Dissertation Notes

Unit Operations IAn Bogost

Any medium can be read as a configurative system and an arrangement of interlocking units of expressive meaning. These are unit operations. This would lead to a greater framework of understanding of the cultural productions that are both computational and literary. It would also join the chasm between technology and literary theory. Object technology software engineering provides a framework for developers to create units of programmable meaning and for creating different applications without repeating the root programmes. Stephen Wolfram believes that OTs object/relational effects are built into natural systems, which allows the whole thing to be a configurative experience. See, for instance, humanities like film, theatre and literature, and informatics like computer science, biology. Mysterious fields that require a considerable amount of complex knowledge and experience to fully understand, and obscuity dogs the production of works on either side. Starting out with videogames at 30 if youve not spent your younger years playing is also extremely different to orient yourself to. This is partly because of the use of jargon. Jonathan Culler: A theorycant be obvious. This is how humanities are more like the informatics than they expect Jargon and obfuscation is the means of groundwork for any new production. Move from real property to intellectual property critical theory as intellectual property, works of literary theory as the user guide to applying a critical theory to a given work. Adaptive systems theory. Videogames ludology theories of play and the history of videogames. Ludology and game theory are not mutually exclusive; game theory is a study of strategic/mathematical problems, such as poker; ludology is the study of any game that can be played on a machine, including arcade machines and PC games. Part One: Unit Operations

Unit operations are a form of making meaning that use individual /unique actions rather than a deterministic system. In literary theory, unit operations would be a single unique reading while the system would be literary authority --- i.e. a renowned critic or the theory itself. (another way of putting it is the DNA the whole is the system, the individual setpieces of the DNA are unit operations). This could also be explained as the biological shift from scientists studying genes as a method of understanding the human condition to scientists studying the behaviour between genes in a larger biological capacity so as to understand human behaviour.

Unit operations are concise, referential, separate and active whereas System Operations are prolonged, dependant, chronological and static; unit operations prefer function and instance over context and longevity, i.e. something that makes sense in that moment is better than something in the long term.

However, the creation of unit operations does not mean that systems will become obsolete. Systems are still important, only now they exists as spontaneous and complex backgrounds made up by millions of tiny little unit operations rather than a general backbone to which unit operations must and did adhere to. The integrity of systems stays they regulate the units meaning to become part of the whole. [Postgenomic biology does not strip genes of all their value; rather it reconfigures the role of genes in the systems of organic life from one of causality to one of contribution. Genetics become a process of gene combination, rather than a circumstance of gene existence.]

Systems theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy) focused on studying interrelation between parts of a system as the primary basis for understanding the system itself; today, there is complex theory, which uses the logic of networks stable systems in a network functioning as organized, but unpredictable and individual, functions as a part of the entire network.

Definitions: Unit a material element that is referentially related to each other. It is an object that is separate and unique, but related to other things like it. Anything can be a unit, even if it isnt strictly inanimate and can even be abstract and conceptual. Units define everything from people to emotions, and the whole result of these units (works of literature; human conditions; anatomy) can be called systems, but they are different from a unit a system is the whole of a bunch of units working or related to each other. However, in the greater picture, a system can also be seen as a unit to a larger whole. Luhmanns system theory puts communication as the basic unit of social systems, for example. Systems are thus structures that seek to explain a phenomenon, behaviour or state, which trive on order, rather than the balance of chaos and order. Mark C. Taylor structuralists are obsessed with systems because they are trying to understand history through universal forms/patterns. However, because they are stable, they depend a great deal on attitudes/values that inform the approach that created the systems; they imply a universal order that someone might discover. Complex systems, on the other hand, are self-contained and rely on interpretation instead of discovery. Heidegger Gestell the idea of ordering the potential of structures in the world to conceal their energy for future use, Bestand (standing reserve) which basically means that everything is waiting and on standby. A good way of understanding this is using packaged poultry that is the Bestand, laying in wait for when chickens run out or we do not have access to chickens. Gestell sees the world only in terms of what it can give us; systematic scientific work seeks to understand and control the world, which draws it away from human experience. While we cannot avoid systems, we can understand ourselves through the exploration of systems. This is the same idea as Heiddeggers essay on technology, and units function in the same way: they leave opportunities open. Heidegger suggests that the only way out of enframing (bringing forth bestand material) is through reidentifying potential reconfigurations of enframing; i.e. instead of giving into reserved theory, creating our own interpretation of a given work. Operation a basic process that takes one or more inputs and transforms it into something else. Brewing tea: teabag + water = hot tea. They are governed by rules. Unit operations are creative, system operations are static (Heidegger) or unit operations are procedural and system operations are structured (software engineering). Complex networks are open and made up of the interaction between hundreds of nonrelated units the internet, the brain, human genetics, are all unit-driven networks moving away from simplistic systems. Unit operations create connections between networks and build relations. They move according to a broad range of logics (maximizing profit; new function). Spinoza: one substance (God/nature) controls the universe. Deus siva Natura is a unit operation the two ideas, God and Nature, are related via sive (or) where the two are in open relation to each other and different in only arbitrary ways. It doesnt matter which is chosen, as they are both equally good it is one substance appearing in different forms. The substance then interacts with itself in different forms; for example, Spinoza uses the idea of memory a memory is the mind remembering things that are outside the human body, it memorizes objects that act on the mind rather than the mind controlling what is remembered. Leibniz: monads/self-contained units make up the universe from clearest (God) to cloudiest (organic matter) and their essences/ideals are defined from the beginning of their existence. The relationship between themselves is conceived by God, who dictates the relationship between the other monads. Systems therefore fall in line and exist on a divine order. Cantor: combined the notion of infinite with that of the set/total- the infinite is mathematically immeasurable, so he focused on the numerical order of different infinities. Set theory intensional: a set as a collection of objects held together by a common thing. They require coherent and clearly defined properties, i.e. system operations. An extensional set is self-contained and only understood by the collection of objects it contains, and is thus constructed from the bottom up. Badiou multiplicity: the items in it are both the same as a unit and unique from one another. Sets are made up of collections of elements and it is fundamental for their existence. Count as one multiplicities are seen as a completed whole; each one is a multiple (so not a unit) but the result left after the count as one process is one. Units do not exist as they are all multiplicities. Situation an infinite set; structured presentation the set it set up in a certain way. This cannot count as on, but the structure of the situation can count as one. The structuring process is the state of a situation. State what identifies, names, classifies and orders the parts of a situation. Event a disruption of the set. Both Spinoza and Badiou put belonging as the centre of existing. With regards to configuration/order: Spinoza units form their own relations. Leibneiz units are pre-organized. Badiou count as one; a set of units taken as a complete whole. Jane Murray on digital environments: they are procedural, participatory, spatial, encyclopaedic. Procedural references the computers ability to follow pre-defined rules; it is the practice of programming real behaviour into digital representations. Eliza a computer programme who crafted responses according to natural language rules. Through count as one process, it helps to bridge the gap between computational and traditional representation the unit operation, which is self-contained but also part of a whole, is dictated by rules and changes according to rules. ontology: a conceptual model of the domain that is, a framework of the hierarchy of programmes and the relationships between them, which serve as frameworks for further calculations. They enable relationships, but do not explain them; unit operations not only enables relationships but explains the relationship between one situation and the other. Unit operations textual and critical. Aarseth views cybertext as art, not as a tool with which art must be analyzed. Multidisciplinary and seen only through criticism of a work of art. By criticising, we will see the unit operations that will transfer between mediums. They can be found naturally in any form of art they are the procedure of a work of art, the framework of it. For example, the film the Terminal seen in the view of a unit-operation analysis becomes a story about uncorroborated waiting (waiting without guaranteed results): Dixon waiting for the results of his review (complicated by Navorskys presence in the airport); Navorsky trying to get the last signature for his fathers collection 50 years later; Enrique and Dolores; Amelia and her married man (waiting for him to break it off, leave his wife, take her in instead); Gupta waiting to find out if he can go home to India. Furthermore, when viewed in similar circumstances as the base operation (in this case, a flight) the unit operations themselves become more obvious and noticeable and the viewer will be able to supplement the unit operation with his own experience of waiting. Story/plot is merely a way to string unit operations together. Structuralism and Computation Both seek universal models semiotics tries to find rules to govern the production of meaning in language; computers operate on logic and seek to code all meaning in such a way that can be manipulated by outside forces. Do universals (abstract concepts) that range over individual things (particulars) exist outside of human understanding? Plato realist universals exist on their own. Ockham nominalist only particulars exist. Aristotle universals exist within human experience as objects function in two ways: the universal mode (symbolic red for apple) and the particulars about the object. This affects system operations in two ways: Dualistic world where universals forms exist but only materially. Matter + form = abstraction allows us to understand the material form and the universal form is accessible through thought in the material world. This lack of separation between form and material leads to individuality. Form is always something material. Causality final causality is the form objects work towards as they change. Things actually seek a formal purpose and purposiveness is the universal system that guides the objects to their form. Forms are shared (general) properties and because they are simultaneously shared and general, their distinctness becomes a universal with a pre-established end. The tension between causality and dualism is the tension between unit and system operations, which is similar to semiotics (signs only have meaning if relayed through a larger system). Semiotics of signs: Peirce sign functions by resemblance (computer icon) Saussure symbol, i.e. no relation between the word and what it means parole (unit/single use) and langue (system). Post-structuralists are against the idea of a stable structure establishing and controlling all meaning while remaining external to the system. Favoured the notion of unit operations but their approaches tended to risk falling into becoming system operations, like deconstruction. The very assumption that anything can be deconstructed is a system operation. WWII: The computer ENIAV needed its information processes physically plugged in in a certain way to relay the information. John von Neumann suggested that it would be easier if the computer performed its work internally without the need for physical alteration to the computer by a human this led to stored programming, where each unit of the programme is reusable and executable based on need, not arrangement. Conditional control transfer executing instructions in any order. Commonly used sets of instructions (subroutines) were kept in libraries and loaded in multiple programmes to reduce programming. JvN wanted a universal computer where the CCT would allow individual computer functions to be preserved across programmes unit operational. He worked with Turing and they treated universal compution as a logical problem. Computation mimics representation on a higher plane and they wanted to create a pre-defined notion for universal cognition, and used the brain as a model. However the brain does not rank in a hierarchy and so becomes hypothetical. Computation and cognition thus becomes an equal relationship this is similar to post-structuralist and structuralist theory because meaning-making becomes the universal process. Praxis structure and method create meaning. Post-structuralism moves away from systems; universalisation becomes an approach and spreads different methods. In digital culture, the bit is the most common universalism. The force and power of the media comes from how the bits are organized (functionally and logically). Analogue vs digital analogue begins universalisation on a 1-1 basis, which Walter Benjamin calls the decline in the aura of mechanical production of art, where art looses its ties to tradition and thus becomes easily applicable for a socio-political purpose (such as revolt) and, ergo, becomes a commodity. This is also known as stored-programme. Katherine Hayles and cybernetics: CN function with relations of pattern and randomness meaning emerges when authors create meaning or recognize the pattern of meaning. These take the form of unit operations: 1 action on 1 piece of data. Pattern recognition can be either a system operation or a unit operation. In a scenario where conditions are met, it is unit operational the act of information processing that identifies patterns is a unit operation. This leaves out political/social/economic/ethical issues. Bayesian filtering may sold this this uses predictions based on decisions made by humans being monitored by computers, although the output is considered a probability and not a certainty. US Homeland Security Advisory System shows tension between unit and system operations. DOHS colour system was launched and made public to the general media, but by standardizing threat into a colour unit operation, the government hoped to express risks clearly. However, citizens do not have a historical/political context to make an informed decision because the DOHS assumes that America is safe, and not a part of the violent world its predicting. The unit operation encapsulates a system, not a single unit. Unit operations must therefore try and succeed the promise of universal computation. If we have become to see the world through logics and unit operations, we must understand their relationship to each other and to us. Humanism and Object Technology Usually come with ontological questions ontology, how something exists. For Aristotle, the object is accessibly in the material world (the universal form is only accessible in thought). Ontology therefore becomes a reference. In psychoanalysis, the analyst asks questions to individual structures which are mostly enabled through jargon (i.e. the 4 forces of dreams). These theories become building blocks that the analyst arranges in order to move the patient towards a result. Psychoanalysis is made up of units. Lacan came up with mathemes (algorithms) that act in the gap between the unconscious and subconscious action. The gap does not exist as such, but when the subject is awake, it leaves a chasm that the object a (the desire) can work in to incite the desire of the Other (the unconscious) on the subject. Ergo, the subject does not really achieve desire but only notices the gap. In other words, one unit changes the system and returns it to an uncompromised state. Similar to Spinoza, except the relation in Lacan is returned to a gap in the unconsciousness. Slavoj Zzk and his Lacanian analysis of Rear Window the window is a fantasy window (does not exist) and shows what could happen if Jeff were motivated to act (sexually). The meaning of what he sees depends on his situation outside the window what the window provides is merely a great deal of different outcomes. Retroactive causality the search for truth prolongs the search. Every context is already retroactively a part of the whole; problems are part of the Lacanian subject. Graham Harman insists that retroactive causality is a global structure (system) not a psychological theory (unit). Starr: the theory only appeals to Lacanian theorists. By relating problems outside the system, Zzk unit remain subject to further change. Lacan remains symbol/domain specific unlike Badiou who extends maths to all domains rather than just believe that maths signifies key relationships between symbols and reality. Badiou thinks all relationships are mathematical and one can alter the situation by adjusting their structure. Badiou reality is constantly in flux because it can always be changed (event) by something unexpected/something leading to an unexpected and radical change. For ex: Anti-Semitics are incapable of seeing Jews as individuals; they are merely the living lack of Aryan characteristics. A restructuring would lead to them being seen as individuals, but it is unthinkable at that moment. Psychoanalysitic-development unit operations can therefore e reconfigured to underwrite new representation of a symbol. Technology Objects McLuhan sees technology as an extension of our bodies and changes the boundaries of technology to implicate humanity, like cyberpunk (William Gibson). Its a phenomenological. Kittler we are products of the technology we use. Partially connected media systems emerge from segregated media systems (gramophone; film) which are not yet fully connected media systems (digital storage). He focuses on the transfer of human knowledge and experience into binary data for electronic storage. Neil Postman people have become technology; opposes technology as it claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience and supports its claims by showing that it thinks better than we can. Both trace universal binarization back to Turing, who first thought the world could be totally programmable. Postman reacts by denying signifence of computation while Kittler show the limit to how far soft/hardware metaphors can go owing to the inherently limited nature of the machine. For Kittler, there is a price of programmability in which hardware constrains what software can do. Machines cannot replace/do what humans do because of limited hardware. Humans relate to computers only on a software basis, which is itself limited by hardware. Leibneiz binary arithmetic all reality is either Being (1) or Nothing (0) but nowadays seems outdated. Technology limits and extends human behaviour through programming. Consider software and programming as expressive binary data storage becomes an accident of convenience (such as ink with books). By 1970, Large Scale Engineering (LSI) reduced the space needed to house required hardware for computing this led to the minicomputer being shipped with software preloaded. VLSI reduced digital computer circuitry to one chip, which led to the rice of the microcomputer with Apple/IBM/Radioshack. Minicamp used a client-server operation. The server (mainframe) had minicomputers linked to it, which offered greater security, reliability and control. When microcomputers became available, disaggregation of programme elements became highly desirable because they would allow microcomputers to contain common instruction symbol. Microsoft and Apple found ways to protect their base of programmatic symbols. 1980 GUI programmes needed access to all instructions/objects/symbols that bridged across all apps (OS). To protect code while leasing it, component objects simple symbols in binary that expose certain aspects of a task. In windows OS, these exist in dynamic link libraries (DLL) and contain object classes with instructions for creating a window, etc. This protects the base code while also simultaneously allowing outside developers to make apps for it. This is called Object Oriented Programming/Object Technology. Attempts to bridge gap between human experience, software/programmed representation and computational execution. Software 4 properties: Abstraction programmed representation without context; the object as is. Encapsulation content of software hidden from the system/simplified. Polymorphism different instances of an object leading to different behaviour. Inheritance can create other classes which inherit attributes from parent classes. Software is made up of alogrithms (Lev Manovich a final sequence of complex operations that a computer can execute to accomplish a task). The structured objects are simple so software objects show a representation of the world, not the world as is. LM believes that in changing data from traditional to computational, the data is affected and changes to become more like the digital representation. LM also think that the material world must be compressed to be reproduced in software. Bogost believes that unit operations help us expose and question the ways we engage the world. OT merely makes it easier to discuss abstract relations that exist between entities in the material world and the computational world through encapsulation. Encapsulation hides the internal working to reduce complexity and protect the real property. In literary theory, device encapsulates meaning but it is complicated by literary criticism. Bolter and Grusin claim that all media pay homage to previous media, thus reinventing forms. For ex: the goal of the Batman franchise is to have a child dressed as Batman while watching a Batman video and eating a Batman-themed fast-food meal. Product licensing therefore becomes a form of unit operations. George Landow on Hypertext: Praises Derrida for acknowledging that a new richer form of text depends on discrete readings and that citability and separability is crucial to hypertext because in so doing it can break with every given context engineering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable, however he privileges the theory over the actual technology. We can now see that literary theory and technology work in the same way. Human Objects Human Genome Project- mapping out the structure of the human DNA. The DNA has sequences of 4 base pairs which provide enough information for most social relations. The goal of the HGP was to build a guidebook for human application basically, to explain the DNA. Informational DNA was contained in the 4 bases as a kind of backbone, and type and order of the DNA composed genetic encoding. HGP was interested in simplicity and the DOE assumed that the hardest part was the identification and sequencing because the final result would be simple. This is because HGP saw humanity as a system operation rather than a unit operation, which is blatantly false. Humanity cannot be simplified. DNA model was also used by cyberneticist Gell-Mann who sees units of cultural DNA encapsulating stored experience of many generations. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene speaks about the meme, which is cultural and basically tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain Memes are units of culture. The unit-operation memeplex showed where memes encapsulated themselves into the social system. Devox the meme superentity which creates cultural change through deviance. WebQL viral marketing; cultural unit operation as OT (software unit operation used to measure the success of a social unit operation). The individual function of unit ismaintained. Janet Murray procedural authority (the most important element the new medium adds to our repertoire of representational powers is its procedural nature, its ability to capture experience as system of interrelated actions. That is, they can use a common toolkit to analyse both technology and literature. Both express a system of interrelated action and teaches us to read both non-tech and tech from the perspective of a shared procedure. Procedural criticismComparative Videogame Criticism Claude Levi-Strauss comes up with 2 forms of thoughts: the mythological (engineer) and the scientific (scientist). While the scientific seeks to create structures which will then have events, the engineer creates events which form structures. The bricoleur/engineer creates everything from scratch using parts. Derrida shows that the bricoleur/engineer is a myth because the bricoleur is the creator of the base of what he is. The bricoleur is produced by myth itself. Bricolur and literature criticism share a habit for borrowing concepts and putting them to use. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (The Handbook of Qualitative Research) think that a bricoleur is a flexible and responsible agent willing to deploy whatever research strategy, material and empirical material at hand to get the job done. Videogames are known for their rapid and unconventional approach to development. Creators push the computational boundary of every day technology ergo, comparative criticism and videogame software development need a bricoleur who uses units of pre-existing meaning to form new structure of meaning. This suggests that criticism and production are interrelated. Videogame criticism tries to find abstract principles to characterize the medium for example, Aarseths notion of cybertext (difference in function in the mechanization leads to the aesthetic process). Videogames and technology provide information regarding principles and evolution of human communication, which primarily relies on configuration to get the meaning across. He refuses to use literature criticism to explain videogame theory and believes that it must be separate from literature criticism because otherwise it will be subordinate to literature. Generally, literature criticism regarding technology tended to focus on the links between machinery and humanity. In the 80s and 90s, they tried to make a computational practice of literature theory because they believed that the works advanced assumption that software variations of theories exposed new ways to read and write. Aarseth is adamant that is is a new form of art production and a new form of literature; he does not want them to be thought of in the same way as traditional art production and traditional literature. DiGRA published a Hard Core forum (dedicated researchers coming together to discuss what was essential in digital games criticism) which raises the question if they were primarily focusing on the ludic aspect/videogames and evading all other forms of theory. From Frans Myrs 3 thesis of videogames, this definitely sees to be the cause because it isolates games from other disciplines and emphasizes the playing aspect over the literary and expressive. Bogost believes that we should focus on what they do and how they communicate; focus mostly on the expressive capacity which would seek to understand how videogames shows what it means to be human. This would not avoid functionalism/ludic aspects of the games but would recognize the use of the functional aspect of videogames as a tool for further analysis, i.e. the creation of meaning through the mechanical parts of a cybertext. Videogames and Expressions Videogames are complex software programmes, however they can be abstracted into units with dramatically increased scope. The FPS genre founded the industry of game engines and leads into advances because common gameplay in the works of some genres makes it easy to develop new games based on the code written for existing games. Aarseth: Creating a new version is mainly a matter of editing and then recompiling a program file; the end result can be as similar or different from the original as the programmer wants. Ergo the idea of a common substructure for games grew into modern game engines. Component-based software became not only useful for background rendering but also for crucial functions of gameplay. In modern games, the engine is split up into software objects and recompiling isnt necessary. Developers create tools to allow nonprogrammers to build game components that the engine then runs, such as plugins to import models/animations from 3D programmes and level editors. Valve hammer Editor Half-Life. Neverwinter Nights Aurora Editor. Game engines regulate individual artistic/narrative/cultural expression. This is due to videogame status as an industrial art, i.e. the creative process that takes place in the market economy. Like film, videogames require large budgets and big creative teams, and only way they differ is in their treatment of IP. Film license IPs based on content and most are pre-existing (LotR; Harry Potter) so they may produce sequels. Shrek the only thing reserved from the bok are the name and the ttle character. Furthermore, studios structure their films around formulas already proven to be a success, however they do not produce/own/sell those models themselves. The studios cannot own a genre. The game engine is a genre; one plays a game not a game engine. Genre describes a story while game engines are the functional unit operations of that genre for example, a genre would be a buddy cop movie while the game engine would have to include driving, guns and chases. Bushnell created a competitor for Atari (Kee Games) to increase market share and later created Chuck E. Cheeses pizza/arcade chain because he understood botht he promise of transferring material structure from one game to another and the importance of transferring games from one play environment to the other. In the mid 70s, arcade games like Pong were set in bars and showed an attractive young man playing with a woman on his arm. Bushnell realized that the social function of games could be transferred from an adult to a family setting, but this social play was lost during the 90s. Pong and Tank p2p combat simulation/aggression-release/materially bound to structure of works themselves. Unlike film and literature, there is no reason for alignment between IP, material, functional and discursive modes of authorship. The hardware structure of Atari 2600 was crafted to accommodate games like Pong and Tank, i.e. a playfield, 2 sprites, 2 missiles and 1 ball. VCS was considered one of the hardest systems to programme for, and gameplay innovation required developers to work within constraints such as 128 bytes of RAM ad 2 kb game data cartridges. Furthermore, there were concept constraints because it was designed for games with tennislike attributes. Although the RAM was later increased, new concepts required manipulation of the hardware. Comparative unit operation game engines accentuated merger between functions and materialism. Ben Sawyer: as a media form, games have perhaps the closest relationship between advancement of the medium and advancement of its underlying technology and production processes. FPS game engines are usually more anticipated than games, i.e. Epic Games Unreal Engine. DOOM gave birth to modern game engines. It showed: Huge market for FPS 600,000 retail copies shown plus whatever was sold through a shareware license. Huge market for helping others to create similar games by extracting/abstracting the games core features so they created the Quake Engine. Modern game engines are more complex because they manage 3D worlds which demand increasing complex programmes. Rendering has nothing to do with gameplay, for example, and the game engine also manages abstract routines for objects/characters, game physics; AI; sound management, scripting and tools. The last two open up the game engine to other systems which might modify or add to it. Therefore, the game engine is responsible for the growth of industry. Links created by communication technology are many. Pong/Tank shared IP through direct ownership. Quake II Engine both the licenser and the licensee benefit from shared property. Licensing starts at 10,000 an devs save start-up costs due to already having an engine to work on. Valve Half-Life (1998) Counter-Strike, still popular today. The legal relationship makes them different from books because there is no legal literary body to regulate intertextuality. Anxiety of influence by Harold Bloom states that all literary texts are mirespresentations of stronger texts that came before them. Strong poets like Keats achieve a high revisionary ratio because of his internalizing works of writers such as Milton and Wordsworth, and thus it is easier for Keats to be accepted into the canon as a great original writer. Poets work against themselves and against the fear they will be forgotten. By contrast, half-Life has core portions of Quake. Their commonness is mediated through IP, which is a stable relationship regulated by governments and markets. Rules are flexible, and may change, but the fundamental principle is legal. IP differs from remediation (Bolter & Grusin): remediation is at work, but the borrowing is mediated by outside legal/commercial forces. The games access to the unit operations game engine being borrowed from Quake is redeemed through another unit operation, licensing. By relying on this unambiguous relationship with the law, game engines relate cultural art and market in a new way. IP is modified by the law, so effective game criticism has to take license operation into account. Commercial material/functional basis collapses literary criticism notions of metaphor and analogy into unit operations: Quake and Half-Life shares same material basis. The material, therefore, shows the cultural, social, microeconomic status of a game. Working conditions, for example, might become embedded into the game engine. In 2003, California workers went on strike (141 days) and Californians just avoided the accused markets. This game-engines material basis then gets formally embedded in another. Discursive relationships between games of the same engines: Half-Life adjust the parameters of the Quake Engine. CS makes players fight in a world of gravity and friction. FPS shooter games were born from the market opportunity to cater to a market dominated by young men. Some developers use FPS engines to turn it on their heads. MGS stealt over violence Rainbow Six. Thief avoid conflict entirely. Deus Ex (Unreal Thief) adds character interaction and skill use as an alternative way of getting through the game. The player has numerous solutions and a morality scale, both of which affect the outcome. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern are developing a game engine for their interactive drama, Faade, for more subtle human acts. It uses a set of software subsystems to manage interactions between Grace and Trip, a couple involved in a complex marriage crisis. The player takes the role of a longtime friend visiting them. Faade integrates A Behavioural Language (reactive planning language) which underscores the importance of recognizing the material and functional details of unit operations through the game engine. The discursivity of games is thus changed by the capabilities of the game-engine. Limitations influence the kind of discourse the works can create. Game Engine development is usually relegated to the visual/physical. The Maximum PC report on Half-Life 2 focused on improved bump mapping, visual effects, and described Valves goal as to make everything in the game look positively life-like (if not otherworldly). Appearance is the most important aspect of a game-engine. Remediation (Bolter and Grusin) humans write code because the computer can execute code by the computer can act without human intervention. The programmers use disappearance to remove themselves from the executing programme, so disappearance becomes a goal of new media. They argue that digital media reproduction identification through creators interactions with previous reproductions. However computer systems resort to unit operations as their primary form of reproduction. In the case of a game-engine/software development kit/code framework, the programmer embeds his presence into object-oriented systems that both limit and enable works. Faades goal-directed ABL creates no work. ABL is a computer language that compiles to an ABL agent API in Faades world. It supports synchronized behaviours which allow the narrative author to yield mixed effects and also supports a number of features, i.e. goals, subgoals, priority, etc. Primitives are enabled through the game world. Mateas and Stern: ABL sends simple parameterized action requests to the 3D story world, answers questions about the game world and receives event notifications. The 3D story world is responsible for accomplishing basic performance tasks such as the animation of the face and synching the mouth to dialogue. Break down the master-narrative into story beats (plot points within a larger story) but in Faade, the story beats mean short segments of goal-driving action. They are the unit operations of the narrative and the platform queues beats to progress the storyline. Game Engines like the Quake II Engine and ABL API bind developers materially/functionally/intellectually, which both limits and facilitates discursive production. These confines, like language rules, can be broken. Games and Narrative: Aarseth Adventure and Zork are objectified-systems that generate units of textual meaning. Markku Eskelinen Aarseths theory focuses on functional differences within media instead of making essentialist claims. Ludology vs narratology Jesper Juul: Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh. Games and narratives share common properties, such as the use of narrative to make sense of the experience, and the games embedded stories/backstories are decidedly narrative. Even simple games (Space invaders) has a narrative to motivate gameplay. Juul if games are narrative, they must be translated from other mediums, like film. Compare the film version and the game version of Star Wars the game does not create enough narrative to recreate the story of the film; it recreates neither narration nor motivation. Juul believes that games disturb the relationship between the reader and the story that narration requires because the player becomes both an empirical subject outside the game while also retaining a place inside the game. Juul believes that paying too much attention to narrative will make us focus too much on existing theories, thus leading to forgetting what makes games unique. The argument against Juul is simply that games may not be trying to reproduce coherence. Ludology is the study of unique features of a game; narratology is the study of narrative across all media. Traditionally, narratology owes a lot to structuralism which focuses on formal properties of language. Fabula/sjuzet imply rule-based analysis of narrative discourse. Frasca: Just like narratology, ludology should also be independent from the medium that supports the activity. He compares elements of ludus to elements of narration (game goal compared to the narrative plot) Janet Murray reminds us that all forms of storytelling requires units, such as Propps morphology of folk-takes. Digital stories are thus only a subset of the reproduction possibilities for unit operations, while examples of storytelling like epic poetry and folktale suggests that stories are instances of unit operations. However, discussion of formal properties of games and narrative becomes confuse with a discussion of expressive quality. Frasca proposes that we use narrativism instead of narratology because it characterizes the particular kind of criticism that privileges narrative over configuration. Henry Jenkins narrative enters games at localized incidents (micronarratives) with fabula as the catalyst for understanding these structures. narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypotheses about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues This narrative reassembly of unit operations is taken forgranted. Aligning stories with cognition: Roger Schank we think in stories. Humans process information in story form. Mark Turner [humans possess] a literary mind. Giacomo Rizzolatti mirror neurons suggests a relationship between the cognitive understanding and discrete nonnarrative actions. Also structure human cognition. Might explain empathy and the evolution of language. While mirror neurons seek to understand units of reproduced meaning that do not necessarily help narrative, ludology sees to separate games from human experience. Following just narrative makes games produces of narrative only. Both ludology and narrativism are dictated by a functionalist ideology. Ergo, ludology vs narrativism should ask if games need to produce stories while acknowledging that they are able to. We should try to evaluate all tets as configurative systems built out of experience units through training ourselves both to understand simulations as interpretations of the world (Janet Murray) but also to understand narrative texts as simple. Videogames can be played as individual lines of experience that might be narrative, however this is only useful to show the broader abstract meaning the tets unit operations make. Murrays assumption that a digital version of a film must have a plot progression is ideology. We must learn to read unit operations as discursive in their own right.