Starter Kit

"Hacking Virtual Worlds: Video Games and Critical Infrastructure Studies"

[This start kit was prepared for Prof. Alan Liu's Critical Infrastructure Studies graduate seminar (Fall 2018). It is also available on CIStudies.org. If you decide to visit, I highly recommend checking out the other starter kits as well!]

Description

How might we re-think game studies in relation to the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies, and vice versa? Further, how might games themselves teach us new ways of understanding, developing, reconfiguring, and even "hacking" infrastructure? If we understand infrastructure as a convergence and entanglement of Marx's base and superstructure--a point at which culture and material technology intertwine--do we find a way out of the relentless emphasis on harder and harder materialities, of the ongoing persistence to go deeper (e.g. from screen essentialism to software to hardware to geological minerals (as in Parikka's A Geology of Media))? In certain games, might we find infrastructures, and not merely "representations" of infrastructure, on our screens? In addition to putting CIS in conversation with game studies, this starter kit assembles what we might loosely categorize as a "critical hacking" genre, in which the user interacts with computational infrastructures that blur the divisions between content and medium, representation and real.

Readings

Framing

Alan Liu. “Toward Critical infrastructure Studies.” Adapted version of paper last presented in full at University of Connecticut, Storrs, February 23, 2017. http://cistudies.org/wp-content/uploads/Toward-Critical-Infrastructure-Studies.pdf
Walt Scacchi. “Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene.” First Monday, vol. 15, no. 5, 2010. https://firstmonday.org/article/view/2965/2526
---. "Modding as an Open Source Approach to Extending Computer Game Systems." Open Source Systems: Grounding Research, Proc. 7th IFIP Intern Conf. Open Source Systems. eds. S. Hissam, B. Russo, M.G. de Mendonca Neto, and F. Kan. IFIP ACIT 365, (Best Paper award), Salvador, Brazil, October 2011, 62-74. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/New/Scacchi-OSS2011.pdf

Foundations

A Brief Bibliography of Game Studies and Media Theoretical Approaches. While none of these take an explicitly infrastructural approach, in combination (or perhaps, "conversation"), they form the foundation for an infrastructural approach to game studies.

Platform Studies

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. 2nd edition, The MIT Press, 2009. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam

Software or Algorithmic Studies

Alexander Galloway. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture First edition, University Of Minnesota Press, 2006. http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/1536/galloway_ar_-_gaming_-_essays_on_algorithmic_culture.pdf
Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. The MIT Press, 2012.https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/expressive-processing
Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press, 2002.https://dss-edit.com/plu/Manovich-Lev_The_Language_of_the_New_Media.pdf
---. Software Takes Command. 1st Edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.http://softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.pdf

Narratology

Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. UK edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Aarseth_Espen_J_Cybertext_Perspectives_on_Ergodic_Literature.pdf

Media Archaeology/Hardware Studies

Friedrich Kittler. Literature, Media, Information Systems. Edited by John Johnston, 1st edition, Routledge, 1997. https://monoskop.org/log/?p=9991
Jussi Parikka. A Geology of Media. University Of Minnesota Press, 2015. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-geology-of-media

Cultural Studies

Mia Consalvo. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. The MIT Press, 2009. https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/podzim2013/IM082/um/Consalvo__Cheating__Gaining_Advantage_in_Videogames.pdf

Gallery of Games

While most of game studies points to the universal--e.g. developing theories that apply to all video games--this starter kit assembles a selection of infrastructural games in order to further demonstrate the relevance of critical infrastructure studies within this field. There's an obvious shortcoming here: the theory developed out of analyzing these games will not necessarily (or likely) apply to all games; it is an admittedly limited theoretical approach. But the universalizing tendency renders the specifics of the games mute--under-appreciating how games themselves play a role in developing the theory. Rather than applying an already developed theoretical approach to games, this starter kit thinks with a specific set of games in order to develop a broader intervention into infrastructural theory. Or, in other words, the games are just as much participants as the players.