Making History in Gamespace

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.