{"id":2647,"date":"2012-03-22T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T15:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2647"},"modified":"2012-03-21T15:00:23","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T19:00:23","slug":"performances-and-operations-rules-of-the-text-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=2647","title":{"rendered":"Performances and operations (rules of the text 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I\u2019ve worked on these posts, I\u2019ve been torn about how much of other scholars\u2019 work to bring in, or, as I was taught to say in grad school, to adduce. It seems to me that the moment most readers of blogs see a reference to a book they haven\u2019t read, like Ian Bogost\u2019s Unit Operations<\/em>, is the moment they stop reading because they figure that what follows will be over their heads, while those who have<\/strong> read the book stop reading because they already know what the author of the post is going to say.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m about to hit a section of the argument that on the one hand wouldn\u2019t raise itself except in reference to the work of other critics and, for that reason, won\u2019t make much sense without reference to them, and, on the other, I intend at some point, either here or in a future \u201creal\u201d article, to make a contribution to the critical discourse about games and performance. It therefore behooves me to slow things down a bit and do what I was taught to do at humanities camp, and place my work in dialogue with the work of fellow critics.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s what I’m saying: rulesets, whether of games or of any other kind of practomime, like (since we\u2019re in the GRR Martin vein) novels, only become legible in performance<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What do I mean by \u201clegible\u201d? Well, on one level, I literally mean \u201creadable,\u201d because every time you read something you\u2019re performing it, so there can be no reading of a ruleset without at least an exiguous performance. This is where I get to say that Roland Barthes talked a lot<\/a> about reading and writing, and their relationship to one another and complementarity with one another, and that structuralist thought, founded on the work of Saussure<\/a> and L\u00e9vi-Strauss<\/a>, conditions everything I say about practomime since that work founded the study of culture as a set of discursive practices that I\u2019m carrying on here.<\/p>\n

But I also mean \u201clegible\u201d in the senses \u201ccomprehensible\u201d and, most importantly, \u201csusceptible of analysis.\u201d I\u2019m saying that practomimes of all kinds can\u2019t be understood without being performed. This point isn\u2019t in itself new in any way; various schools of criticism have cropped up to deal with it in one or another way; deconstruction<\/a> and reader-response<\/a> theory are two examples, but it\u2019s probably fair to say that every school of post-structuralist thought deals with this issue as a fundamental question.<\/p>\n

But part of my argument is that the rise of games as a privileged practice–as something about which a debate \u201cIs this art?\u201d can occur, as jejune and undertheorized as we consider that debate to be–has posed the question in a new way, because since the days of oral epic composition there hasn\u2019t been a privileged artistic discourse configured in such a way that the performer is not only imaginable, but necessary<\/strong> and visible<\/strong> not just as an ideal (this is what a reader does; reader-response and narratology<\/a> are founded on their ability to nail down such formulations) but as an active agent whose experiences differ from another performer\u2019s in ways so obvious that even non-theorizing performers (that is, gamers) cannot ignore them. Indeed, these non-theorizing performers focus on the differences to what often seems excess<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m saying that if we want to analyze games as part of culture, and also to analyze other cultural practices that I suggest have much more to do with games than they\u2019ve previously been given credit for–especially if we want to analyze these things more thickly<\/a>–we need to analyze the relationship between rulesets and performance. We need above all to see that a ruleset is a performance of another ruleset, that a performance of a ruleset is itself a ruleset, and that the corollary of these observations is a \u201cgreat chain of practomime\u201d that re-establishes play at the heart of artistic discourses of all kinds.<\/p>\n

For this reason, if I\u2019m to make this point in a scholarly way, there are certain critics of games whose work I must refer to, in order to clarify my argument by distinguishing it from theirs. Thankfully, because of the nature of their work and the nature of my project, that can be done pretty quickly. So here comes an academic paragraph.<\/p>\n

Previous work on the analysis of rulesets as discursive practices has largely ignored the role of the performer in enacting the ruleset. Bogost<\/a>\u2019s concept of unit operations, Wark<\/a>\u2019s gamer theory, and Juul<\/a>\u2019s idea of the half-real nature of the zone of play all see the player as a constant, and his or her performance as supplementary to the artifact as they see it–the game. The idea that a performance of a ruleset is itself a ruleset cannot be grasped through these methodologies, because the player forms the boundary of the artifact, a boundary analyzable only as a boundary. Perhaps most revealingly, Wark\u2019s gamer theory, which would seem from its name to hold promise for the thick description of player-performances, is rather predicated on a description of games as systems that make gamers all the same thing–that is, gamers.<\/p>\n

Still reading? If so, I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll see you next time as I apply all this to the stunning (and I mean that, no matter how cynical people on Twitter are being) news that BioWare is going to be modifying the ruleset of Mass Effect 3<\/em><\/a> in explicit response to players\u2019 complaints. I wasn’t going to go on, but considering the furore a bit of striking while the iron is hot is in order: BioWare did not cave; authorship and artistic value are not indissolubly linked; what happened yesterday (BioWare’s announcement) is a shaky, but enormous, step forward on the path to the realization of the expressive future of digital practomime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I\u2019ve worked on these posts, I\u2019ve been torn about how much of other scholars\u2019 work to bring in, or, as I was taught to say in grad school, to adduce. It seems to me that the moment most readers of blogs see a reference to a book they haven\u2019tContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-2647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2647"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2650,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions\/2650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}