Object Lessons: Games as Theory and Practice

Ian Bogost has an interesting post up (here) about his latest invention Cow Clicker. Apparently Cow Clicker is a facebook game designed as “partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.”

Personally, I loathe meaningless and mindless facebook games. I never play them – I have better things to do with my existence. However, Cow Clicker seems to be about something more than this.

And I still find the idea that video games can become innovative learning environments if done properly intriguing. So it is interesting what Bogost seems to be implying about how technology might be used to increase reflexivity on a concrete level of action and cognition, rather than be used simply as tools deployed unconsciously.

Here is the part of his post I found most interesting:

The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric. This in mind, I thought it might be productive to make an example [of a social game] that would act as its own theory. It's a strategy I've been calling carpentry, and which I'll be discussing in more detail in my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology (including this example). In the case of social games, I reasoned that enacting the principles of my concerns might help me clarify them and, furthermore, to question them. So I decided to make a game that would attempt to distill the social game genre down to its essence. Cow Clicker is the result.

Thinking about how our discourses and theories translate into practice and address issues of coping and understanding in the world is important for very obvious practical reasons, so Bogost’s move towards an ‘applied’ object-oriented philosophy is welcomed. As I have continually argued, we are never going to understand 'things-in-themselves' without a full-out engagement (attentiveness and experimentation) with actual things in the world - and all their idiosyncrasies. Bogost’s carpentry may be just such an engagement?