Amorality in Games and Discovering the Algorithm

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.