I’m reading Patrick Jagoda’s incredibly dense and foundational text, Experimental Games. It’s not an easy read! But it’s scratching every itch I’ve had since I left college and started taking games seriously.
If you didn’t know, my background is in philosophy and mathematics. I studied phenomenology and existentialism rather closely, as well as the philosophy of mathematics. I received a lot of accolades for my work, so I think I’m reasonably qualified to say that Jagoda’s work here is really something else. Drawing on affect theory, game criticism, scientific theory, and gobs of American military history (surprisingly essential for any game design scholar), Experimental Games is a tour-de-force of scholarship and affective analysis.
Before I started reading this book I didn’t know that affect theory existed. I am beginning to think it’s the cure for all my ailments.
Affect theory is a field of study which draws heavily on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and literary theory from the mid-to-late-20th century. Its object of study is affect, roughly the non-cognitive, or semi-, sub-, or meta-conscious awareness of feeling, and how this awareness affects our daily lives. Much of intellectual history has been shaped by the legacy of the Enlightenment, when western European intelligentsia were poised to wipe out feeling, what they considered an impure stain on our most human feature: our rationality. But rationality - especially scientific rationality - can only get you so far.
Take for example the crisis in the foundation of mathematics which occurred in the early 20th century. Great figures like Hilbert, Gödel, Russell, Whitehead formalized mathematics on a logical basis. The work done in this field inspired the creation of the Vienna Circle, a group of scholars in Austria which founded the philosophical movement known as logical positivism. While logical positivism didn’t last very long, it is hard to understate its influence. This is especially true in the Anglosphere, where figures like Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap (after fleeing for the United States) established a regime of strict logical thought. Their primary opponent was the burgeoning study of continental philosophy, a loosely-defined movement which centered, at the beginning, around the work of Martin Heidegger. Carnap in particular was a staunch critic of Heidegger, writing a famous attack in which he declared the obscure metaphysical writings of his opponent to be literal nonsense.1
Heidegger and Carnap were both in agreement on one thing: Traditional metaphysics - that espoused by neo-Kantians like Cassirer