Monday, February 20, 2012

Modern Living & Proceduralism


“By procedural literacy I mean the ability to read and write processes, to engage procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the interplay between the culturally-embedded practice of human meaning-making and technically-mediated processes.”
-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity. To these qualities that Mr. Glendenning ascribed to the code I would respectfully add one more: boredom. Opacity. User-unfriendliness.”
-The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

“Training videogames become educational when they stop enforcing a process as a set of arbitrary rules in the service of the organization and begin presenting a procedural rhetoric for the business model that the employee has been asked to work under. Once the worker has a perspective on this business model, he can interrogate it as a value system rather than an arbitrary condition of employment.”
-Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost

“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air [...]  find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. [...] It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
- The Pale King, David Foster Wallace