Academic study of new media is increasingly spawning more specialized inquiry: Game studies, software studies, critical-code studies, even platform studies are all buzzwords in the field. One high-profile meeting last year at the University of California at San Diego, hosted by Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, brought together an international array of scholars, artists, and technologists, including many of the names mentioned in the accompanying article, to discuss “the meaning of studying software cultures, and the direction and goals of software studies as an emerging movement” (http://workshop.softwarestudies.com). The centerpiece of the meeting, a public “pecha kutcha” session, featured several dozen seven-minute speed talks with titles like “Expressive Processing,” “Unmanned Systems as Assemblages,” “The Time of Codework,” and “Software Values.”
Most users have no more knowledge of what their computer or code is actually doing than most automobile owners have of their carburetor or catalytic converter. Nor is any such knowledge necessarily needed. But for academics, driven by an increasing emphasis on the materiality of new media — that is, the social, cultural, and economic factors driving technical innovation, essentially the inverse of an old-school technological determinism that posited technology as the governing force in human activity — no hardware component is too exotic, no acronym too esoteric to escape critical notice. Put another way, software studies and its kin are the collision of computer science and cultural studies.
That collision happens on a daily basis at one of the busiest crossroads in academic new media, a group blog called Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org). Its authors, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, are all hands-on developers and creators of new media like interactive fiction and games, as well as critics and theorists. In the five and a half years since it’s been online, Grand Text Auto has become the single must-read blog for the field.
The MIT Press, which has an extensive list in new media, last year published Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller and featuring contributions by a number of key critics and thinkers. The MIT Press is also launching a series in platform studies, edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost (http://platformstudies.com). According to Montfort and Bogost, “Platform studies investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems.” They have written the inaugural volume, a study of the Atari 2600 Video Computer System, to be published this year. My own Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008) is likewise in this vein.
Critical Code Studies is the mantle of another group blog, founded by Jeremy Douglass and Mark Marino, whose mission is to “promote the close reading of software within socio-historical contexts” (http://criticalcodestudies.com/wordpress). Critical-code studies have also been the focus of sessions at the Modern Language Association and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. In an essay in the electronic book review, Marino writes that critical-code studies “holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems” and that it “follows the work of critical legal studies, in that its practition-ers apply critical theory to a functional document (legal document or computer program) to explicate meaning in excess of the document’s functionality, critiquing more than merely aesthetics and efficiency” (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology).
Rita Raley’s book on new media and code, to be published later this year by the University of Minnesota Press, promises to further extend these inquiries.
Games studies is the most venerable of these various offshoots of new-media studies, and also the one whose relationship to the larger discipline is most fraught. Almost anyone familiar with academic discussion about computer games has probably encountered vestiges of a once-vociferous game-playing versus storytelling debate, which largely defined the field for several years following the 2001 launch of its foundational journal, Game Studies, edited by Espen Aarseth (http://gamestudies.org). Today game studies has been invigorated by a wave of writing, including the First Person and Second Person compilations edited by Pat Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (Third Person is forthcoming later this year); Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg); and Bogost’s pathbreaking study Persuasive Games (all from MIT); as well as Alex Galloway’s books Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, with Eugene Thacker (both from Minnesota), and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (from Harvard University Press).
Meanwhile, Stephen Ramsay’s work on “algorithmic criticism,” which explores the role of procedure in literary criticism and applied digital humanities, represents still another important area of activity and serves to complement the kind of projects described above. Ramsay’s book is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press, which has begun a series in digital humanities edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 20, Page B11
