Games!

Wark, GAM3r 7H3oRy

McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark (born September 10, 1961)^[1] is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for his writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. He is currently Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City.

Gamer Theory was first published by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a networked book with his own specially designed interface. In Gamer Theory Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games are a utopian version of the world (itself an imperfect game), because they actually realize the principles of the level playing field and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_Wark

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Back to the Cave (Full circle)

Wark’s Project

• A reinterpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• Game Studies
• Ideological Critique

Cave as Arcade

• Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The Cave™. It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room.
• You have played in The Cave™ since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you.
• Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: “Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere.” The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave™ provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Yours is the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.

The World Beyond...

• Perhaps you are not just any gamer. You are the one who decides to investigate the assumption of a real world beyond the game. You turn away from the screen and unplug the headphones. You get up and stagger out of the darkened room, toward the light outside. You are so dazzled by the light that the people and things out there in the bright world seem less real than the images and sounds of The Cave™.
• You turn away from this blinding new world, which seems, strangely, unreal. You return to the screen and the headphones and the darkness of being a gamer in The Cave™.

The Light...

• Suppose someone, a parent maybe, a teacher or some other guardian, drags you back out into the light and makes you stay there. It would still be blinding..
• Gradually you see the people around you, and what it is that they do. Then perhaps you remember the immense, immersive games of The Cave™, and what passes for wisdom amongst those still stuck there. And so you return to The Cave™, to talk or text to the other gamers about this world outside.
• You communicate to fellow gamers in The Cave™ about the outside world of which The Cave™ is just a shadow. Or try to.

Plato

“And if the cave-dwellers had established, down there in the cave, certain prizes and distinctions for those who were most keen-sighted in seeing the passing shadows, and who were best able to remember what came before, and after, and simultaneously with what, thus best able to predict future appearances in the shadow-world, will our released prisoner hanker after these prizes or envy this power or honor?” You bet!

Pure Agon

• The Cave™ is a world of pure agon, of competitive striving after distinction. But suppose you are that rare, stray, thoughtful gamer who decides to try this new game of getting beyond the game again? Suppose you emerge from The Cave™ and decide to take stock of the world beyond? You find that this other world is in some curious ways rather like The Cave™

What you observe...

• The whole of life appears as a vast accumulation of commodities and spectacles, of things wrapped in images and images sold as things.
• Images appeal as prizes, and call us to play the game in which they are all that is at stake. You observe that world after world, cave after cave, what prevails is the same agon, the same digital logic of one versus the other, ending in victory or defeat. Agony rules.
• Everything has value only when ranked against another; everyone has value only when ranked against another. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win — a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games.

The Real World

• The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many and varied games. Work is a rat race. Politics is a horse race. The economy is a casino. Even the utopian justice to come in the afterlife is foreclosed: He who dies with the most toys wins. Games are no longer a past time, outside or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, itself. These games are no joke. When the screen flashes the legend game over, you are either dead, or defeated, or at best out of quarters.

Who does this remind us of?

• The game has colonized its rivals within the cultural realm, from the spectacle of cinema to the simulations of television. Stories no longer opiate us with imaginary reconciliations of real problems. The story just recounts the steps by which someone beat someone else — a real victory for imaginary stakes.
• Sure, reality TV doesn’t look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games.
• All this is perfectly of a piece with a reality which is itself an artificial arena, where everyone is already a gamer, waiting for their turn.

The Level Playing Field...

• The game has not just colonized reality, it is also the sole remaining ideal. Gamespace proclaims its legitimacy through victory over all rivals. The reigning ideology imagines the world as a level playing field, upon which all men are equal before God, the great game designer.
• Every action is just a means to an end. All that counts is the score. As for who owns the teams and who runs the league, best not to ask. As for who is excluded from the big leagues and high scores, best not to ask. As for who keeps the score and who makes the rules, best not to ask. As for what ruling body does the handicapping and on what basis, best not to ask. All is for the best in the best — and only — possible world. There is — to give it a name — a military entertainment complex, and it rules.

The Game

• The jitter of your thumb on the button or the flicker of your wrist on the mouse connect directly to an invisible, intangible gamespace of pure contest, pure agon. It doesn’t matter if your cave comes equipped with a Playstation or Bloomberg terminal. It doesn’t matter whether you think you are playing the bond market or Grand Theft Auto. It is all just an algorithm with enough unknowns to make a game of it.

War

• Slavoj Zizek: “It is thus not the fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the face to face killing of another person; on the contrary it is this fantasy of face to face encounter with an enemy killed bloodily that we construct in order to escape the Real of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological operation.”

Class

• The old class antagonisms have not gone away, but are hidden beneath levels of rank, where each agonizes over their worth against others in the price of their house, the size of their vehicle and where, perversely, working longer and longer hours is a sign of winning the game. Work becomes play.
• ...the dream is to escape into the commerce of play — to make it into the major leagues, or compete for record deals as a diva or a playa in the rap game. And for still others, there is only the game of survival. Biggie: “Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”⁴ Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is morality, it is necessity.

The Citizen

• The old identities fade away. Nobody has the time. The gamer is not interested in playing the citizen. The courtroom is fine as a spectator sport, but being a citizen just involves you in endless attempts to get out of jury duty. Got a problem? Tell it to Judge Judy.
• If the gamer chooses to be a soldier and play with real weapons, it is as an Army of One, testing and refining personal skill points.

Cynicism

• Paolo Virno: “At the base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and women learn by experiencing rules rather than ‘facts’… Learning the rules, however, also means recognizing their unfoundedness and conventionality…. We now face several different ‘games’, each devoid of all obviousness and seriousness, only the site of an immediate self-affirmation — an affirmation that is much more brutal and arrogant, much more cynical, the more we employ, with no illusions but with perfect momentary adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and mutability we have perceived.”⁶ Each game ends in a summary decision: That’s Hot! Or if not, You’re Fired! Got questions about qualities of Being? Whatever.

Gamer Theory

• Gamer theory starts with the suspension of the assumptions of The Cave™, that there is a more real world beyond it, somewhere, and that someone — some priest or professor — knows where it is.
• The challenge is — ah, but even to phrase it thus is to acknowledge the game — to play at play itself, but from within the game. The gamer as theorist has to choose between two strategies for playing against gamespace. One is to play for the real. (Take the red pill). But the real is nothing but a heap of broken images. The other is to play for the game (Take the blue pill). Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid.

Which pill would you take?

In closing, try to wrap your mind around this...