(see Version 1.1 of this card)

The inclusion of almost everything within the game leaves little by way of a topos in which to conquer, expand, colonize, transform, or even to pose as the remote time or place as the alibi for utopian texts. Sure you could terraform Mars, but the result seems a foregone conclusion. There is no frontier along which a storyline might traffic the unknown into the realm of the known. A certain kind of history ends here. Says the Stalinist-Surrealist poet Paul Eluard: “There is another world, and it is this one.” SimEarth closes the book on that utopian realm, and the struggle for and against it. Gamespace has consumed the world, but the catastrophe of the world’s consummation comes back to taunt it, undoing it from within. E. M. Cioran: “There is no other world. Nor even this one.”* Once all terms are included within the agon of gamespace, the whole of life becomes a game that can be lost, forever.

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

SimEarth is by genre a “God game.” Some God! Again and again, you fail your creation. SimEarth is not so much about the death of God as God’s suicide. It takes away the empowering thought of being responsible for His disposal. Suicide is either fast and violent, in which God throws himself into the flames of global warming. Or very, very slow; hooked, like a helpless junkie, to the sun. A sun which finally overcomes your ability to maintain. Mark Amerika: “Oblivion is the only cure for agony.”* The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller. I’m the decider! But it is the game which plays the gamer. It is you, the gamer, who is an avatar, in the sense of being the incarnation of an abstract principle. The gamer is a lesser deity incarnate, answerable to a higher power — the game itself.

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

Perhaps you are an avatar of the Egyptian demigod Theuth, who according to Plato was the inventor of not only of writing, but also of number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, games of chance and games of skill. In a story Socrates tells in Phadrus, Theuth offers these to the sun-god Thamus, and says: “what I have discovered is [recipes] of memory and wisdom.” Thamus, the sun-God, the ultimate authority, key to the great chain of being, who speaks for being itself, considers the gifts of Theuth one by one. In Socrates’ telling, it is writing about which Thamus has the most qualms. For the problems of memory, recording, delineating, is this recipe, or “pharmakon,” of writing a remedy or a poison? Writing sends the word — logos — out into the world estranged from the authority of its author, erasing the line of its paternity, making of it an orphan. In this sense, it’s a father-killing poison, and it would make of Thamus the sun-god a marked man. But the sun-god only has to give the word. Behind writing lies speech, and behind speech, the pure light of the good. Jacques Derrida: “The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden illuminating, blinding source of logos.” Thamus refuses Theuth’s gifts. But perhaps that’s not the end of the story.*

(see Version 1.1 of this card)

Perhaps what Theuth had to offer Thamus was not a remedies but recipes — algorithms. Manuel De Landa: “These recipes… include rules of thumb and shortcuts discovered by trial and error, useful habits of mind developed through experience, and tricks of the trade passed on from one generation of problem-solvers to the next. Some of the valuable insights… may then be captured in a general purpose, “infallible’ problem solving recipe (known as an “algorithm’).”* And what if Theuth had killed Thamus, and taken His place? What if it were not writing, but all Theuth’s algorithms which were His power? The algorithms of writing, calculation, navigation and the game, at first separately, and then coming together create a topology, a world no longer logocentric, but ludocentric. Theuth sets himself up as King Digital. Behind appearances lies a new Helios, the artificial sun-king of the algorithm, able to name, locate, value, calculate and set in play anything and everything but the sun itself. If in Plato history moves between mythos and logos, it comes finally to rest between logos and ludus, between writing and the game, in a world where the originary power of voice is neither here nor there. The sun that powers SimEarth, the light which illuminates The Cave is not the sun-God Thamus, but the algorithms of Theuth. But by this light, SimEarth tells the inconvenient truth about gamespace — that it can know its limit, its end, but not what to do about it.