How To Do Things With Videogames, Conclusion: The End of Gamers
“We like to think that technological progress is spectacular” (147)
“The internetworked digital computer may be poised to join media like toolmaking, agriculture, metallurgy, the alphabet, the chariot, the printing press, and alternating current as forces that have altered the shape of human life and experience fundamentally and forever” (147)
“But within the wake of media ecologies like these, smaller ebbs and flows make increasingly smaller waves. They just make more of them” (147)
“Within an ecology, the individual actions of particular creatures exert local forces on the overall system. Media microecology steps in here, asking modest, pragmatic, but still consequential questions about the internal operation of particular media microhabitats” (147)
“We don’t need more media ecologists raising their fists in boosterism or detraction, painting overly general pictures with broad brushes. We need more media entomologists and media archaeologists overturning rocks and logs to find and explain the tiny treasures that would otherwise go unseen” (148)
“We need more media particle physicists and media nanotechnologists explaining the strange interactions of the tiniest examples of various media, videogames among them” (148)
“If we think of the possibility space for games as a more complex, graduated space, in which many kinds of experiences could be touched by games, then many more kinds of innovation present themselves” (151)
“Instead of chasing after a mythical videogame Citizen Kane or trying to reconcile all videogames with one monolithic set of laws for design and reception, what if we followed Ecko’s provocation to demystify games. What if we allowed that videogames have many possible goals and purposes, each of which couples with many possible aesthetics and designs to create many possible player experiences, none of which bears any necessary relationship to the commercial videogame industry as we currently know it. The more things games can do, the more the general public will become accepting of, and interested in, the medium in general” (153)
Commentator’s Note: I think this paragraph captures my ultimate frustration with Bogost. I agree with him, fundamentally, that games do things, and we should be interested in all the different ways that games do things, and practice different ways of doing things with games. But Bogost’s ironic, liberal detachment (he is the “ultraliberal” from Disco Elysium) leads him in the most boring direction possible. It’s almost as if his project of “persuasion” failed (see my [[No Dice, No Masters]] for more) and he retreated into his position of disaffected privilege. Remarkable given that we both begin with Deleuze and Guattari. And this class, in bringing them together, really shows how much further we can go with Deleuze and Guattari, and how Bogost comes up short.
“Soon gamers will be the anomaly. If we’re very fortunate, they’ll disappear altogether. Instead we’ll just find people, ordinary people of all sorts. And sometimes those people will play videogames. And it won’t be a big deal, at all” (154)
Commentator’s Note: Sadly, this levelling ultimately does not create greater possibility, but less. We now just have billions of players captured by the most homogenizing of platforms, like Fortnite. I’d much rather have developers strive and fail to make the Citizen Kane of games than churn out the bland mediocrity Bogost appears to welcome.