I’ve got yet another publishing milestone to my name this year: my first academic book review is up on the Teachers College Record website. It’s a review of Ian Bogost’s book Unit Operations. The review is only up on the site for free for a week before it goes to members only, so don’t put this off til next week if you can’t make time now!
Unit Operations is one of the first approaches to video game theory I’ve seen which takes computation into account. As a result, I think it’s quite valuable. The book is very theory-heavy, but if you’re into that stuff — or into comp lit, which is Bogost’s background — it’s a worthwhile read.
I should note I genuinely need to thank the TCR editors for putting the review up again — I didn’t figure out when it was up the first time, but they reopened it and put it back on the front page when I noted I hadn’t managed to point the article out to people! Very, very gracious of them. Thanks!
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Late addenda: First, what a day — I also got notice I had a paper based on my Masters’ thesis accepted to AERA, the biggest education conference in the US, and was invited to contribute a chapter on DDR to a book! Lest you start snarling about me getting more than I deserve, please note that a number of my peers in the TC program started hitting these milestones earlier in their careers, so I’m actually a late bloomer by department standards…
Second, another thought on Ian’s book. In Unit Operations, he suggests the phenomenon of “simulation fever,” drawing on Derrida’s “archive fever,” with which I’m not familiar. Simulation fever is supposed to encompass users’ reactions to simulations. Drawing on studies of people who use simulation software (among them, government agents working with complex disaster and economic simulations, etc) Ian cites two common attitudes. One is to dismiss the simulations as inaccurate, and refuse to use them. Another is to basically say “well, this simulation is flawed, but it’s the best tool we have to understand the situation.” (I personally think we need to account for other attitudes, particularly those of uninformed acceptance, but we’ll get there at some point.)
It occurred to me tonight that these two attitudes are kind of like quantitative and qualitative approaches to knowledge. The qualitative phenomenologist, in the extreme, succumbs to the view that any simulation we make of human behavior will be near-fatally incomplete. From there, he or she tries to tell the story as accurately and comprehensively as possible, allowing often as to the limitations of his or her perspective. Meanwhile, the quantitative empiricist tries to make the best model possible, outlining the potential weak points of his or her data wherever possible, but still insisting some knowledge can be gleaned from it.
Maybe I’m still too naive to really understand these epistemologies, but it feels similar….
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