Agony
 
 
Allegory
 
 
America
 
 
Analog
 
 
Atopia
 
 
Battle
 
 
Boredom
 
 
Complex
 
 
Conclusions
 

Most of the avant gardes celebrate transgressive, sublime play, erupting beyond a rule-bound world. The Oulipo group did the opposite. It preferred self-imposed rules, elegant as they were arbitrary, that might be conductive to new kinds of play. Rather than resist heterotopian marginality, they reveled in it. Given that the passage from topographic to topological space eliminates even the margins within which heterotopias flourished, this might prove a more enduring gameplan for gamer theory. Oulipian novelist George Perec saw what was coming, in his late-dystopian creation of W, a textual island devoted only to total sport: “The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious striving, a pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest.” What Caillois sees as a win for civilization over the Nazis, Perec sees more darkly, as the triumph of The Triumph of the Will. Both enter the gamer theory hall of fame by providing it with its object — gamespace — and its critical impetus — the gamer’s odd attunement toward the game.

No utopia pulls at the topological world, calling it away from itself. Even dystopian texts become marginal, confined to the playground of literary gamesmanship. The once discrete heterotopian spaces no longer co-exist with everyday life, as compensation. Rather, gamespace seeps into everyday life, moving through its pores, transforming it in its own image. Marshall McLuhan: “Games are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland…”. And unlike it. Rather than a timeless utopian ideal where history ends, rather than the allotted hour of the heterotopian, everyday life now pulses constantly with moments of unrealized atopian promise. Everywhere, all the time, the gamer confronts the rival impulses of chance and competition, intoxication and spectacle, as homeopathic antidotes to a boredom that challenges being from within. In Vice City all of Caillois’ four kinds of play — chance and competition, intoxication and spectacle — come together. The destruction of the spectacle becomes the spectacle of destruction; the derangement of the senses becomes the arrangement of drug deals. In Vice City you chance your arm in an agon of all against all.

No work of art can aspire to transcend this gamespace, which has realized art by suppressing its ambitions. Yet perhaps a game like Vice City can function as the negative of gamespace, its atopian shadow, in a parallel to the way that the very positivity of a utopia acts as a negation of the world outside its bounds. Not the least of the charms of Vice City is that while it appears to be about a life of crime it is thoroughly law abiding. It is a game about transgression in which it is not possible to break the rules. One may succeed in the game or fail, but one cannot really cheat. (Even the ‘cheats’ are part of the rules.) This is the atopian dream of gamespace, where the lines are so dense, the digital so omnipresent, that any and every object and subject is in play, and all of space is a gamespace. Every move contrary to the rules of a given game is merely a move into another game. The game imagines topology perfected.

Atopia has one quality in common with utopia — its aversion to ambiguity. Vice City may take place in a dark world of guns and drugs, but every mission produces an exact and tangible reward. If your mission is to find porn stars Candy and Mercedes, you drive to the right location, dispatch some body guards, chase Candy’s pimp, run him over, return to pick up Candy, drive to the pizza joint, collect Mercedes, drive them both to the Studio and deliver them to the director. Your reward is always exactly one thousand dollars. If utopia thrives as an architecture of qualitative description, and brackets off quantitative relations, atopia renders all descriptions arbitrary. All that matters is the quantitative relations. By excluding relations, utopia excludes violence; by privileging relations, atopia appears as nothing but violence, but only because it excludes instead any commitment to stable description. Anything that matters can be transformed in precise and repeatable ways into something else. The relentless working out of the algorithm leaves behind a carnage of signs, immolated in the transformation of one value into another.

The rules of Vice City call for a vast accumulation of cash, cars and cronies, of weapons and real estate. Most of these activities are outside the law, but law is just part of a larger algorithm. In any case, the story and the art are arbitrary, mere decoration. If in utopia, everything is subordinated to a rigorous description, a marking of space with signs, in atopia, nothing matters but the transitive relations between variables. The artful surfaces of the game are just a way for the gamer to intuit their way through the steps of the algorithm. Hence the paradox of Vice City. Its criminal world is meant to be shocking to the literary or cinematic imagination, where there is still a dividing line between right and wrong, and where description is meant to actually describe something. But to a gamer, it’s just a means to discover an algorithm. Vice City’s film noir world implies not that one can step back from it into the light, but that while driving around and around in it, one can discover the algorithm of to which gamespace merely aspires and by which it is to be judged in its entirety.

(7) Comments for 116.
posted: 5/25/2006

I wonder what the Oulipo connection to this book is. That is on one hand this book seems a lot more free than an analog, remaining open ended. But on the other hadn it is goverened by a lot more rules than an analog/codex one, and not just on the level of computer code. I wonder what “rules” were set out ahead of time here: Each section containing 25 cards, minimum and maximum lengths to cards, alphabetical order etc. So this text is highly structured and rule oriented, but paradoxically it seems to me that these rules actually produce more meaning, in contrast to the idea of just having “free play” (whatever that would mean).

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

exactly. those were the rules. part of the gamer persona is about freely chosen, arbitrary rules, within whcih one does one’s best

posted: 5/25/2006

I was wondering which rules were “freely” choosen and which were medium driven (not that this is probably completely sepearte) and are there some that developed after the writing process.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/26/2006

In this case all but one of the rules came before anything started. They weren’t emergent. The 250 words per par rules came about so it would fit on this interface, so that rule came after we decided on rthe card layout. But its a good disciple. Had to hack off a few sentences taht were much loved by superflous.

posted: 5/30/2006

What about the colors? At times I find myself thinking of the sections of the book in terms of colors (green) rather than concept (Atopia) or game (GTA).

gamer theory responds to David Parry
posted: 5/30/2006

The colors weren’t chosen to match the title, although there was some effort to line up some obvious ones (battle = red, america = blue [so there's a red(pink), white, and blue], boredom = grey). It’s a bit of stretch on the other colors trying to match themes.

But there was another consideration, which was how these colors looked next to each other: it was my intention to put contrasting colors together, and to surround weaker colors (like grey or brown) with stronger colors. It took a little fiddling around.

gamer theory responds to gamer theory
posted: 5/30/2006

Also, I hoped people would get a sense of a chapter as a whole by refering to the colors. In our initial vision we tied the chapters to individual fora in the discussion section – having a strong color tie was about the only thing that would hold them together. We scrapped that idea and went with a free for all in the forum, but the colors stayed here, in case we did end up splitting forums off by chapters.

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(9) Comments for 118.
posted: 5/25/2006

There is no outside the game.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

i think i put that in there somewhere…

posted: 5/25/2006

Actually my bad, should read: There is no outside OF game. (Bad French Translation)

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

It’s in 183: “There is nothing outside the game.” But maybe your wording is better.

posted: 5/25/2006

Mine comes from an understanding (I don’t speak French I am relying on the authority of others here) that the Spivak translation “outside the” is innacurate. Seems to me that “outside the” and “outside of” are significantly different. (Maybe I should change my url . . .)

posted: 5/30/2006

I wonder how the following are different, and which one is closest to the thesis here:
1.There is no outside the game.
2.There is no oustide of game.
3.There is no outside the gamespace.
4.There is no outside of gamespace.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/30/2006

If you search for ‘outside’ in the really helpful search box, you get a lot of variations on the theme. The point being that one can’t really say much about what is outside from within gamespace. It has to be there. There’s no game without it. yet from within the game its function stops once it functions as the ground for a digital divide: game/not game. It can’t have any form. Yet its there. And, in the last two chapters, we start to realize that it isn’t just ‘there’. It has an ontological status whcih it keps to itself.

This might be the principle of a certain materialism. There is something ‘there’ there, but it can’t really be known as such. It plays a purely metaphysical role of being the negative. Either gamespace collapses when it crashes into this limit, or it expands to include enough of it to keep us going for a while. But there’s no third alternative. There’s no going ‘back’, not in my book.

posted: 2/13/2007

I am particularly fascinated with concept of cheating in games. To Huizinga, cheating is almost a fundamental characteristic of play. If a game has rules, these rules are also capable of being broken. But what does it mean for the concept of play if the rules cannot be broken? What implications does it have that the idea of cheating itself is part of the underlying algorithm of the game? In San Andreas, there is a secret sex scene that can be seen with a certain cheat code. It sparked a great amount of controversy for this reason exactly, it must have been part of the rules of the game in order for it to be accessed. Therefore what can we say about the idea of play in digital gaming? Is there a complete different set of characteristics of play that fall outside of those proposed by Huizinga? I’m also interested in whether or not unexpected results can arise from simple rules such as what is proposed in the work of Stephen Wolfram. Do you think this is relevant in the world of gaming?

McKenzie Wark responds to Justin Gruenberg
posted: 2/17/2007

Justin writes: ” I’m also interested in whether or not unexpected results can arise from simple rules such as what is proposed in the work of Stephen Wolfram” I haven’t read Wolfram’s book, although i have read about it. It does not seem accidental that someone would want to rethink the world in terms that come from our leading technologies. David Jay Bolter has shown that scientific metaphors tend to draw from the governing techniques of their time. But i can’t say more with havign read Wolfram.

The cheating question is an interesting one. I take it as a sign of the all-inclusive nature of gamespace that even cheating is now within the rules.

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(2) Comments for 120.
posted: 5/25/2006

This relates back to some comments on lower numbered cards in this sequence. But I am not fully convinced that the “rules of VIce City call for a vast accumulation of cash, cars, and cronies.” True players are looking to discover teh algorithm, but I think they are also looking if not to change, to find out different ways to exploit the algorithm, not to accumulate cash, but rather to see how many pizzas you can deliver, or taxi cab missions complete, or pedistrains run over . . .This relates back to the notion of rules. As GTA has some fairly strict rules “algorithms” that govern the world, but within these rules one can negotiate a wide range of possibile play oppurtunties.

McKenzie Wark responds to David Parry
posted: 5/25/2006

yes, that’s what’s special about this particular game. 121 covers this, but you’ve said it better ^^^ here.

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