Ethnography & ‘Reading’

Following the substantial ethnographic themes in the works that we read for last week and the sort of ethnographic attentiveness that is demanded by the material for this week  (and me being an anthropologist-in-training—hammer, meet nail), I thought I would write a bit about ethnography and games this week.

Something that first struck me in pondering the relation is the notion that, as we veer into more ‘interactive’ media, a gap between ethnographer and media theorist closes. When, in order to perform an interpretation of a media object, we must try on various roles, traverse and map out different spaces, adhere to various context-specific rules, improvise within those rules, and cathect various objectives (winning, figuring out the puzzle, finishing the level), aren’t we doing a kind of participant observation?

On the other side of things, anthropologists have long been invested in the idea that we can ‘read’ a social milieu, a set of gestures, or a religious practice (or what have you) like one reads a text or a media object. The cybernetics-inspired structuralism of the field-averse Claude Levi-Strauss and his disciples theorized a background structuration of language and society that produced a fractal recurrence of the same effects across both fields, and posited a formal identity between the two. I.e. “of course one can ‘read’ society, it’s basically (structured like) language!” The dream here, in some way, is one of the “armchair anthropologist” that has no need for fieldwork, because he (yes, paradigmatically, he) can simply place new content into preexisting slots in a ‘universal theory of myth’ or what have you. Another less nuanced (and perhaps mean) way of putting it is that anthropologists for time immemorial have found the ‘participatory’ demands of fieldwork to be exhausting and terrifying, and have always dreamt of being able to ‘just read books’ as they imagine a philologist or literary theorist might.

The gaming worlds produced by programming languages (which are, literally—not metaphorically—cybernetic) are, on the one hand, a kind of apotheosis of the structuralist dream/nightmare of a social milieu in which language and sociality are perfectly identical in their cybernetic structuration. But, curiously, the interpretation of these language-worlds does not only make possible but demands a kind of haptic, participant observatory ‘feeling out’. This demand inverts the normal simile: “ethnography is like reading” (this flattens the ‘participation’ out of ethnography); rather, we get the notion that “reading is like ethnography” (this forces a haptic kind of participation back into ‘reading’ and ethnography). The parentheticals are here because I haven’t worked the language out yet, please accept them as a temporarily necessary prosthesis.

This line of thought seems to bring to the tip of the tongue the provocation that  ‘reading’ and ‘participation’ were always like each other in some fundamental way, but I will disavow any take on that here.

Another thing that I’m really interested in, but have not quite worked out in full expressible coherence (this is an invitation!), is the possibility of taking interpretive devices that have been developed in the medium specificity of video games (I am particularly fond of Patrick’s “mechanics”), and bringing them in to ethnographic use (IRL, or “in the field”, as they say) to see what happens.