Academic Writing Talk Episode 7: Platform Studies and Interdisciplinary Scholarship with Jim Malazita

Transcript: Aure: So welcome back to the Writing Talk podcast. My name is Aure Schrock and I'll be your guide to academic writing today. In each episode of the podcast, I talk about writing problems encountered by academic authors and how to solve them. Today I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to be interviewing a client and academic author I've worked with in the past, because I thought it might actually be fun to chat with academic authors and hear in their own words how they solve the problems that a lot of people struggle with today. With me, we have Jim Malazita, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

I'm excited that he found time to chat with me because he has an upcoming book with MIT press titled Enacting Platforms. And I was privileged enough and happy enough to help him get his manuscript in order such that it blew through with rave reviews. Today I was hoping we could talk a little bit about how that happened. Then also, as I worked with Jim, I noticed that he had a real knack for doing interdisciplinary scholarship and bringing together multiple bodies of theory, which is something that is actually kind of difficult! So hopefully we'll talk about all of these issues and more today on the podcast. So welcome, Jim, how are you?

Jim: I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

Aure: Absolutely. And thank you for taking the time. So I wanted to jump in with the vision that you brought to the book project. I love working with authors with a strong vision for a book because it actually makes my life a little bit easier. Also I think it also just makes for a better book that you actually understand the book you want to write and the place it will hold in the literary world. So let's just first talk about the platform studies series at MIT Press. What attracted you to that series in particular?

Jim: The platform study series has kind of been on my radar since grad school, really. The series editors are Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, who are two major voices in the field and whose writings had shaped a lot of my work going back to grad school. But what I really found compelling about the platform study series was its focus on technical depth, but also having that technical depth being placed in conversation with broader humanistic and social theoretical concerns. So it wasn't just a series of textbooks but rather deeper archeological investigations into what makes these platforms. And often in the platform study series, these are gaming or computing platforms—what makes these platforms socially relevant? So for my own study of the Unreal Engine, it was really a great fit to have the structure of being able to focus on a single platform case study through the platform study series, but also the flexibility to investigate that platform in multiple theoretical directions.

Aure: That's great, and I appreciate that you were able to use the Unreal Engine…. I guess we have to not use the word platform like a lot in this interview, but as a “platform” for your research! And I appreciate too how… a lot of your methodology is about layers of technology and not technology. How do you think about the role of the technical in a platform like the Unreal Engine?

Jim: Yeah, so this was also a thing that attracted me to this body of theory was, in more traditional perhaps media studies approaches, you had a lot of focus on the platform or the underlying technology is a series of affordances and constraints that there's this underlying system that allows creators to do certain things or doesn't allow them to do certain things. Creative elements like games are produced by going along with or productively resisting these underlying systems. And I thought the Unreal Engine was a really useful example of that. Not only is [Unreal] one of the major game development software platforms that are in existence today, but also [it has a] long history in gaming. The fact that it's one of the few game development software packages that has been around since the early days of PC gaming in 1998 and is the first unreal game that gets shipped and is still in use today means that not only is there a wide variety of case studies to draw from the Unreal engine, but also that the Unreal engine itself is kind of a living historical document that has accrued layers of sediment of what games are supposed to be over time. And so it is a really interesting way to see where these historical and aesthetic considerations about games are kind of embedded into different functionality within the engine itself.

Aure: And in fact, the Unreal Engine was so popular that when you first came to me, I knew Unreal from [the game] Unreal Tournament, which I used to play all the time in college. And so I was really excited to work on this book partly because I could finally get the real scoop of what that platform was about through the games I played! And that I think made it a really cool subject for a, because it was more than… this is what I always have to remind authors a lot of the time, not you, but maybe other writers, to deepen the sense of what you mean by “technology” and why, if you'll forgive me, a technological object from the outside, how you can make that be something more through your scholarship. I think that's the trick. And I was impressed too that you instinctively understood the arguments that would be relevant to the series editors and I think that helped it be quickly approved by them and also MIT Press as a whole. I remember we did some shaping of your argument early on to customize the writing to appeal to that press and to that series as a whole. Can you say—I know this is probably a long story because you've been working in this area for a while—but how you understood how to shape your proposal to appeal to that press in that series?

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. On the one hand I knew empirically and from a storytelling perspective that I thought an investigation of the Unreal Engine would fit really well into what the platform study series tries to do. But it's funny, on the other hand, it did feel like a bit of a risk because one of the major arguments of the book is actually a critique of platform studies that platform studies has for a long time not engaged enough with science and technology studies work, critical feminist work, and critical race studies. And so it was a bit of a risk, but also really important to me that this book, which is both platform studies and a critique of platform studies be featured in the series platform studies rather than feeling like an outsider kind of circling around that field. So one of the primary ways that we had worked together in terms of thinking how to pitch it was framing the text less as an attack on platform studies or a criticism of its authors and scholars and more about an advancement of the field of study.

So talking about how it's done all this important work to bring technical investigations into the humanities, which frankly can get very easily washed away in favor of looking at narrative or in favor of looking at social practice. But then discussing that in terms of an advancement of what platform studies can and should be for the future, not only in terms of what types of research questions we can be asking through the platform studies lens. So thinking about platforms as political objects and not just technical objects, but also from an ontological perspective, helping us think more deeply about what boundaries of these platforms are that studying the technical object is always more than just the code base itself, but of course includes practitioners, tutorials, para texts, and then in the case of the Unreal Engine, the games that are made on it, which then influence the engine. And so pitching it to the platform study series as less of a, here's what you're doing wrong and more about a, here's the great stuff you've already done and here are the next steps we as a field or subfield can take, I think was really useful.

Aure: And I love how you put that. Not just doing a slash and burn approach… because I feel like academic writing and academic research as a whole sometimes gets this unfair stereotype about just kind of being negative, but really its strength is what you're doing, which is being a synthetic thinker. So you're always dealing with and drawing on different concepts, bodies of literature, traditions, and that's really the lifeblood of academic writing. That's really what makes academic writing, academic writing! If you were to go into a series and basically just take a slash and burn approach that really would result in not just your proposal probably not getting accepted, but it also honestly wouldn't be that in interesting a book because it wouldn't have that kind of depth. So let's talk a little bit about the theory side of things and working on your book, I noticed you have a real knack for working with theory. What theories inspired you to write this book and why, beyond platform studies?

Jim: So the title of the book, Enacting Platforms, draws from theories of enactment by Annemarie Mol and broader feminist Technoscience study scholars. Annemarie Mol and John Law's work were deeply influential to the writing of the book, particularly because they take a very fluid approach to what counts as reality and what counts as an object, and that we need to break down these boundaries that we have between the technical and the social and the given and the static… or the practiced and the static. And their focus on thinking through how objects are made and remade in real time through human practices really aligned with me for how I was understanding how game engines are working. That they're not just these static pieces of software but rather are very human practices that have very fuzzy boundaries that depending upon your place in the games industry or as an independent creator or as a programmer or even as a social scientist or humanist analyzing these systems, they take on very, very different shapes through the practices we use to engage with them. And so enactment and feminist technoscience studies became a really core way of helping me establish a tether through which to read all of these really complex and overlapping phenomena that I was encountering.

Aure: That's really cool. And I remember early on too, I didn't quite grasp frankly, the importance of “enact.” If you remember, we had these discussions about enact and enactment because a lot of the time enact can be used just to say “I want to make something happen.” I think you needed to show me and remind me and say, no, this is a really important analytic concept and it's one with theoretical implications for the work I'm doing.

Jim: Yeah, I think it can be really easy to accidentally turn these analytic terms, especially ones that you've been working with for a while almost into a buzzword, especially because concepts like enactment, performance, and subjectivity not only are kind of used in everyday language, but when you've been working with them so long, they kind of become a part of your internal just how you think and think about and look at the world. And so one of the most useful things in our editing and rewriting processes was not only making sure to demonstrate why enactment was so important through the various empirical investigations of the engine, but just frankly to remember to repeat over and over again, this is why I'm using this term, here's what makes it distinct from other similar terms that we've seen, and here are the implications of that. And just really clearly writing that in black and white several times throughout the manuscript.

Aure: Just so that the reader can stay on this journey with you and understand your argument and story. Totally. And yeah, one of the challenges as an editor on the other side is to kind of decide what words have particular meanings that are important to a client, to a writer, author, and researcher and which don't. So earlier you mentioned affordances. I've done research myself on affordances, however, a lot of the time you'll come across papers where people just drop affordances in once or twice, and the assumption is we're all sort of on board with this… and those types of papers tend not to be advancing a theoretical tradition of affordances. So yeah, I think it's good to always be aware of how you're translating theory into language and what's important and what's not. What's a common word in what is an analytic term—that's super important.

Jim: Absolutely, yeah.

Aure: What about integrating theory into your writing? So I think about your writing as extremely synthetic, meaning that you're bringing together multiple ideas and traditions. How do you integrate theory into your writing? Does the theory come first or the data come first? How do you bring these things together, all with the understanding that you need to actually be well-versed in theory, and to do that you need to actually have your finger on the pulse of these different traditions, otherwise you're just kind of cherry picking from queer studies or feminist studies, which we don't really want to do. We actually want to be embedded in those discussions and the people developing those ideas too. So how do you sort of do that and how do you bring those ideas together while keeping your finger on the pulse of these disciplinary traditions?

Jim: Yeah, I think it's a great question because each, especially when you're working on a long-term project like a book, and now that I'm starting a second project, each one of these projects I think reflects where you are personally and professionally. And so this first project I think actually fell out of my own deep discomfort in disciplinary spaces. Before I had started my PhD in communication and cultural studies, I was a game designer. I moved into cultural studies and just felt very uncomfortable and unfamiliar with some of the ways that games and game products were being talked about and discussed and analyzed in ways that frankly just didn't match up with my experiences with them on the development side. And so my gut was to reach into theory to find something that would help me resolve some of these tensions that I was encountering as someone transitioning from one field to the next.

I tried a lot of different theoretical approaches… object-oriented ontology was the hot thing when I was in grad school. I tried that, which ended up introducing me to platform studies. That was kind of a happy accident, but it was coming to the theories of enactment and talking about how these social and technical practices influenced one another and are inseparable that independently of any particular object of study helped me resolve some of my own internal interdisciplinary tensions. But the book itself didn't really come together until I later found the Unreal Engine as a really useful topic to explore those tensions through. So for me, for my first book, it really was the theoretical debates that came first and the Unreal engine provided me the ground that early on I actually didn't know that I needed, but especially when you're writing these kind of integrative and synthetic theoretical pieces, I really think especially for your reader, that you need something to be the single tying tether that helps move you through these different cases, not only to help focus your own analysis, but to help keep your reader on board.

So every time I would try to synthesize different literatures, I could always return to a concrete example from the Unreal Engine to illustrate some of the work… or the theoretical blending that I was trying to do. And so that was a really important part of my intellectual journey for that time. Whereas—of course our analysis and our analytic frameworks are never totally settled—but now that I'm a bit more comfortable with these different disciplinary spaces, my work has been beginning more with objects that I find interesting and then using some of those theoretical lenses that I'm already comfortable with to explore them in new and different ways. So I think it really is where you're at, where your voice is currently at and your head is currently at helps shape the appropriate direction for whatever project you're working on.

Aure: Yeah, absolutely. And I love this idea about moments that we look to theory because of things we're going through in our lives, and it helps us in moments of transition, versus times where we get attracted to a particular object or other. I think, I don't want to say “that's just life,” but I think that's just the way we move through these spaces. And just speaking for myself as a writer, I've written books that are more about practice and for practitioners. I've written books that are kind of more about a rising tide of interest about a topic, and then I've written books like you did where it's focused on a specific object like an organization or a technology. And I don't think there's a wrong answer here. We can come to our writing through any number of paths, but I do think it's good to kind of be aware that we're doing that right. So there are probably particular hazards for if you went one route or another, both from research and your writing.

Jim: I've often had conversations with graduate students about whether you're thinking about it from a theoretical or empirical interpretive approach, you do get to a point where so much that everything is related and dependent upon everything else, which makes it really hard to just sit down and start writing. And I tell students all the time, you just have to pick one, and it's not like a moral failure by you picking one as your grounding object and then having everything else surround it. Right? We all know that everything is dependent upon everything else. So pick something that helps your readers follow that story and then weave the rest of your findings and understandings around that thing, whether that thing is an object or that thing is a theory or a concept. Yeah.

Aure: Well, I'm glad you're telling your students that you're thinking like an editor already, although you already have a career. [laughs] Yeah, the trick with writing is to not try and do too much. I think a lot of the time if we free write, we tend to just go off on tangents, and then sometimes what ends up getting produced is not, I don't know… there's something that happens where the reader just loses touch in this move from a writer-centric perspective on a book versus a reader-centric perspective. The reader loses touch with what's important or what is being discussed.

And yeah, I think the object does and doesn't matter. The real reason it matters is because it gives an anchor for your readers and for your inquiry. And yeah, ideally you come up with a technology as strange and interesting as the Unreal Engine, and that's why, in my opinion, that particular platform needed a whole book to talk about in the way that other objects may not.

Jim: Yeah, I don't think I could have done this research as a series of articles. I actually think it needed a book all hung together in order to make sense to do that synthetic work.

Aure: And that's also good to be aware of and think about. I have to have the talk [laughs]… I have to have “the talk,” I have to talk with my clients… I call it sometimes “the talk.” If they try to write a journal article and they realize they've got a whole book's worth of material, that can be a certain kind of problem if you're trying to fit a journal length argument into a book or vice-versa. Again, it's not like one is better than the other. They're both different genres of writing though in academic lifeworlds. And you need to be aware of which one will fit with which genre of writing.

Thank you so much, Jim, for joining me on this, the first interview of my podcast. And just remember his book, Enacting Platforms, is coming out in the platform studies series for MIT press on July 2nd, 2024, so pick it up!

Jim: Yeah, plus it's just nice to catch up too. This was great. I'm really excited to see where it goes!

Aure: So thanks again, Jim. And that does it for this episode of The Writing Talk podcast, and I hope you found it helpful and interesting. Tune in next week, when we're going to be talking with Charisse L’Pree who is going to be telling us about how she wrote her book, which is about diversity and satire. As always, if you have any questions or want to work with me on a specific project, you can find me@indeliblevoice.com . Hope you tune in next time, and thanks for listening. Bye.