Modes of Existence - Chapter 5 - Impediments
In the previous posts, I have talked about defining our object of inquiry as well as a little on what documents matter. I also wrote about how defining is actually a bit more tricky but easier within this method because it allows researchers to learn. More recently, I wrote a bit about how definitions of charisma exist in tandem and sometimes overlap. This was then followed up by the concept of space in method.
This next chapter is titled, “Removing some Speech Impediments.” There’s a growing sentiment in this work that could best be boiled down to probably my favorite sentence in the whole chapter, “The Moderns are those who have kidnapped Science to solve a problem of closure in public debates.” The consequence of this is found a bit further into the chapter where Latour notes, “People have told themselves that they had to talk straight to have a chance to straighten up those who talked crooked…”
And so I want to write a bit about the impact this has had on the act of discussing games, the ultimate goal of this particular project.
While there have been innumerable numbers of papers written about games, in the current moment, we tend to mark the start of game studies with the publication of a single paper: Computer Game Studies, Year 1 (2001). In this piece, the author declares:
2001 can be seen as the Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field. This year has seen the first international scholarly conference on computer games, in Copenhagen in March, and several others will follow. 01-02 may also be the academic year when regular graduate programs in computer game studies are offered for the first time in universities. And it might be the first time scholars and academics take computer games seriously, as a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate.
And yet, 20 years later, we see a new announcement stating, Just Games:
Here is an announcement: From the next issue, Game Studies actively welcomes articles on games in general, and will not be limited to an empirical focus on digital games. It is time to recognize that the study of games cannot and should not be segregated into digital and non-digital, and for most of the field, in practice, as well as in theory, this has never been so.
While this piece was sorely needed, it additionally avoided admitting that leisure studies, simulation studies, and various aspects of inquiry that focused on games, play, and leisure had existed in tandem with the development of games that would eventually culminate in 1974, the year Dungeons and Dragons came out along with some of the first computers available for public use.
20 years had passed and as a result, entire generations of scholars devoted to games had come up in a digital only field, forcing the creation of “analog game studies” which itself further devolved into severely limiting approaches to studying board games themselves through a collection of capital - social and fiscal - as well as gamer politics in and around specific kinds of games. For example, the old school renaissance was purposefully avoided because of a variety of its adherents being vocally conservative, LARP researchers being kept to their niche spaces despite the ruleset difference between modes of LARP, and certain kinds of corporate sponsorships (much like that of Facebook-sponsored research) being foregrounded due to potential fiscal gains).
At the center of this is research in and around Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Now, D&D is an interesting beast of a game. Depending on what timeline you pursue, the game either started being developed by Dave Wesley in the last 1960s after he found Strategos: A Series of American Games of War Based on Military Principles or you begin with the moment Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson meet. Most will mention the former while only focusing on the later though early drafts like Beyond This Point Be Dragons will sometimes throw wrenches into this because the politics of where this draft was found, who bought it from whom, its murky place in history, or its place among the pages of notes Dave Arneson gave Gary Gygax during the creation of D&D which ranges from 20+ to around 12.
Wading into this war is one that is frustrating because whereas one would want to talk about the method of analysis that led to some conclusions, this almost all took place long ago on Google+ and has since stabilized in a variety of outlets related to the academic stability of referential work by those whose career requires such stability.
And I want to note here that this is in no way a slight, just a sort of “what is expected when writing Scientifically.” And so this is where the Latour chapter becomes interesting with regard to Charisma.
While the book takes a while to get to this point, Latour notes that there is this sort of frustrating war between politics and reason that are often at odd with one another. This has resulted, especially in the spaces where humans exist, a sort of imbalance. Humans often cannot fully act when an academic is watching because as scientists performing the scientific method, we must be rigorous in cataloging our observations and various kinds of analyses. To wit, Latour notes that we Moderns attempt to use Straight Talk:
Wanting to use straight talk thus does not mean, despite the claim often put forward, that one is going to speak “as the scientists do” or “the way a scientist talks,” but that one wants to imitate the results without having to encumber oneself with imitating the burdensome process as well.
And so, this is relevant to the previous section in that we see a sort of adherence to academic and scientific inquiry though many of the methods through which we gathered, processed, and dealt with our information is often a bit politically driven in its results while avoiding the discussions of weakness, of method, of politics, or of its humanity.
And as such, we see two moments that need to be accounted for in some fashion should we want to use this text as a way to evaluate concepts that move across, between, and through mediums, creatives, modes of interaction, and self-reference. We additionally need to account for the modes of politics that are at the center of not only game studies, but simulation studies, analog game studies, digital game studies, but also LARP studies, agential developments in AI and other spaces I will not mention for space.
And so, this is the consequence. Whereas I might want to discuss some of what Anthropologists may refer to as the oral history, the social capital of those who control the publication of papers focusing on these subjects would shut these down as non-empirical or simply false. To this, Latour additionally notes:
Strangely, it is the very implausibility of straight talk that makes it astoundingly effective for disqualifying all the other modes. Once one makes the mere supposition of a transfer of indisputable necessities, of information without any transformation, of displacement without any translation, all the other ways of speaking are suddenly subject to deep suspicion. And, even more strangely, the other modes start to doubt themselves and their own capacity to distinguish between truth and falsity. - 127-28
And this is a fascinating space to exist in because ultimately what is happening here is that we have communication about a complex history geographically specific that was not taken seriously until nearly 50 years after its happenstance. The context, the oral history, the tangible history, and the potential for straight talk is simply non-existence. It reminds me of an issue philosopher Alphonso Lingis notes in his, Community for Those Who Have Nothing in Common where he states that:
Entering into communication means extracting the message from its background noise and from the noise that is internal to the message. Communication is a struggle against interference and confusion. It is a struggle against the irrelevant and ambiguous signals which must be pushed back into the background and against the cacophony in the signals the interlocutors address to one another the regional accents, mispronunciations, inaudible pronunciations, stammerings, coughs, ejaculations, words started and then canceled, and ungrammatical formulations and the cacography in the graphics” (Alphonso Lingis, 1994 - The Community for Those Who Have Nothing in Common)
The above quote is essential to understand what happens when we separate modes of communication from the thing being communicated. D&D took hundreds of years to manifest and yet within 50 years of its publication it is so separated into, “regional accents, mispronunciations, inaudible pronunciations, stammerings, coughs, ejaculations, words started and then canceled, and ungrammatical formulations and the cacography in the graphics” that we have lost the very nature of what made D&D itself a useful object of study to travel across all of these concepts.
Latour again has foreseen these types of issues whereas he notes that:
Once the standard of straight talk has been invented, everyone else suddenly begins to engage in crooked talk; they become double-dealers, liars, manipulators. And then begins the crushing labor of the rationalists: they start seeking to rectify everyone through a sort of generalized speech therapy. If the domain of what they call “irrational” is so vast, it is because the rationalists adopt a definition of “rational” that is far too unreasonable and far too polemical. If we, too, give in to the temptation of straight talk, a whole series of modes of veridiction, so decisive for common life, risk falling into oblivion, henceforth unable to have their own criteria of truth and falsity, or at least incapable of achieving their full measure of realism, their ontological dignity. The danger is greater still, since experience itself may well stop being expressible…experience will have been lost from sight, and with it, of course, any possibility that Moderns may be empirical, that is, may draw lessons from their experience. – 128
The result is that in seeking to study the attribute of charisma in D&D, there is a need to contend with the political nature of studying something as innocuous as games in the current moment when the logical nature of studying games has been separated into so many powerful camps that cross-cutting studies are often avoided. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this method thus far and one that has been at the forefront of thinking about reading for quite some time.
I remember meeting a scholar at a workshop a while back who took issue with an abstract I had written discussing how the history of games is useful because it is a history of how computers afford for human activity and attention. I discussed how games were useful in that many of the ways games afford and concentrate human cooperation in a very specific way.
The scholar felt that the need to justify games being worthy of study was an ancient argument that had long since passed. Instead, I should stop wasting my time and focus on studying specific things in reference to games. This was at a workshop on using the history of technology to discuss the future of technology, but this sentiment is one that was often repeated. “History is useless to technologists in the present because the cutting edge is something that has never existed.”
And yet, we see the collapse of this sentiment spread across nearly every part of the technology industry possible. With society itself becoming a user through things like wallets, bus passes, as document signature devices, and mediating more and more of our essential infrastructure, the nature of technology development itself must make up for a lack of acknowledging the parts of humanity that has yet to truly be encapsulated in any aspect of this technology.
And through that need, we see a slow realization that the calls to vintage and retro tech in recent years are indeed calls to incorporate the history of tech in more intimate ways than forcing everyone on to yet another new generation of iPhone.
So Chapter 5 here has proven to be an instantly useful chapter discussing things that we should never put into papers but is always center in the type of work we do in academia.