serial consign

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would imminently arrive at Mackenzie Wark's Gamer Theory which was at that point in time buried midway down my pile of spring reading. Well, I finally was able to give some time to the book last week and it has left me rather perplexed. I think it is useful to consider the context of the text before delving into any critique.

Gamer Theory is not a standalone text, it is actually version 2.1 of a 2006 web project entitled GAM3R 7H3ORY that was produced with the Institute for the Future of the Book. This project reconfigured critical theory as a modular and interactive web experience in which the audience was invited into the arena of discourse through dialog with Wark. User comments were visible onscreen alongside the work and it was possible to view threaded discussions emerge out of the text. The discussion surrounding the text was closed this past April and GAM3R 7H3ORY 2.0 (another iteration of the web project) and 2.1 (the book) were launched.

[image: gamer theory 2.0 screen capture]

Gamer Theory is essentially a series of modular essays in which each chapter is dedicated to using a game to unpack a specific critical paradigm. Larger arguments are strung throughout the entire text, but there is definitely a sense that these game specific chapters need to be read in sequence. Some of the chapters explore allegory in The Sims, imperialism in Civilization III, atopia in Vice City, and so on. Each chapter scrutinizes the interface, organizational logic, and experience of play in each of these specific games as a springboard into larger conversations about myth, metaphysics, socioeconomics, and aesthetics. In large part this speculative theorizing is fascinating. A particularly compelling thread that runs through the text is the idea of the allegorithm, the marriage of programmed script and allegory as a distinguishing feature of immersion in a game.

Wark on the distinction between algorithm and allegorithm:

The gamer selects one sequence after another, and gradually learns what they do - that's algorithm. The gamer discovers a relationship between appearances and putative algorithm in gamespace - that's allegorithm.. But there is always a gap between the intuitively knowable algorithm of the game and the passing, uneven, unfair semblance of an algorithm in the everyday life of gamespace - this is the form that allegory now takes. [pg. 31-32]

The text also contains several brilliant moments which include a hypothetical sim named Benjamin with a penchant for dialectics, a discussion on the politics of coltan, and a mapping of the myth of Sisyphus onto the narrative of Katamari Damacy. Despite this praise I still find the project quite troubling. Several of the chapters feel considerably less developed than some of the highlights I have pointed out and the overall text seems somewhat burdened in repeatedly returning to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I'm not dismissing it as an obvious point of departure, I just don't think the project needs to orbit this paradigm so tightly.

Another problem I had with the text in book form is that while the web iterations of this project were quite imaginative, the book design was completely normative. Perhaps it is not fair to judge any book against a hypertext iteration of the same work but would it have been so hard to conduct a mild interrogation of publishing conventions through imaginative design, layout, and structure in print? Even the design of the endnotes is profoundly unsatisfying. I really should suspend this line of thought as I believe one can only approach this book as a companion text to a website, a noteworthy feat as it inverts the standard in the publishing world these days (an enlightened example of which the Anne Friedburg / Erik Loyer collaboration for the Virtual Window Interactive).

Despite these grievances, I think this ongoing writing experiment of Mackenzie Wark is an extremely engaging and important precedent. Wark is undoubtedly one of the key voices in the emerging intersection between gaming and critical theory.

[image: katamari damacy screenshot, not to be confused with the sculpture of nancy rubins]