EDIT: I forgot to re-establish the initial thought I had with the rest of it. I'll try and fix it.
So, in this quest for understanding of Bruno Latour we have entered a new realm of understanding why there is no such thing as a group, only group formation. It is such a stange thing, something i do not understand entirely yet. I suppose I have been saying this for a while but it is getting there! The fact that I am getting there is a sure sign that trudging through all of this work is most definitely worth it. We get now to this idea that groups are constantly being made and that there is no such thing as inertia in the social realm. Latour writes:
"For the sociologists of associations, they make all the difference in the world because there exists no society to begin with, no reservoir of ties, no big reassuring pot of glue to keep all those groups together. If you don't have the festival now or print the newspaper today, you simply lose the grouping, which is not a building in need of restoration but a movement in need of continuation. If a dancer stops dancing, the dance is finished. No intertia will carry the show forward.
It is an interesting idea that at any given moment a group might disappear altogether. For the gaming world, I have been thinking about what this means. I think that first I need to further describe what I mean about Gaming.
Gamespace is the place where you play a game. McKenzie Wark calls this place a cave. Unlike most networks, the Cave is different from the real world. For gamers, they exist inside the cave, inside gamespace. Wark calls the cave, "...a world of pure agon, of competitive striving after distinction."
The network of gaming and gamers has existed since the initial creation of home consoles. You could argue that the arcade created these gamers, and it did, but the arcade was a vessel in which the game was introduced, the innovation of home gaming created a private sphere through which almost all other innovation in gaming was done. I will not make a differentiation between PC gaming and Console gaming simply because, like the arcade, the PC was a vessle through which innovations requiring larger components (monitors with higher resolutions, networking capabilities, and bigger processors) made their path into the console.
Gamespace is unique because you can turn it off. While the gamer will think about their games with the game off, they do have a switch through which gamespace begins and ends. This is contrary to Wark who seems to imply that the cave is where gamers exist and only exist but I believe this to be an insufficient explanation for the entirety of gamers.
Types of gamers can be split into several categories. For me, there is the hardcore gamer, the casual gamer, and the 'when i have to' gamer. The first are the ones who keep the gaming industry going. They are the people who mediate the actor-network "gaming" and they also can be intermediaries while switching between consoles. These are the guys who convince everyone else that their console is the best. Once that console has enough support, the group for that forms mediaries and the group's dance begins. The second, the casual gamer, are the ones who might enjoy playing games, but simply don't have the time to devote to them like the previous group does. These guys are the ones who buy into the hype when they, one lazy sunday afternoon, decide that they need a game system; they end up picking a system not based on their own choices, but on the choices and feelings of others. The later of the three could be family members, grandparents, or any of the other people who only play video games if a controller is shoved into their hands. Any of the people associated with these groups can flow within all three categories.
By all three of these categories, i mean to say that while a gamer may or may not be a hardcore gamer for each available system, they can be casual on some and not others; indeed, they could even just play a game system when it's available to them. These systems are also not linked to time. While a system may have been out of date when the new systems came, a hardcore network of gamers may keep a system going for quite some time. However, when this happens, the casual and later group may not be present at all or, if nostalgia comes in, they could play this system more than any other. Game networks vary wildly, just like any other network.
It is a slippery slope, throwing gamers into three categories, and quite honestly it is contrary to what Latour calls for through ANT. However, I believe it is necessary given the current impetus of the current generation of gaming. It actually matters for this group. I think that exploring why it has to matter here is of great importance. But first, we'll move on to the building blocks of something further back in scope, metaphysics.
We move now into metaphysics, a subject of great importance to Latour. Metaphisics, as I understand it, is looking to, "define the basic structure of the world." I guess I would call these the a priori assumptions through which the entirity of our social lives is founded. Latour is interested in exploring "...the actor's own metaphysics (51)". He calls for this by saying that Sociology has been, "...abstaining from metaphysics altogether", and has been, "cutting all relations with philosophy, that fanciful and non empirical discipline which represents the lowly infancy of the now mature social sciences."
While I am not of a philosophical nature, I do understand his point and I have been thinking about this in terms of gaming (I know, I know, logical leaps...but this is a blog so please forgive the logic leaps).
We look now to Johan Huizinga and his book
"Homo Ludens: A study of the play element of culture". This book looks at how the play, the rules of play in early, pre-civilization humanity created the building blocks upon which all of humanity currently rests. Let's think about telescoping. I'm a hunter with a small band of humans. We can't really speak but we can communicate well enough to get through some basic interactions. Let's say that there is a boar over there in the woods and I've created a spear. I look at the boar and point to my head and throw the spear through the boar's head. Well, over time these rules end up becoming some sort of rite of passage. Take these rites of passage and attach more rules to them and you have more complex rules of the game, the rite of passage, take this and telescope it several thousand years, and you have society. All of our creation rests on the crazy rules a couple hunters made one day when outside their tribe, bored.
This is an overly simplistic approach to this book, Huizinga was a genius and I really feel this book and it's ideas were swallowed by the times it was published in (like 2 years before WWII). However, it isn't the creation of society we are so much interested in as we are what he thinks of society now and how it relates to video games. We move now to his ideas on contemporary society:
"The question to which we address ourselves is this: To what extent does the civilization we live in still develop in play-forms? How far does the play-spirit dominate the lives of those who share that civilization? The 19th century, we observed, had lost many of the play-elements so characteristic of former ages. Has this leeeway been made up or has it increased?
It might seem at first sigt that certain phenomena in modern social life have more than compensated for the loss of play-forms. Sport and athletics, as social functions, have steadily increased in scope and conquered ever fresh fields both nationally and internationally.
Contests in skill, strength, and perserverance have, as we have shown, always occupied an important place in every culture either in connection with ritual or simply for fun and festivity. Feudal society was only really interested in the tournament; the rest was just popular recreation and nothing more. Now the tournament, with its highly dramatic staging and aristocratic embellishments, can hardly be called a sport...
Now, with the increasing systamatization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost. We see this very clearly in the official distinction between amateurs and professionals. It means that the play-group marks out those for whom playing is no longer play, ranking them inferior to the true players in standing byt superior in capacity. The spirit of the players is no longer that true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontinaity and carelessness. This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex...In modern social life, sport occupies a place alongside and apart from the cultural process (195-197)."
I didn't want to quote this much of his work but condensing it to my own words just wouldn't be enough. We're seeing these things happen now, in gaming. Professional gaming events are just now popping up on television (and especially in South Korea's electronic sports stadium).
However, the video game is one of the last true elements of play in our society. It is a play space that is left entirely of the imagination and while it strayed somewhat away from the general populace, it has begun to find it's way back. It is as if video gaming can remind us all that the Plato based definition of play "for children and animals" might just be the wrong one.
Posted by:
Before Game Design
7:08 AM
So we have two definitions in ANT (and i'm going to relate them to video games so please forgive me): Intermediary and Mediator. Latour defines these two things as:
An Intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. For all practical purposes, an intermediary can be taken not only as a black box, but also as a black box counting for one, even if it is internally made of many parts.
An example of the black box is the computer. Latour gives this example saying:
A properly functioning computer could be taken as a good case of a complicated intermediary while a banal conversation may beome a terribly complex chain of mediators where passions, opinions, and attitudes bifurcate at every turn. But if it breaks down, a computer may turn into a horrendously complex mediator...
This leads into Latour's definition of a mediator:
Mediators, on the other hand, cannot be counted as just one; they might count for one, for nothing, for several, or for infinity. Their input is never a good predictor of their output; their specificity has to be taken into account every time.
Video games. I tend to think of the video gamer of today as....well,
this. I guess you could call it the chaos and consequences of play without freedom. But anyway this is a few applications of the terms intermediary and mediator.
So, we have a short history that I am going to start with the use of the video game in the home. Pong was mostly inconsequential overall, but it was the first way in which video games made it into the house. It also created the idea that video games in the home on the tv were a good idea. In this way, Pong served as a mediator. After Pong, you have the Atari's the Intellevisions and the Colecovisions. These systems served as a further mediator and began to give the groups that loved to play these games a name. Once the name was solidified before the early 80s, those systems served as Intermediarys. They all served, however, as one. There was no differentiation between those that had an Intellevision and those that had the first Atari. The ground work was there, there were differences, but none that served as much of a mediating factor as what happened next.
The NES came around just before the previous gamer group had burnt itself out. With only so many colors, so many different ways to make the same blocks, gamers had grown bored and the game companies who were feeding off of the needs of those gamers had been too quick to produce. When the NES came out, the family began to play video games. The games were simple but looked infinitely better than those of the previous generation. Also, with the bundling of the Light Gun and the name Entertainment System in America, the burnout associated with the video game was thusly forgotten and assigned to the Atari's.
Now in comes the SNES and Genesis. This creates a rift, a controversy in the gaming world that inevitably creates the rift that partially removes gaming from all but those who could be called "gamers".
While this is a short history and I haven't explained a few leaps of logic, I am just trying to get most of these things together. The consoles seem to serve as a mediator when they are released. They create a new group from the groups that exist currently. Because of the varying nature of the generations or basic age in general, these groups may gain or lose; sometimes a new console will create a rift within a group and two seperate groups appear.
The seamless web is apparent in this circumstance again. The moves to these groups via the mediators as video game consoles, do have age markers given that the console has to be released at a given time to drum up media. However, within a year of the console's release, the group of people who identify as that console's gamer are very apparent. The rules and such are created by the now intermediary - the console of identification.
Now, things are far more complex than this and if I really wanted to be an ANT user then I need to acknowledge this. I'll save that for next time.
So one of the hard parts of ANT is just how slow it is. By Latour's definition, there are five major uncertainties that exist for the social sciences. They are (From Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory):
- The nature of groups: there exist many contradictory ways for actors to be given an identity.
- The nature of actions: in each course of action a great variety of agents seem to barge in and displace the original groups.
- The nature of objects: the type of agencies participating in interaction seems to remain wide open.
- The nature of facts: the links of natural sciences with the rest of society seems to be the source of continuous disputes.
- and, finally, about the type of studies done under the label of a science of the social as it is never clear in which precise sense social sciences can be said to be empirical.
Latour goes on to talk about ANT users of being mostly impaitient. It is as if people cannot use the theory given the do-it-right-now-or-miss-it mentality of Sociology right now. I think, and I say I think as there's not enough smarts in this head of mine to really know this stuff this quickly, that he's telling us all to slow down; to give up on our competing definitions of the word social. He says:
The argument of this book can be stated very simply: when social scientists add the adjective 'social' to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. Problems arise, however, when 'social' begins to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was roughly comparable to other terms like 'wooden' 'steely' 'biological' 'economical' 'mental' 'organizational' or 'linguistic'. At that point, the meaning of the word breaks down since it now designates two entirely different things: first, a movement during a process of assembling; and second, a specific type of ingredient that is supposed to differ from other materials.
What I want to do is the present work is to show why the social cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the current project of providing 'a social explanation' or some other state of affairs. Although this earlier project has been productive and probably necessary in the past, it has largely stopped being so thanks, in part, to the success of the social sciences. At the present stage of their development, it's no longer possible to inspect the precise ingredients that are entering into the composition of the social domain. What I want to do is to redefine the notion of social by going back to its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again. Then it will be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences but with tools better adjusted to the task. After having done extensive work on the 'assemblages' of nature, I believe it's necessary to scrutinize more thoroughly the exact content of what is 'assembled' under the umbrella of a society. This seems to be the only way to remain faithful to the old duties of sociology, this 'science of living together.'
He goes on to say, much later:
Sociologists of the social seem to glide like angels, transporting power and connections almost immaterially, while the ANT-scholar has to trudge like an ant, carrying the heavy gear in order to geneerate even the tiniest connection.
So I think now about an item I was tested on: Seamless web. I thought I understood the term but I think now that I didn't until I read more.
I had thought about doing something involving gaming. I have been reading a bit too much lately about game design and thought it would fit in well. It is an extremely curious web of things. Let's think about it from my perspective (which is wrong to do but is an excellent blogoxample):
I am a Gamer
I am a Student
I am interested in Sociology
I am conscious of changes in myself and others
I am conscious of my actions
5 Statements, 5 meanings. Now, seamless web. A typical day, I will go to work, go to class, go to a store, and go home. Now, thinking about the 1st and 2nd uncertainty, I have to think of my existance in the student network, the state employee network, the gamer network, the consumer network, and the pedestrian traffic and normal traffic network.
Perhaps it is wrong for me to call these things networks but as I am starting here and this is an exercise, it will do for now. Now, on a given day I will wake up, take a shower, and head to work. On my way to work, I think of things I need to do: Work, School, After-Work stuff. However, this is where the conflicting nature of groups happen.
I get a text message on the way to work. A network has imposed it's power on me (power in ANT is something I am just now coming to understand). Suddenly, my plans and actions change to cater to the sender of the text message. Maybe my own actions still exist but the network i've entered now, the network I am an actant in, holds me in and demands certain things of me. I have to comply in order to keep that network going / keep myself in that network.
Once that action is finished, I reflect on the past actions I had planned. In the course of a day, given the radical tasks I often have to complete, I often only manage to finish one or two things I set out to do. When I go home, those actions or plans I had at the beginning of the day change.
I get home and get another text message about joining someone in a game. Now, Game Space is an interesting thing. McKenzie Wark says of Gamespace:
Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.
In essence, if this idea of gamespace stands, the very networks i'm existing in shut off and i'm in a whole new set. I'm essentially shutting off the world i've been living in, with it's own networks and it's own actors, and going into a completely different one with much different networks and much different actors. The thing i'm curious about is, 'does this matter to ANT?' If anything, it is probably just another layer and another network and manages to fit in just fine. Without the actors plugging into the machines that run the game, we wouldn't have that network at all. The network, the Punctualisation happening in that circumstance (the creation of an entity consisting of dozens, hundreds, thousands of seperate networks) is no different than that of an automobile. However, I am part of that network so it is special to me.
Now, i'm rushing this and it's relatively obvious. But for a first example I think I am happy with it. This stuff is hard...this stuff is difficult to think of given that it is forcing me to rethink about the basic nature of things i've been learning for years. It isn't going against theory; it's going against the very nature of the material we use to construct pictures of the world we live in. Going back to Latour's idea of the word social, we have to not use the word as a material, we have to rethink the very idea of social.
This is a bumpy ride, but a good one.
I've been searching for a method to create a paper on Bruno Latour. After thinking about it, reading various books and articles of his, and doing some soul searching, i've settled on writing about the Network of Video Games and the Actors that inhabit that space. It's an interesting concept but I think that mayhap it might be rejected outright as i've also decided to write it in a narrative style. I think narrative ends up being the best way to perform this work as I think that any scholarly wording I might use will only create confusion and end up looking contrived.
My approach is going to be a 'history of'. I think that the creation of the cycle of always 'better' video game system hinges on the idea of the gamer network constantly wanting better games. If they want better games then it stands to reason that there is another netowork at work here. It's going to be complicated and this ends up being an effort to understand ANT moreso than understanding or being correct about video games. Further, being correct about video games is difficult considering it is ever more difficult in finding a reliable resource. So many games, game systems, and periods of gaming history are so short that any type of historical basis is lost. It's like trying to write a summary of the life of a fly in my own house. You don't know exactly where it came from, but it's there and it's bothering you.
Anyway, here's to a supreme amount of work ahead.
