GP Book Review: Ian Bogost's "Unit Operations"
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
by Ian Bogost
Reviewed for GamePolitics by Jeff McHale
Reviewing Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism presented a quandary: how does one go about critiquing a work that is itself based on an entirely new method of criticism?
To begin, let's define some terms. Gamers generally think of criticism in terms of reviews in the vein of "buy or don't buy" or "4-out-of-5 mushrooms", etc. While this type of video game criticism is fairly ubiquitous, it's not the type Ian Bogost has in mind. The Georgia Tech professor is referring to literary criticism - the more scholarly approach one would find in a college-level lit course.
Being somewhat familiar with Bogost's work at Water Cooler Games, I expected the author might use Unit Operations to further his Serious Games agenda. But while the book does advance the idea that video games have value far beyond mere entertainment, Bogost doesn't make the serious side of gaming his primary focus. This book was clearly written with academia in mind. In fact, Unit Operations is so brain-bleedingly academic, I couldn't have made it through the first parts without help from dear friends Google and the Wikipedia.
Lest you think me too harsh, let me clarify: Bogost's work is both well written and meticulously documented. But the author's oblique references to obscure literary theories make the book less approachable for the casual reader. What's more, the author's prose is a bit self-consciously elevated. For instance, Bogost uses the word "ligature," far too many times. This struck me as unnecessary at best, and SAT-style word dropping at worst.
For the reader who is not familiar with the myriad of theories Bogost mentions, an inordinate amount of time must be spent on playing catch-up. I have never before been required to dig so deeply into background material just to grasp what an author was saying. This was not a task I relished, and I'll admit to some degree of frustration. There was a payoff, however, and it came when I realized I could trust Bogost's synthesis of the material. The Georgia Tech prof was not engaged in some academic manipulation of the theories he referenced. Thus I came to understand that the underpinnings of Unit Operations were solid.
Bogost's theory essentially is that creative works of any type can be broken down into individual units of meaning. For gamers, it may be easier to understand this from a programming point of view. Each video game engine has "unit operations" which we are - perhaps unconsciously - familiar with. For example: gravity, ballistics, collision detection, lighting, and so forth. Many times, these units of programming language (meaning) are exactly identical from game to game. But what makes a title unique is how it blends unit operations to create a whole. Imagine the differences in play that become available by simply changing the in-game representation of how gravity functions. We gamers are all likely familiar with Bogost's prime example of unit operations at work in video games - the Half-Life engine. Exactly the same engine was utilized for Counter-strike, so individual users could access the unit operations coded for Half-life (the game engine) in whatever way they wished.
Bogost's radical step comes in the use of his theory across all types of media, art, and science - not just video games. Simply stated, the author's idea is that all types of works contain similar discrete units of meaning. Even sciences like chemistry and biology can be intuitively broken down into in such a fashion.
In Unit Operations Bogost has pooled the resources of many prevailing schools of academic criticism, as well as mathemtical theory and pure science. He then demonstrates how the concept can be used across media genres by reviewing the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, the French poetry of Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce's classic novel Ulysses as well as all-time video game bad boy Grand Theft Auto III.
By way of example, the unit operation known as "the passerby" is seen all of these diverse works, but each uses this function in different ways. In addition GTA III, Bogost uses many other game examples to further his theory, including The Sims and Star Wars Galaxies.
My patience in struggling through the early parts of the book was rewarded in the end. The chapter on Grand Theft Auto III is in itself worth the price of admission. Bogost wraps up the GTA III material up especially well when he writes, "We should be less inclined to condemn works like GTA for their brutality than to try to evolve the core problem they present: how to understand and refine each unit operation of our possible actions so we can interrogate and improve the system of human experience."
While Unit Operations unleashes Bogost's theory, it remains to be seen if his ideas will gain any traction with fellow academics. For now, let's hope the book world hasn't heard the last from the ever-innovative Professor Bogost.
-Reviewing from the Steel City, with its system of mighty rivers that will protect us from the inevitable zombie apocalypse: Jeff McHale (A.K.A. "the1Jeffy")
GP: ...and we welcome Jeff to the ranks of GamePolitics writers!
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