Bifo coins a new term for the workers of the 21st century–the cognitariat. The cognitariat is defined by the way that they perform labor. They all have the same physical skillset–an ability to use computer systems, to click and type. They way they are specialized and atomised, or alienated, is in their mind–their mental labor is different from the others. There are architects and writers, IT professionals and technicians working for oil companies.

Berardi, though he doesn’t use this language, suggests that the real danger of this kind of work is the way that it begins to structure the life of the worker. No longer is it simply the factory floor and the eight hour clock that structures the worker’s life. It is the cell phone, always on, making the worker available as a resource for capital 100% of the time. Berardi says it fairly clearly here:

Digital labor manipulates absolute abstract signs, but its recombining function is more specific the more personalized it gets, therefore ever less interchangeable. Consequently, high tech workers tend to consider labor as the most essential part in their lives, the most specific and personalized. (76)

In other words, digital labor becomes a graft to the worker, defining the limits of life and turning into a second skin, a second set of totalizing obligations that have to be fulfilled.

Taking this a step further than Bifo–this enables fascism, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term, to the highest degree. Intellectual labor changes labor from a thing that has to be done to a thing that wants to be done. Work becomes desirable, not just because of enterprise, but because it fulfills some basic desires and needs of the worker. The intellectual worker becomes the happiest cog in the most ambivalent machine.

Certain arguments make a lot of sense in the framework that Berardi sets up, especially in the context of video games. Bifo writes:

But it is also true that the time apparently freed by technology is in fact transformed into cyber time, a time of mental processing absorbed into the infinite production processes of cyber space.

In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal writes about how video games become a way of reestablishing lost community in the digital age. Since we are separated by our jobs, the loss of communal communication, etc., we desire to be brought together in digital communion. We want to do things together–to perform actions collectively, or what McGonigal calls “epic” actions.

Instead, I think that we need to look at what Bifo proposes. The cognitariat is trained to use her mind all the time–to constantly produce digital labor. I think it is no shock or surprise that a huge chunk of World of Warcraft players come from the digital labor force. McGonigal argues that they are looking for communal experience; Berardi forces us to ask the question: Are they so used to producing cognitive labor that they cannot turn their productive capacity off?

MMORPGs are often described as jobs by both players and detractors alike, and I think there is something to that: the menial tasks of collection missions are drudgery to the maximum, much like coding or simple, but highly specialized, tech jobs.

Berardi quotes a radical journal from the 1970s called A/traverso: “The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.” I think that is both fundamentally true and also incredibly misleading, and Jane McGonigal takes us down the misled path. Berardi makes us question the things that make us happy, and more importantly, should make us cringe that we are constantly performing labor, even when playing games–a practice that some theorists attempt to place outside of time, narrative, and political practice.

I’m going to talk about Unit Operations here. Extra Lives gets its own post later.

Unit Operations is a strange beast as far as academic books go. It is interesting and easy to read, but also incredibly dense and complex in a few parts–Bogost is a great stylist, and it really shows. There are two distinct kinds of writing going on in the book. The first is the explanation of the current field of video game studies and new media in general; in fact, a lot of space is spent on this, which I was grateful for. Bogost does a phenomenal job giving succinct and brilliant summaries of a number of important philosophers, including Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, Benjamin, and others. The second kind of writing is dedicated to Bogost’s own philosophy.

Bogost advances his notion of the unit operation, “mode of meaning-making that privileges discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems” (I had to bungle that quote a bit to make it fit.) Bogost creates a distinction between unit operations and system operations; the difference between the two is that the unit operation is one that builds itself and is, as I understand it, properly molecular rather than molar. It is an operation that builds itself and drives itself forward–I imagine it as a kind of Guattarian desire-operation. System operations, though Bogost makes sure to draw away from D+G in a later chapter, seem to be hierarchical–they have a defined telos that determines the use of the operation’s constituent parts. All of the pieces of a system operation point toward a single goal, whereas each unit in a unit operation has the potential  to point anywhere. That is the benefit of the unit, you see; a kind of “plug ‘n play” logic.

Bogost makes a number of interesting  moves in that framework. Most important for me is his notion of “simulation fever,” an evolution or co-option of Derrida’s archive fever, which Bogost loosely defines as “the simultaneous drive toward and fear of archivization.” Simulation fever, then, is deciding/being indecisive about what is included in a simulation–racism, weather patterns, the potential for nuclear fallout, attitudes toward current leaders, etc. Where is the line drawn for what needs to be simulated? This really just transports us to a conversation about how ideology works in video games. The player is always “living” in ideologically-driven inclusions and exclusions at the whim of the programmer/designer/director. The bounds of the game a predefined, especially in video games, and so we are forced to operate within those bounds if we play the game.

This cleaves close to Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible taken to its logical limit. For Ranciere, the distinction rests between was is understood as reasonable or speech versus the excluded parts, the part-of-no-part that ceases to exist because the dominant order cannot imagine that it does. For a video game, this is extended–the excluded, the non-sensible in the game world, does not exist. There is no code that gives a Call of Duty game the ability to understand that you want to distribute foreign aid to the nameless African men you are gunning down. It just doesn’t exist.

There have been opportunities in the past for this to occur, however, a rupture in the order of things that brings the unspeakable to into the realm of the visible. The famous “Hot Coffee” mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example. It was code attached to random resources left in the game files, and through careful reconstruction, hackers were able to bring a strange sexual encounter back into existence. What is important to realize is that “Hot Coffee” was always there–no one made it from whole cloth. It can only resurface.

But games don’t normally get that far (and I think the GTA series is a simulation in a loose sense.) They don’t even get to a point where a viewpoint can be obfuscated in code, left as remnants. The viewpoint never makes it in the game at all–it isn’t “archived.”

I think this gives video games the ability to be either profoundly conservative or profoundly radical. I know that sounds really silly, but the point is that video games, simply through the ways that they are created, are necessarily ideological polemics.

This is where unit operations come in handy. Bogost is pretty up front when it comes to the neutrality of unit operations; they can never be neutral. They are always biased, and when you combine unit operations, what you are getting is a debate of subject matter, mini-ontologies that are different and heterogeneous but also organs of the same assemblage (Bogost wouldn’t agree with this, I think.) In essence, unit operations can be together and yet separate, opening up space for interpretation. For example, my recent post on Bulletstorm shows how this works–that game both loves and hates the player’s genocidal tendencies.

So that was what I got out of Unit Operations. It says about ten thousand things, all of them really smart, and it would do everyone good to read the book. For instance, I keep going back to his reading of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.” It’s just good stuff.

Those things are actually bad.

There are all kinds of theoretically suspicious things about the assumptions that the bills make, but none of those things really matter here. What matters is the practical effects of what would occur of the bills are/were passed.

One thing that would happen is that I wouldn’t be able to blog anymore. As you know, it is critical to me to link, show, and talk about visual media. I wouldn’t be able to do that in a SOPA/PIPA world. Comic book companies that don’t agree with my reading or use of their material (read: my opinion) would be able to prevent me from using their images under fair use plus they would be able to prevent my website from loading. While it appears that DNS blocking gone from the bill, Congress edits and creates new portions of bills all the time, and the lobbies for the media industry are wealthy.

The same goes for the video game industry.

So this is important. Coilhouse says everything that I want to say about it, so go read their post and reason for blacking out.

I am not blacking out, but that’s because I wanted to make this post and be visible today. Also, people gotta get their Rise of the Planet of the Apes symbolism searches fulfilled.

A lot of things will go on today, but just remember that MLK Jr. did an enormous amount of work for the civil rights movement.

Don’t forget that he wasn’t the only one, though, and that the individual resistances and public disobedience to racism is what really made things change. Every member of the movement was on the ground as much as King, so appreciate those people too.

That said, it’s a Monday, so it’s music time. Have some M83 now. Embedding seems like it is broken, so here is a link to “Midnight City.”

This is an article written by a teacher in Canada. The teacher teaches young kids. The teacher got the bright idea to ask kids about the games that they play.

Here’s the positive news: kids like to play Angry Birds. They like to play Angry Birds so much that it polled the highest among ninety or so kids. The author doesn’t give us any particular numbers about anything in the article, but I bet that the Angry Birds ratio was standard across girls and boys.

And that is good. I think Angry Birds is a pretty good game. It’s simple and it encourages problem solving, and more importantly, it teaches the player that you have to fail (sometimes eternally, I’m terrible at the game) to succeed in the end. You have to try things over and over. Eventually, you will get it right. I like fostering problem solving in kids through games. I think that’s a great power that video games have–forget big claims. I don’t think video games are going to save the world anymore than Monopoly will make me a millionaire, but I do think that simple lessons learned over and over in a subliminal way can be good.

But you can also learn horrible lessons, and that’s what the article is properly about. I think that it is bad for kids to play Call of Duty in any of its iterations. The game promotes a jingoistic ideology and justifies murder and torture constantly. It also takes a masculine, extremist, war-porn point of view.

So we need to take the author’s final words to heart:

“I don’t doubt your abilities to raise your child,” I begin. “But you and I both are part of the problem. For you, being more engaged in what your son consumes will help you bond with him even more in the time you have together. And for teachers? We need to become better equipped to talk about new technology and the role it plays in shaping our children. Teachers and parents are in this together.”

So let’s get a few basic things out of the way:

1. I think that humans and animals playing games together is amazing.
2. I think that games might be the first place where we see some real interspecies communication.
3. I think that a person who plays games with an animal might think twice about murdering and consuming it.
4. I could never play a game with a creature and then consume it.

Now that we have those basic things out of the way, I want to say a little about how dangerous I think this game could be. On one hand, you have my points 3 and 4 above–this could legitimately be a liberating relationship between humans and animals. It could do wonders for the ways that your average person thinks about animal agency in the world; it could provoke people to take stronger stances against factory farming.

However, I don’t think that is the case. If you read the article and watch the video, you can see that the game is really played by manipulating the pig with the iPad. You push on the iPad, you try to line up with a pig snout, and then you guide the pig around in shapes that score points. This is really a reduction of the pig to the level of a Kinect–it tracks human movement, creates a “pattern true” statement in the game itself, and the human gets points. That means that the way you get better at the game is learning how to best manipulate a pig–the player learns how to better use her tool to achieve the gameplay goal.

This is really sad for me. I want to see good things, but the very design of the game purposefully creates the pig not as a player but as a method to score points, a real-world NPC helper.

Also, we have to remember that this game is meant to amuse animals before they are going to be slaughtered for their flesh. This is literally a distraction from the reality of their conditions. If you’ve read Reality is Broken, you will remember that this is the exact reason that Jane McGonigal gives for the current desire to play MMOs and games in general: people hate the world they live in, and they want a better one.

But what does that distraction do for an animal destined to die within a year of birth?

There is a new tumblr called Mapstalgia that invites readers to submit maps of video games drawn from memory. That sounds pretty boring, but it is actually really amazing. Most of the maps and games that have been posted so far are of games that are five or ten years old (or older), which means that these maps are imprinted, permanently, in the minds of the people who are submitting them. The experience of the video game, the phenomenological experience of playing it, gets imprinted on the player. Tom Bissell, in Extra Lives, writes about how he was able to navigate London based on his playing The Getaway, a game that takes place in an exact recreation of a little bit of London.

This mapping, and memorization, takes place automatically (mostly). It is repetition, and normally it is repetition through fun and game design–you either play it so much you remember it automatically, or the game makes you run through the area so many times that it becomes second nature.

There aren’t a lot of games I could do this for. I could definitely do it with Grand Theft Auto III, which gives you an idea of how much I played that game. In any case, a submission to the site had this comment attached:

This is my first attempt at reproducing the entirety of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow’s map from memory. It was drawn on a large sheet of paper using graphite and a colored pencil. My attempt to be as exact as possible highlights the errors moreso, but I think that the errors are the most interesting part. As one example: in the bottom-middle, a little line connects two rooms in the Subterranean Hell sector. The line represents an intended linking that I could not complete. Another example: on the top right, you can see an erased horizontal space that links two towers. This was the correct placement. The final, second-guessed version is incorrect. In any case, was surprised by my relative accuracy. The last time that I played Dawn of Sorrow was a little less than a year ago. I should also note that, rather than mentally consulting the image of the game’s map, I drew this map according to the actual rooms in the game. Put another way, I imaginatively played the game at high speed, and used that to generate the map. (X)

The bolding is mine, of course. There is something amazing to me about being able to mentally play a game and how profoundly games have to impact and affect us in order to initialize that experience in us. There are very few other things that automatically encode us to remember and memorize them–the only thing I can think of right now is intense trauma.

That said, I can remember every single little detail of the first map in Super Mario Brothers.

In any case, go look at some of the maps. I like this one for Sonic Adventure 2.

This is how superheroes are going to appear in the real world. It’s not going to be what Grant Morrison thinks that it will–Superman isn’t going to show up. The Silver Age scientist-hero isn’t going to come save the world.

Instead, we are going to have more efficient killers. We are going to have enhanced soldiers, people built for war, supersoldiers. I mean, isn’t Kyle just a modern day Captain America? A man from simple roots fighting the good fight against the enemy? He even has his own meatphysically-given superpowers:

The son of a Sunday-school teacher and a church deacon, Kyle credits a higher authority for his longest kill. From 2,100 yards away from a village just outside of Sadr City in 2008, he spied a man aiming a rocket launcher at an Army convoy and squeezed off one shot from his .338 Lapua Magnum rifle. Dead. From more than a mile away. “God blew that bullet and hit him,” he said.

And that’s superhuman, right?

That’s the logic of comics. A man with a power and ability above all others. A hero that uses his powers to the maximum (the masculine pronoun is important to comics ideology , as well).

Let’s keep reading:

For Kyle, the enemy is a “savage” — there’s no room for gray, only black or white. His Charlie platoon even adopted the insignia of the comic-book vigilante The Punisher, spray-painting skulls on their body armor, vehicles, helmets and guns.

On some level, this proves a few arguments that I have made right. The character of The Punisher becomes one that can be emulated. It gives a certain justification to vigilante action–but special ops are not vigilantes. They are state-sponsored, efficient murderers. It’s easy to see the world in black and white when you have superiors denoting who the “savages” are for you.

In any case, these are our superheroes, and it should make us shudder.

2. This is an article for The Guardian in which Cory Doctorow asserts that the internet is an integral tool for contemporary revolution and struggle. It is yet another first world attempt to legitimize the first world lifestyle without having to actually take into account conditions on the ground–the unspoken assumption that Doctorow begins with, which is “everyone in the country ripe for revolt has access to the internet,” is basically just wrong. We’re getting closer to the grim meathook future, and Doctorow is one of the reasons why internet denizens will never really understand it.

3. This is an old article about how things like “honor” work in video games and how those concepts constellate with real world issues like racism. It is a remarkable anecdotal study of the behavior of game players. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever played an online game, the language is horrifying.

4. This is an article about a game, called “Train,” in which you follow strict rules that end with trains packed full of people pulling into Auschwitz. I am probably going to do a slightly longer post about this article next week, but if you are interested in reading the article now, check it out. (Thanks to Dustin.)

5. This is a smart post at Big Other about animal studies and a Rilke poem. You know you want to read that.

6. On the tail of that post, read this Biblioklept post about why Horse Movies Suck.

7. The United States pressured Spain into passing stringent anti-piracy laws under economic threat/predictions (those things are the same sometimes). Thanks Wikileaks!

8. This is a Partial Objects snippet about aesthetics and killing (that’s what I think it is about, anyway.)

But I do have some massive, massive problems with what Morrison has to say. It comes down to his view of superheroes and what superheroes mean. If you don’t know already, and I imagine you might not, Grant Morrison believes that superheroes are real. He believes that Batman is a two-dimensional, living being whose life is controlled by us–essentially, we are gods to comic book characters in the same way that a fourth or fifth dimensional creature might be to us. The magnitude of power that we have over superhero characters is palpable–we can write them into horror or glory, after all.

This way of thinking should fall apart pretty readily to any reader.

In any case, Morrison thinks that what occurs on this second dimension is inextricably linked to what we experience in our reality. The things that exist in comics can function as a kind of magic that will impact our world. You might notice that this is a little incongruent with what I said above, which is true; Morrison doesn’t do a lot to bridge the gap between “comics as magic” and “comics as their own reality” in his grand unifying theory. But I digress.

The problem I have with the book is that it forces comic books to withdraw from any kind of political message. Morrison laments the current spectrum of comic book writing because he feels that it takes a number of problematic things for granted, with corporate and capitalistic ownership being at the forefront. For example, The Ultimates is about a superhero team that works for the government and eliminates “enemy targets.” That’s pretty strange, and I agree with Morrison that it isn’t the way that comic books should be written. He calls on the example of Superman’s original stories. Superman began as a proletarian hero, fighting against injustice, which sometimes meant power structures and even the state.

Morrison loves that Superman, but he also writes things like this:

There is observable evidence to suggest that what we believe to be true directly affects how we live. As the first few years of the twenty-first century wore on, I wondered just how badly people, especially young people, were being affected by the overwhelmingly alarmist, frightening, and nihilistic mass media narratives that seemed to boil with images of death, horror, war, humiliation, and pain to the exclusion of almost everything else, on the presumed grounds that these are the kinds of stories that excite the jaded sensibilities of the mindless drones who consume mass entertainment. Cozy at our screens in the all-consuming glare of Odin’s eye, I wondered why we’ve chosen to develop in our children a taste for mediated prepackaged rape, degradation, violence, and “bad-ass” mass-murdering heroes. (409)

On face, I agree with him. I think the focus on violence for violence’s sake is problematic. However, erasing violence, especially realistic violence, means that we erase the opportunity for reflection on that violence. Morrison, on his All-Star Superman philosophical kick, is comfortable getting rid of all that analysis, what he would call nihilism, in favor of active heroes that go out and do things. He continues a few pages later

We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn’t we all use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in–and we made Superman, after all.

I think this is the best example of how the comics community can bury its head in the sand. Morrison and I agree that comics can have real world implications, but we diverge in that I think that comics are a site for politics to occur. They can educate and create spaces for resistance. They are accessible and fun to read and immediately engaging for lots of readers. I think it’s sad that we have a major player in the field essentially saying that we need to give all that up and act like Superman. Honestly, I don’t know how thinking or acting like a superhero would solve any of the problems that he outlines, and as long as comics that are disengaged from the real world, and real implications for actions,