What characterizes gamer theory is a playing with the role of the gamer within the game, not by stepping beyond it, into a time or a role beyond the game, but rather by stepping into games that are relatively free of the power of gamespace. The game is just like gamespace, only its transformations of gamer and game have no power beyond the battle in which they meet. In a game, you are free because you choose your necessities. In a game, you can hide out from a gamespace that reneges on its promises. In a game, you can choose which circumstances are to be the necessity against which you will grind down the shape of a self. Even if, in so choosing, you click to opt out of making history. [165]
Again from McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory. One of the points of contention I have with Wark’s theories is the idea that the game is restricted to influence and work outside of the “real world,” which Wark terms “gamespace.” Here, Wark suggests that the game exists independent of gamespace, and, most crucially from my perspective, the point that gaming removes the gamer from “making history.” The final line from the above quotation seems to give the gamer an option – to participate in the game or to participate in gamespace and the making of history.
Wark begins his theory in what he calls The Cave, an allegorical arcade that alludes to and mimics the Platonic Cave, a place that is distinct from the gamespace of the world, removed from it, unaffected by it, and unable to effect it. And it is this premise, I think, where Wark is wrong.
The gamer does not “opt out of making history.” The game and gamer are not in a Cave, cut off from the rest of the social machine. The game – like the works of literature and film to which Wark compares gaming – is a part of the intellectual and social milieu that is shaped by and shapes our ideological understanding of the world around us.
Games may be new media, but they are a vital part of our intellectual and ideological communication with and reaction to the gamespace of the world around us. They deserve not to be undervalued as mindless or shunted into a Cave frequented only by the basement-dwelling. Games are – as they have always been, even when analog rather than digital – a fundamental part of our lives. Games teach us socialization, competition, sportsmanship, and even encourage us to participate in and/or rebel against the socio-political gamespace that builds and reinforces the dominant ideologies of our culture.
"Words fly up, my thoughts remain below."
black and white, Angels and demons.
We aren't two sides of the same coin.
We're the gold into which those sides are imprinted."
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Warning: Gamer at Play
My current in-process read is Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, which, while it certainly has its flaws in interpretation, raises some very interesting questions about games, gamespace, and gamers. For instance,
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. [007]
My issue with this is that stories have always been the recounting of "the steps by which someone beat someone else" - Wark makes it sound as though this is a recent development in storytelling technology, and one that has somehow evolved through the degradation of our society's culture. But that isn't the case. Stories are always about someone else through whom we are meant to vicariously experience the events of the story. It happens that gaming - in the RPG and video game sense - permits a deeper level of this by causing the gamer (rather than the audience) to actively participate in the action of the story. The story is still scripted, even if it has alternate endings, and still controlled, however. It is still about "the steps by which someone beat someone else."
Wark continues, suggesting that the idea of "game" has come to permeate not only our narratives, but our existence:
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 folks are equal before God, the great game designer. [008]
In this sense, gamespace is "real" space, and the concept of life as a game plays out (pardon the pun) all around us:
Work becomes gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Not least for children, who if they are to be the winsome offspring of win-all parents, find themselves drafted into evening shifts of team sport. The purpose of which is to build character. Which character? The character of the good sport. Character for what? For the workplace, with its team camaraderie and peer-enforced discipline. For others, work is still just dull, repetitive work, but they dream of escaping into the commerce of play - making it into the major leagues, or competing for record deals as a diva or a playa in the rap game. And for still others, there is only the game of survival... Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity. [011]
On the one hand, Wark captures the highly competitive understanding of the market that we see in our capitalist world. On the other hand, he seems to undervalue play for the sake of play. Yes, we have evolved into a highly competitive society that seems to understand its surroundings in terms of competition and payoff, but to say that there is no "play" anymore is to severely diminish the satisfaction that one receives from non-required competition - from a game that isn't the "gamespace of reality."
In that gamespace, Wark notes, "The only thing worse than being defeated is being undefeated. For then there is nothing against which to secure the worth of the gamer other than to find another game" [038]. In this paradigm, we are limited to the set established by gamespace, to the way in which our worth is constructed within the artificiality of the game itself, and of the god-designer. We cannot function as autonomous, individuated beings without the relational marker of the gamerscore or rank, but at the same time, we cannot be autonomous at all within the construct of the gamespace to which we (willingly?) subscribe our identities. We are powerless to escape gamespace and have sacrificed ourselves to it as mindless automatons incapable of participating in the allegory (or, in Wark's terms, "allegorithm") of the game itself.
Wark paraphrases Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but disagrees with his assessment that gaming in fact increases the participatory - and didactic - element of storytelling:
Key to Debord's understanding of "spectacle" is the concept of separation. Some argue that the "interactive" quality of contemporary media can, or at least might, rescue it from separation and its audience from passivity. One could with more justice see it the other way around: whatever has replaced the spectacle impoverishes it still further, by requiring of its hapless servants not only that they watch it at their leisure but that they spend their leisure actually producing it. Play becomes work. Note to [111]
The question here is how Wark defines work. In the literary world, we say that a novel, play, or poem does "work" when it interacts with and comments upon the society that has shaped it (or in which it is produced). In that sense, yes, the game does "work" through "play" (a concept with which a performance theorist is intimately familiar). The gamer in fact participates in this work by allowing the game to work through him- or herself in a way similar to how an audience at a theater or a reader of a novel participates in the "work" of the performance or book. However, Wark's claim that participation "impoverishes" the spectacle and mission of the game is as ridiculous as stating that the performance of a play "impoverishes" the spectacle of the text.
There is no spectacle without a certain level of interaction. There is no spectacle in the theater without the production that creates that spectacle. Likewise, there is no spectacle in a game without the full use of not only its audio track and visual graphics, but also the complex mechanics of the game design itself. The game itself - the rules, the "algorithm" (according to Wark) - is a form of spectacle upon which the designers rely. It is something new, this "interactive spectacle" that requires the active participation (rather than passive observation) of its spectators in order to operate fully, but it is nevertheless a form of spectacle.
But where I really disagree with Wark is with the suggestion that a game is somehow restricted, partitioned off from this "gamespace of reality." Not only has Wark attempted to rob games of their unique form of spectacle, but he asserts that
the utopian book or the atopian game lacks the power to transform the world. But where signs and images may bleed off the utopian page into the world, the algorithm of the game, in which each relation depends on one another, may not. At least not yet. [122]
I respectfully disagree. A game is as capable of "bleeding off" the console or computer screen and "into the world" as fully as a novel. Perhaps more so, by pure virtue of its interactivity. This is not to say that games are the impetus to violence (a point which Wark makes, and with which I agree, is that it is utterly ludicrous to suggest that games cause people to become more violent), but that the choices present in many games - such as Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, and so forth - directly involve the gamer in making a quantified moral choice (or series of choices) that impact the outcome of the game in unforseen ways. And choices that, while not analogous to everyday life, reflect hyperbolically some of the types of choices a gamer in "gamespace" may have to make. The point is that the kind of seepage Wark attributes to novels is at least equally present in games. Especially games that foreground the kinds of dystopian/atopian ideologies that provide an analog to the (deliberately) impossible utopian visions of More and others. Indeed, some games - Bioshock and Mass Effect 2 being prominent examples - interact with the very textual utopian visions Wark claims they cannot match: Bioshock takes on Atlas Shrugged and Mass Effect 2 engages Shakespeare's The Tempest. These are not "texts" in the traditional sense, no, but they are participating in and actively speaking to the textual tradition which Wark (and certainly many others) find somehow more valuable than the games which seek to respond to them.
Certainly, I am not advocating the abandonment of literature to the study of gaming, but neither can I say that gaming does not belong in the field. Certainly Wark agrees - and does excellent work - with the need to study digital media in its own right (and has some quite interesting readings of Katamari Damacy and The Sims, among others, in this book), but it seems to me that we cannot separate these "early" games from the literature that has produced them, any more than it would be folly to suggest that Shakespeare's plays did not owe a profound debt to the centuries of poetry and medieval drama that came before him. Our literature is our intellectual past, present, and future, but it would be foolish to discount the importance of play - of games and gaming - as we trace that history from Shakespeare's stage to the Xbox screen.
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. [007]
My issue with this is that stories have always been the recounting of "the steps by which someone beat someone else" - Wark makes it sound as though this is a recent development in storytelling technology, and one that has somehow evolved through the degradation of our society's culture. But that isn't the case. Stories are always about someone else through whom we are meant to vicariously experience the events of the story. It happens that gaming - in the RPG and video game sense - permits a deeper level of this by causing the gamer (rather than the audience) to actively participate in the action of the story. The story is still scripted, even if it has alternate endings, and still controlled, however. It is still about "the steps by which someone beat someone else."
Wark continues, suggesting that the idea of "game" has come to permeate not only our narratives, but our existence:
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 folks are equal before God, the great game designer. [008]
In this sense, gamespace is "real" space, and the concept of life as a game plays out (pardon the pun) all around us:
Work becomes gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Not least for children, who if they are to be the winsome offspring of win-all parents, find themselves drafted into evening shifts of team sport. The purpose of which is to build character. Which character? The character of the good sport. Character for what? For the workplace, with its team camaraderie and peer-enforced discipline. For others, work is still just dull, repetitive work, but they dream of escaping into the commerce of play - making it into the major leagues, or competing for record deals as a diva or a playa in the rap game. And for still others, there is only the game of survival... Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity. [011]
On the one hand, Wark captures the highly competitive understanding of the market that we see in our capitalist world. On the other hand, he seems to undervalue play for the sake of play. Yes, we have evolved into a highly competitive society that seems to understand its surroundings in terms of competition and payoff, but to say that there is no "play" anymore is to severely diminish the satisfaction that one receives from non-required competition - from a game that isn't the "gamespace of reality."
In that gamespace, Wark notes, "The only thing worse than being defeated is being undefeated. For then there is nothing against which to secure the worth of the gamer other than to find another game" [038]. In this paradigm, we are limited to the set established by gamespace, to the way in which our worth is constructed within the artificiality of the game itself, and of the god-designer. We cannot function as autonomous, individuated beings without the relational marker of the gamerscore or rank, but at the same time, we cannot be autonomous at all within the construct of the gamespace to which we (willingly?) subscribe our identities. We are powerless to escape gamespace and have sacrificed ourselves to it as mindless automatons incapable of participating in the allegory (or, in Wark's terms, "allegorithm") of the game itself.
Wark paraphrases Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but disagrees with his assessment that gaming in fact increases the participatory - and didactic - element of storytelling:
Key to Debord's understanding of "spectacle" is the concept of separation. Some argue that the "interactive" quality of contemporary media can, or at least might, rescue it from separation and its audience from passivity. One could with more justice see it the other way around: whatever has replaced the spectacle impoverishes it still further, by requiring of its hapless servants not only that they watch it at their leisure but that they spend their leisure actually producing it. Play becomes work. Note to [111]
The question here is how Wark defines work. In the literary world, we say that a novel, play, or poem does "work" when it interacts with and comments upon the society that has shaped it (or in which it is produced). In that sense, yes, the game does "work" through "play" (a concept with which a performance theorist is intimately familiar). The gamer in fact participates in this work by allowing the game to work through him- or herself in a way similar to how an audience at a theater or a reader of a novel participates in the "work" of the performance or book. However, Wark's claim that participation "impoverishes" the spectacle and mission of the game is as ridiculous as stating that the performance of a play "impoverishes" the spectacle of the text.
There is no spectacle without a certain level of interaction. There is no spectacle in the theater without the production that creates that spectacle. Likewise, there is no spectacle in a game without the full use of not only its audio track and visual graphics, but also the complex mechanics of the game design itself. The game itself - the rules, the "algorithm" (according to Wark) - is a form of spectacle upon which the designers rely. It is something new, this "interactive spectacle" that requires the active participation (rather than passive observation) of its spectators in order to operate fully, but it is nevertheless a form of spectacle.
But where I really disagree with Wark is with the suggestion that a game is somehow restricted, partitioned off from this "gamespace of reality." Not only has Wark attempted to rob games of their unique form of spectacle, but he asserts that
the utopian book or the atopian game lacks the power to transform the world. But where signs and images may bleed off the utopian page into the world, the algorithm of the game, in which each relation depends on one another, may not. At least not yet. [122]
I respectfully disagree. A game is as capable of "bleeding off" the console or computer screen and "into the world" as fully as a novel. Perhaps more so, by pure virtue of its interactivity. This is not to say that games are the impetus to violence (a point which Wark makes, and with which I agree, is that it is utterly ludicrous to suggest that games cause people to become more violent), but that the choices present in many games - such as Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, and so forth - directly involve the gamer in making a quantified moral choice (or series of choices) that impact the outcome of the game in unforseen ways. And choices that, while not analogous to everyday life, reflect hyperbolically some of the types of choices a gamer in "gamespace" may have to make. The point is that the kind of seepage Wark attributes to novels is at least equally present in games. Especially games that foreground the kinds of dystopian/atopian ideologies that provide an analog to the (deliberately) impossible utopian visions of More and others. Indeed, some games - Bioshock and Mass Effect 2 being prominent examples - interact with the very textual utopian visions Wark claims they cannot match: Bioshock takes on Atlas Shrugged and Mass Effect 2 engages Shakespeare's The Tempest. These are not "texts" in the traditional sense, no, but they are participating in and actively speaking to the textual tradition which Wark (and certainly many others) find somehow more valuable than the games which seek to respond to them.
Certainly, I am not advocating the abandonment of literature to the study of gaming, but neither can I say that gaming does not belong in the field. Certainly Wark agrees - and does excellent work - with the need to study digital media in its own right (and has some quite interesting readings of Katamari Damacy and The Sims, among others, in this book), but it seems to me that we cannot separate these "early" games from the literature that has produced them, any more than it would be folly to suggest that Shakespeare's plays did not owe a profound debt to the centuries of poetry and medieval drama that came before him. Our literature is our intellectual past, present, and future, but it would be foolish to discount the importance of play - of games and gaming - as we trace that history from Shakespeare's stage to the Xbox screen.
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