esperado, tem partes em que qualquer um que não trabalhe na área possa largar e desistir de continuar a leitura, mas é um conhecimento teórico excelente dentro da proposta.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overly dense for me when Bogost goes into the deep end of the humanities, but the remaining chunks of it are particularly salient. Probably a poor pick for my first Bogost book.