Our unit on Reading Machines and Matt’s presentation has me excited about digital humanities. I didn’t know much about digital humanities practices previously. My understanding was that Moretti could use computers to prove that Hamlet is the main character of Hamlet and other such nifty trivialities. It seemed like kind of a cool-tool for other people to play with but I never thought of identifying myself with it or using the practices myself. For some reason it never occurred to me that one might integrate digital humanities techniques into a larger project that combines close and distant reading.

I have been thinking a bit about how I might try to incorporate some of the potentials of digital humanities into my own work. It seems there might be a lot of potential in modelling grammatical structures to develop an initial hypothesis of how various texts are oriented towards various material objects and towards the future. I could then combine that with a close reading and standard critical analysis on materialism/realism and futurity. Moretti on the grammar of instrumental reason and temporal continuity, significantly likely in Robinson Crusoe: “Past gerund; past tense; infinitive: wonderful three part sequence.” Now just need to figure out similar constructions and let the computer search the universe for me.

Certainly it seems like a great skill to have in the toolbox. Now just to learn how to actually make it happen…

Since we had a relatively light reading and preparation load this week, I’ve been waxing philosophical about some of the key terms of our class. What is procedure? And then, somewhat differently, what is proceduralism and what are its virtues? Dwarf Fortress is pretty clearly procedural in every sense of the term that I can think of. It is obviously procedurally programmed in a coding language, like any other computer game or program. On top of that, the world you play in is procedurally generated in the sense that it is produced by automated machine processes rather than being deliberately designed by a human working in tandem with the machine, like it would be if someone made an accurate Middle Earth map for Dwarf Fortress (I really hope this exists). It is also an example of proceduralism, in that it seems to deliberately call attention to its own procedurality. Very little is abstracted in DF, you have to micromanage your dwarves’ job assignments and your fortresses designations. The primary method of learning to play involves following the Wiki’s step by step process.

Let’s now compare DF to another game noted for being difficult and frustrating: Dark Souls. For those who don’t know, DS is an infamously difficult action rpg. The challenge of DS comes primarily from the difficulty of successfully executing the twitch-based skills and moves to defeat enemy forces that seem to continually increase in both numbers and strength. There is a strategic element in that you have to learn what weapons and moves work well against which enemies and have a plan for surviving the difficult gauntlet your avatar has to run. In some sense, DS ontologically has to be just as procedural as DF—after all a computer is running it. Certainly a higher component of DS’s process intensity is taken up by graphics. My question is, is the gameplay, or user interaction with the game, procedural? On some level it seems it has to be. You learn, adapt and get better at the game over time just like DF. Does the fact that it incorporates twitch-based elements make it less of an example of proceduralism? The more kinesthetic process of moving my fingers over the controller still must be a process on some level, involving neurons, synapses, muscle tissue, etc. But it seems that some of the writers we have looked at for this class would want to maintain that DS is less procedural, somehow, than DF.

It seems that if someone were to memorize the procedural information contained in the Wiki prior to ever playing the game that it might be said that they know how to or can play DF. But if you read a manual or wiki for DS, I submit that no one would claim that you therefore know how to play it. You have to experience the twitch-based combat and die a few thousand times to establish the muscle memory necessary to be successful. It seems there’s a bit of an analogy to be made between these two games and something like geometry versus something like rhetoric. If you memorize a geometry textbook, it might be said that you know geometry. But if you memorize Beebe and Beebe (our “beloved” public speaking textbook) I submit that no one would claim that you know how to deliver a public speech.

It seems that Bogost might say that life is procedural, and so are games, but that not all games call attention to life’s procedurality. Perhaps proceduralism or a strong procedural rhetoric is (gaming) procedure that calls attention to (real life) procedure rather than obscuring it? Throwing a football involves a procedure, but an attempt to understand the steps of that procedure will probably make you worse at executing it. Playing DS may be similar in that regard, you can probably “overthink” what you are trying to do.

How far can we stretch the idea of proceduralism or procedural rhetoric? Should we confine it to computation, or even more specifically to games like DF that wear their proceduralism on their sleeves? Or should it be more widely applicable? And what about the master term, computation? When we play DF, the computer computes, and to play successfully we “compute” with it. The computer computes when DS is running. Do we humans “compute” when we play DS?

When attempting to describe a video game or other media object, it seems there are (at least) three potential choices in orientation to take at the outset—one could choose to focus on what the object is, what it means, or what it does.

Focusing on what the object is leads towards an object-oriented perspective. We might follow Bogost and dissect Atari machines to try to achieve some understanding of what, really is going on inside a video game console or what it’s like to be a computer. Focusing on what the object means requires making a pronouncement on the significance of presenting or publishing a software object in a given social context. Wardrup-Fruin makes a strong case for focusing on, or at least starting with the question of what an object does.

He frames this question in the very pragmatic terms of operational logics. Understanding individual operational logics does not require the ability to produce or read code, nor does it require that we understand what is happen when electrons, light flashes or what have you race around the silicon inside of a computer. Operational logics are the basic categories of how a program communicates or expresses itself to humans. Conveniently, it seems that most gamers already make use of this category to talk about games (“WoW doesn’t have “collision detection” but it has a “reputation system,” etc”). Without knowing much about code or computers I can say quite a lot about the operational logics games use for expression. This is really a theory of expressive processes as media, something that mediates, between the silicon and human world. It is a theory of how processes strike a blow upon the human.

As a result this seems like a very useful tool for game designers or critics. They can break down games into their constitutive operational logics—and perhaps come up with new ones. His discussion of the various Eliza, SimCity, and Tale-Spin effects also offers a compelling theory of good versus bad game design. The focus on these individual logics is useful, but it may also have some limitations.

I’m not usually one to drink the Burke Kool-Aid, but I couldn’t help but imagine the essay he would write in response to this book. Wardrup-Fruin is focused almost entirely on “Agency,” or the how of the actual process. Consider his discussion and critique of the failings of the quest tree process in KOTOR. I submit that most gamers were not overly put off by the narrative incoherence of the side quest line problem on Dantooine. A good bit of the pull of a game like KOTOR comes from participation in the “Scene” of the Star Wars universe. For the Star Wars fan who just wants to explore a bit more of the galaxy, it’s not critically important if the side quest makes narrative sense or not; really they just want to get a sense that they are wandering around and acting in the “frontier” environment of Dantooine. Personally, I was much more bothered when KOTOR’s light side/dark side “system” didn’t match my expectation of Star Wars cosmology, (i.e. you acquire light side points by going far out of your way to help everyone you meet, when of course such behavior demonstrates excessive attachments, which we should all know is really the path to the Dark Side). The game process is entirely obvious, internally consistent, and accessible to the user but still at times unsatisfying due to a mismatch with Scene. Could we extend operational logics beyond the software itself to describe how a game interacts with external elements?

In addition, multiplayer games are almost entirely absent from Wardrup-Fruin’s account. (He does describes the experience in a MMO of having an enemy mob he has just killed reappear, destroying narrative coherence, which, of the many complaints I’ve heard from MMO gamers, has never really been one of them). Adding other human players to a game certainly has to change the equation. What can expressive processes and operational logics tell us about human-to-human interactions mediated by software, rather than human-to-software interactions?

Finally, on a relatively unrelated note, I couldn’t help but speculate on the relevance of this books’ terms outside of game and software studies. I haven’t had much time to develop this idea, but if we take the Eliza, Tale-Spin and SimCity effects and map them onto real world regimes of knowledge organization what would we get? The SimCity effect corresponds with Newtonian physics. A set of rules, perhaps mysterious at first, but readily available through experimentation or “play.” The Tale-Spin effect corresponds to statistics and probability. It completely obscures the material causes and the actual physical interactions of the things it measures and reports only the surface values of correlation. And what could the Eliza effect be? Considering its reliance on surface over depth, it seems like the closest match is rhetoric—or at least the commonplace negative view our venerable discipline. What does it mean? Probably nothing, but I thought I’d leave it here anyway.

Brown’s piece draws some interesting links between the OOO theorists Bogost, Harman and Bryant and Rhetoric. I’d like to add to this a little bit and also pose some questions about the possible relationship between a (newly copious) rhetoric and ontology.

For Harman, something about an object always withdraws from relations with any other object. In fact, this is what makes it an object as such. Harman has a long running dispute with Bruno Latour (and other, smaller worker ANTs) on this very point—for Latour and smaller worker ANTs, an object is nothing but the sum of its relations. Harman replies that such a conception leads to absurd results—in a universe where everything was merely the sum of its relations nothing could grow, change or even move, because every object would be caught in and overcoded by the thick web of relations. An object has to “withdraw” or hold something in reserve from what it deploys to its observable local manifestations to explain a dynamic universe.

Harman loves to tarry with Heidegger’s workshop full of tools. The craftsman interacts with a hammer, but is only interested in the wooden handle and the metal head’s ability to pound things. The nail only interacts with the hardness of the metal head, If the workshop caught on fire, it would appreciate a very different aspect of the hammer’s being, namely the capacity of the wooden handle to serve as fuel. A spider might experience an idle hammer for its sturdiness as a web anchor. Objects are interesting for their potential to reach into their withdrawn reserve and inflict a new cut or blow upon reality.

Taking withdrawal seriously, we might say that all of these actants approach the hammer “rhetorically,” i.e. they “persuade” the hammer to engage in various relations. Since the hammer always holds something of its nature back, we might say it is persuaded into various relations.

In Onto-Cartography, Levi Bryant is keen to mark a difference between semiotic and thermodynamic politics. The archetype of semiotic politics is to protest a corporations activities with traditional forms of rhetoric—marching making signs, crafting arguments, etc. A thermodynamic politics would recognize that a corporation is not a machine readily persuadable by semiotic meanings and human rhetoric—it is fundamentally not human, but a machinic amalgam of humans and non-humans that doesn’t care about anyone’s protest in the least. We might say, “corporations do not understand human language.” Thermodynamic politics would seek to attack (or persuade, if you like) the corporation at the level of inputs and outputs that are legible to it, such as labor and revenue. A strike or a boycott are archetypal examples of thermodynamic politics when directed against the corporation—they translate the human perspective into something the corporation can understand.

Computer code brings us to an interesting case—in Bryant’s dichotomy, is it semiotic or thermodynamic? On one hand, as we have discussed, we have to admit that it is a language. On the other hand, it indisputably makes things happen in the world and inflicts direct cuts upon reality. A computer code can tell a missile to launch or a robotic drill to operate. Computers seem to lie right at the borderland of this division. The OOO sympathizer in me wants to ask what exactly happens when you press enter and run your code? We could answer that question in regards to language of Python, or we could ask what is really happening under the hood with whatever blinks of light or electrons that race around the silicon (I really haven’t a clue what is going on in there). Semiotic or thermodynamic machine?

I apologize if this post is a bit late. I was hoping I would be able to program a bot to complete this blogpost for me, along with all of my other assignments and duties. Alas, it was not to be. I sit here actually typing this message with my fingers like a common 20th century chump… or am I? Perhaps I am really a computational creation of the greatest bot-maker ever, pushing the Turing test to new limits even as we speak.

But seriously–after observing the difficulty and hard work that goes into make an interesting Twitterbot, even a simple one, made me think a bit. If computational media classes like this one take off and become part of curriculum for undergraduates one day then perhaps a common assignment will be to have students make Twitterbots or other simple chatbots. I was imagining the hilarious situation where a student, unable or unwilling to really learn how to code a bot, stays up all day and night typing inane chatter into Twitter in an attempt to pretend to be a bot in order to fool the teacher into thinking the programming assignment was completed successfully. The instructor would have to engage in some kind of reverse Turing test to determine the authenticity of the bot. If machines can emulate humans, can humans also emulate machines? I mentioned this thought to a friend who replied that recently a popular Twitterbot was in fact exposed as a human. What new species of intellectual misconduct is this? Passing something off as NOT your original work!

I suppose the best chatbot would actually be a human-machine symbiote, with a program amalgamating all the relevant Twitter and headline chatter and suggesting possible humorous mashups, but with the human getting final review. If Twitter chatter is to be the new form of aesthetic expression, then let’s push it to the limit!

This post was supposed to end brilliantly, but my chat program still seems to experience bugs while winding its random musings into a succinct conclusion. Perhaps one day someth>>> 10 * (1/0) Traceback (most recent call last): File “<stdin>”, line 1, in ? ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero >>> 4 + spam*3 Traceback (most recent call last): File “<stdin>”, line 1, in ? NameError: name ‘spam’ is not defined >>> ‘2’ + 2 Traceback (most recent call last): File “<stdin>”, line 1, in ? TypeError: cannot concatenate ‘str’ and ‘int’ objects

Learning to code in Python was both a challenging and frustrating experience. It really showcased the gap between what computers seem to “do” in society and the economy at large and what they “are.” Another way of saying this s that I began to appreciate that the gap between an experienced computer user and power user is really a yawning chasm. Recent years of doing all my thinking and writing on computers has made me into the exact kind of human-computer symbiote we were discussing last week—I generally type in all lowercase, don’t need to spell words or use proper punctuation and don’t bother remembering or recording the exact names of things because I know auto correct or google suggestions will correct it for me. These habits may allow me to work faster and perhaps augment my thinking in various ways. Ironically however, these skillsets that the computer has encouraged me to develop made my coding instincts a complete disaster.

I kept getting stuck in the Python tutorial for the silliest reasons such as misspelling my variables and especially forget to capitalize “True” or punctuate things appropriately. As simple as it might sound, it took me awhile to really grasp the fact that this wonderful machine that corrects all of my spelling and punctuation errors (when running the appropriate software) at its core demands the highest level of accuracy and precision to interact with. Addressing this in the context of some of the parallels between literacy and coding leads to some interesting conclusions. The contemporary computer seems to be the most extreme example of a media that erases itself, or hides its true core. Introducing someone to the most “basic” ways of interacting with a computer like word processing or Google actually seems to dull or blunt the basic skills and instincts useful to programming. The Code Academy tutorials try to address this gap someone by including achievements that pop up periodically, making me feel a bit like I was playing another game on Steam.