[This blogpost is an elaboration on ideas presented in my starter kit for an infrastructural approach to game studies developed for Alan Liu’s Critical Infrastructures course at UCSB.]

Indeed, it may be that in late modernity the experience of infrastructure at institutional scales (undergirded by national or regional infrastructures such as electricity grids and global-scale infrastructures such as the Internet) is operationally the experience of “culture.”

[…]infrastructure is that cyborg-being whose making, working, disciplining, performance, gendering, and hybridity are increasingly part of the core identity of late modern culture in ways no longer fully describable in older schemes of ideology-critique according to which infrastructure underlies an alternate, rather than thoroughly intermeshed, reality of superstructure. Superstructure has become compressed into infrastructure, and vice versa, where (to signpost my argument to come) the zone of compression is increasingly structured by the modern organizational institutions in which we are fully enmeshed.

Alan Liu, “Toward Critical infrastructure Studies.”

What is Critical Infrastructure Studies?

In his paper presented last year at the University of Connecticut, Alan Liu positions the digital humanities and new media studies as uniquely capable of addressing, conceptualizing, and critiquing “infrastructure” at various levels of scale. For Liu (as well as for others within the nascent discipline of critical infrastructure studies (or CIS)), “infrastructure” denotes not merely an account of the material, economic, scientific, and technical “base” from which cultural superstructure emerges (as in the orthodox Marxist model), but the superimposition and thorough entanglement of base and superstructure, technology and culture, materiality and discourse. Rather than positing universals, Liu presents such entanglement as particular to the experience of late modernity, in which large-scale infrastructures not only “prop up” culture but function themselves as perhaps the most significant works in our cultural milieu. Entangled ourselves, we lack both the critical distance and solid foundation for the older “schemes” of ideology-critique; instead, Liu argues, the digital humanities must embrace its “dirty-hands proximity” to postindustrialism, getting “close enough to the system to know its critical points of inflection, difference, and change.” Like his theorization of Neuromancer’s Kuang virus in The Laws of Cool, the digital humanities can break into the code of postindustrialism through mimicry until there appears no difference between the two, whereupon DH might unleash its radical potential for change (7).¹

Taking off from Liu’s brilliant conceptualization of the field, this post attempts to re-think a particular subset of DH and New Media Studies–game studies–in relation to critical infrastructure studies, and vice versa. In assessing the media ecology of our present moment, video games seem uniquely predisposed toward not only representing but perhaps even performing computational infrastructures, thus providing a mediational entry-point to infrastructure at the level of cultural artifact. Why?

1. If we’re using “dirty hands” as a metric, video games have perhaps the dirtiest of all. While no art form escapes the neoliberal economy, few function in such close proximity.
2. Video games are software. This contributes to reason 1 in that video games exist on the same media technology as business software (e.g. Microsoft Office). In addition, it sheds light on the performativity of games, in which the code plays out on the screen. Lastly, it ensures the possibility of their endless configurations and reconfigurations.
3. Video games emerged from postindustrialism and have arguably become the dominant cultural art form of our contemporary moment, something akin to film’s relation to the 1940s and 50s.
4. Like infrastructure, video games necessarily operate on many scalar levels (e.g. hardware, software, visualization, etc.).
5. Meta-referential techniques (such as those explored in my next post) can open these levels up to the player in ways that exceed mere alienation (in which the viewer is kept at a critical distance) in favor of further immersion into the critical construction of the artifact (through, for example, modding).

Has game studies yet realized its own infrastructural potential?

Games Studies At Present

Perhaps as a result of the features above, games studies has tended toward an infrastructural orientation for around a decade. Along with the closely related disciplines of software studies, critical code studies, and media archaeology, game studies has long rejected “screen essentialism”–the practice of evaluating only what appears on the screen, thus overlooking the underlying software and hardware that make such outputs possible. Engaging the lost-standing critical practice of always “delving deeper,” media theorists have argued for the necessity of developing new practices of critique that plunge the depths beneath the screen to illuminate the algorithmic or even microprocessural components of new media objects, sometimes even to the exclusion of content analysis. This McLuhanite tendency in new media studies can be traced back to (at least) Friedrich Kittler’s “There is No Software” (1995), in which Kittler criticizes not only GUIs but software itself for obfuscating the “real” prime agents of computation: hardware. Recently, in A Geology of Media, Jussi Parikka takes this “harder! deeper!” logic to its extreme, out-Kittlering Kittler with the claim that “hardware is not hard enough”–instead we must again go deeper to explore the minerals used to produce hardware.

Game studies too has developed along a similar trajectory. Recognizing the insufficiency of older modes of humanistic inquiry, such as ideological critique, in assessing the significance of new media objects, games theorists like Alexander Galloway have argued for an “algorithmic criticism” that formulates gaming as an interaction between the gamer and the game’s underlying algorithms (rather than content). Others, such as Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, advocate “platform studies,” in which we can see an application of the “harder! deeper!” logic toward video game consoles:

Digital media researchers are starting to see that code is a way to learn more about how computers are used in culture, but there have been few attempts to go even deeper, to investigate the basic hardware and software systems upon which programming takes place, the ones that are the foundation for computational expression. This book begins to do this—to develop a critical approach to computational platforms. (Racing the Beam 15; emphasis mine)

Still others, such as Noah Wardrip-Fruin, position their work not as a rejection of content in favor of underlying mechanisms, but as a “bridging” of the gap between these two layers:

But regardless of perspective, writings on digital media almost all ignore something crucial: the actual processes that make digital media work, the computational machines that make digital media possible. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with this. Output-focused approaches have brought many valuable insights for those who seek to understand and create digital media. Yet, on the other hand, it leaves a big gap. This book is my attempt to help bridge the gap. […] hopefully it demonstrates that there is something to be gained by being able to move between the gap’s two sides, being able to see the inside and outside of digital media’s machines. (Expressive Processing 2-3)

In all of these approaches, we can see a gesturing toward the infrastructural without quite realizing the radical superimposition of base and superstructure. While all of these tendencies assert technical systems as cultural artifacts, they still either prioritize these systems over the on-screen cultural representations or, at best, treat them as equal but separate endeavors in need of a bridge. In contrast to Liu’s theorization of infrastructure, Bogost and Montfort pursue the “deeper! harder!” impetus to find the “foundation” for video games, and Wardrip-Fruin’s gap-and-bridge metaphors (while interestingly infrastructural) posit cultural critique and computational analysis as two independent modes that might profitably be brought together, rather than perceiving them as deeply intertwined, as inextricably entangled.

Where does a CIS Approach to Games Lead?

Now I’m going to say something that I’m not sure I myself–a hardnosed media materialist almost Pavlovianly conditioned to cringe at the mere mention of “content”–even believe, but maybe, just maybe, CIS provides a compelling argument for returning back to our screens.

I don’t mean this as merely a return to an older paradigm of traditional cultural studies, but instead as an assessment of how CIS in tandem with particular cultural artifacts (such as the games explored in my next blog post) might provide a way out of the “deeper! harder!” trajectory pushed to its extreme in A Geology of Media (how much harder or deeper can we go?), as well as the bridging paradigm of Expressive Processing. Perhaps certain “infrastructural texts” offer a new way of perceiving the inextricable entanglement of technology and culture on the same level, and perhaps sometimes this level is what we might think of as “surface.”

After weeks of interdisciplinary infrastructural theory, our grad seminar turned toward more traditional objects of humanistic inquiry–not telephone poles, sewers, and electric grids, but poems, novels, and paintings. The question that hung over all of us and lingers through my current blog post was Prof. Liu’s: “What are some novels (or films) that are not merely about infrastructure, but of it?” Or, as it often translates in my mind, “what are cultural artifacts that do not merely represent infrastructure or rely on infrastructures for production, distribution, storage, etc., but actually exist as (or perhaps “perform”) infrastructure?”²

Applied to the field of game studies, are there perhaps games that do not merely represent infrastructure–through, for example, simulations of buildings, bridges, sewers, powerlines in the game world–but effectively exist as or perform infrastructure on the screen? In our seminar, discussing Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead and Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, we considered what it might mean to become or perform infrastructure, rather than record or describe it. Although radically different novels–Rukeyser’s documentary poetics on the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia vs. Lu’s ironic postmodernist tale of an experimental ambient music group–each text seemed to associate becoming or performing infrastructure with exhaustive labor, working on infrastructure until it becomes a part of oneself. Might these games also make their players a part of the infrastructure of the game, in a never finished process of building, of giving oneself over to the infrastructure?

Tentative answer: Maybe.

Post II: Hacking Games: else Heart.Break()