Oiligarchy, proceduralists, and Miguel Sicart
Hot damn, that Miguel Sicart piece "Against Procedurality" rocked my world (http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap). First, because it brought into sharp relief an intellectual debate in game studies that I'd perhaps glimpsed from the edges but hadn't understood as an academic debate; second, because I love Ian Bogost (proceduralist extraordinaire) and his book Unit Operations introduced me to Game Studies back around 2010; third, because I spent yesterday playing Oiligarchy, a fascinating whack-you-over-the-head-with-its-message and bathe-in-its-procedural-ethics type game and I had a whole lot of feelings about it.
So, Sicart's piece. In extremely trimmed down form: Adorno and Horkheimer critiqued the Enlightenment because, by promoting rationalism as the highest good, it basically made a virtue of rationalizing unreasonable things, like myth and ritual and bias. That was back in the 1950's #FrankfurtSchool. Sicart argues that the Proceduralists, a group of very popular game studies theorists led by Bogost who think that meaning is entirely found in the rules/procedures of games, rather than emerging from the play itself, are doing the same thing for the same reason—valorizing rationality for its own sake and pretending that the irrational aspects of games (aka what is found in the play of a game rather than the rules of it) are less meaningful.
This in some ways seems like a fuller working-through of Salen & Zimmerman's organizational scheme. They talk a lot about how play and games are intertwined—play is an element of games, but games are a subset of play—and arrange their book to look at games both as experiential, emerging, open-ish systems (play) or as sets of complex instructions that are simply instantiated each time the game is played (rules). Sicart argues passionately that gameplay cannot be considered a simple manifestation of the rules; this is, he says, a totalitarian, determinist way of imagining a game, as if the designer-god is all-powerful and the little players simply worked out his will. Conceptualizing a game as an open space of possibility, in which players play by creating and embodying their ethical, political, personal thoughts and identities, turns the designer’s job into opening up that space of possibility as much as he can, not conveying his views through code.
Besides the Frankfurt School, this tension resonates with a whole lot of debates. It’s related to the performance studies debate (which doesn’t really exist anymore) about whether the “meaning” of the text is found in the script (akin to rules) or in each performance of it (akin to play). Sicart also seems to be interested in scrapping the designer-as-autor concept, and really killing off the author entirely (#Barthes), which is particularly interesting in an art-form that’s almost always created by teams (even leaving out for a minute the idea that the players co-create the game along with the designers).
It also touches on pedagogy theories of the student-centered classroom, the teacher-as-facilitator, etc.; in an E. Bernhardt language classroom, you’re supposed to speak a total of 10 minutes and, by using those 10 minutes appropriately, facilitate your students’ speaking for the other 40 minutes. It’s a nigh-impossible standard to hit every day (and believe me, we try), partly because organizing a classroom to facilitate a more “playful” atmosphere has the potential to open it up too much. If you give students the control, they might go in a completely different direction than the one you intended, and yeah, maybe they’re still learning, but they aren’t learning the past participles they need to know for the quiz on Friday.
So when we get down to it, the issue is the disjoint between the capitalist, productivity-focused, rule-based ethic of procedurality and the subversive, anti-capitalist, goal-disinterested, imaginative universe of play. If I teach using a “play” mentality but am still fundamentally responsible for teaching my kids their verb forms, there’s going to be friction. Time limits, too, encourage procedurality—with all the time in the world, I could reasonably trust we’d eventually get to verb forms, but I only get 50 hours to teach them a language, so it’s rough to let them “waste time” playing. As Sicart writes: “The discourse of the procedural is that of scientificism. If we can formally define the properties of a game and in them embed meaning, then designers will be able to provide players with guided experiences in which the very act of play is controlled and oriented. Play is instrumentally guided towards the completion of goals that ensure, by means of the objectively and scientifically solid procedural elements of the game. This will lead the player experience a deep message that will hopefully persuade her.” The player/student must walk the path we intended, experience the thing we wanted her to experience, endure the precise cathartic epiphany we wanted to give her. If we set her free to play, we lose control over what happens. She could be bored, or confused, or too frustrated. She could hate us.
Also, how fascinating that proceduralists (according to Sicart) turn games, an activity no one outside of game studies thinks of as productivity-focused, into yet another task we are failing to accomplish. How delightful to think of play as a Marxist activity! Hooray for the Situationists and their kinda pathetic (but earnest) attempts to re-walk the city! To quote Sicart again, “[Procedurality] leads to an understanding of play, and leisure, as mechanical outcomes of processes; outcomes that follow the same production and consumption models than labor: "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work (...) mechanization has such power over a man's leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself." (Adorno and Horheimer, p. 137). Proceduralism, with its call for systems at the core of the essence of games and its disregard for expressive or ineffective play, turns the act of playing a game into a labor-like action, into work towards an externally decided, predetermined, and rational outcome designed by others than the players. Play becomes external to the player and the play context.”
To bring this all back to an actual game, this context makes it SO INTERESTING to play Oiligarchy, which has a clear leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-business set of views but a very proceduralist way of expressing them. It’s like a beautiful exemplification of the “leftists as fascists” idea. Although I want to put it out there that I absolutely loved Oiligarchy, and I’m only calling it “fascist” in the sense that it’s rigidly procedural and doesn’t facilitate open play. It’s fascist in the same way non-fiction books are—it makes an argument, follows it through, tries to persuade you. In Oiligarchy, you begin playing in 1946. You have access to 6 world locations—Nigeria, Texas, Iraq, Venezuela, Washington D.C. and Alaska— and your job is to extract as much oil from the ground as possible. Except I’m not sure it actually tells you that. It’s just that the money and the adoration of shareholders and the sense that you’re winning the game by buying politicians is utterly addictive. It’s so easy! I made obscene amounts of money with barely any strategizing. Oil was almost everywhere I looked, bribing politicians was complete child’s play considering how much cash I raked in, and my opponents (cartoon-ish protesters bleating helplessly like sad birds) had no chance against me. Any time they did manage to influence a politician, I found myself muttering “fucking environmentalists” and building another oil rig on indigenous land out of spite. The game ends in 2060 or so with wide-spread cannibalism, factories producing energy from the bodies of humans because the oil has dried up, and basically the end of the world as we know it.
I need to replay it to see if you can misplay it as an ethical, human person. What happens if you don’t buy any politicians? But even if you could, this would just be another train track, not an open possibility-space. Oiligarchy is about how the mechanic of bribing politicians brings about an ethically corrupt world, and it makes the game so easy in order to prove its point—if you don’t care about the morality of it, it isn’t hard at all to do. The trick comes in making people think openly and honestly, to make them care deeply and critically. And proceduralism can’t do that, only play.
