Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Wark, McKenzie (April 2007), GAM3R 7H30RY version 1.1, Retrieved on 2024-05-29Source Material [www.futureofthebook.org]
Folksonomies: critical theory gaming Memes
06 JUL 2024
Being "Good" At a Game Means Internalizing It's Algorithms
The gamer is not really interested in faith, although a heightened rhetoric of faith may fill the void carved out of the soul by the insinuations of gamespace. The gamer’s God is a game designer. He implants in everything a hidden algorithm. Faith is a matter of the intelligence to intuit the parameters of this geek design and score accordingly. All that is righteous wins; all that wins is righteous. To be a loser or a lamer is the mark of damnation. When you are a gamer, you are left with ...Folksonomies: critical theory gaming
Folksonomies: critical theory gaming
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notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Games Turn Play into Work
‘Play’ was once a great slogan of liberation. Richard Neville: “The new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and they’ll suffer society’s penalty).” Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom... 1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
The Allegorithm
A Sim in The Sims is a simple animated character, with few facial features or expressions. In The Sims 2 they seem a little more lifelike, but the improvement of the representation in some particular ways only raises the standards by which it appears to fall short in others. From the point of view of allegorithm, it all seems more the other way around. Everyday life in gamespace seems an imperfect version of the game. The gamespace of everyday life may be more complex and variegated, but it s... 1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Games Offer Perfect Unfreedom
In The Sims, things proliferate. Or rather, the skins of things. You can have many different kinds of sofa, or coffee table, or lamp shade, but the meter is running, so to speak. You have to make more money to buy more things. But some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in ‘winning’ the game, they are interested in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds. If a cheat is someone who ignores the...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Allegorithm is About the Relation of Sign to Number
Allegory is about the relation of sign to sign; allegorithm is about the relation of sign to number. Signs don’t open to reveal chains of other signs, pointing in all directions. Or rather, it is no longer of any importance what signs reveal. They billow and float, pool and gather, arbitrary and useless. There is no way to redeem them. But signs now point to something else. They point to number. And number in turn points to the algorithm, which transforms one number into another. Out of the...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
History in Games
Of what use is the past to a gamer? Peter Lunenfeld: “For the most part, its blood, mischief and role playing that gamers revel in. They live in an alternative universe, a solipsistic one scripted by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons. The visual and storyline tropes that most of us bring with us as cultural baggage are… all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use.” In t...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Games as Multimedia
The third level continues. Games have storylines like the historical novel, which arc from beginning to end. Games have cinematic cut scenes, pure montages of attraction. Games subsume the lines of television just as television subsumed cinema and cinema the novel. But they are something else as well. They are not just an allegory but a double form, an allegory and an allegorithm. Appearances within the game double an algorithm which in turn simulates an unknown algorithm which produces appea...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Games Do Not Model/Simulate, but are a Business
This is how the world appears to game design: There are dependent and independent variables. Designers, through trial and error, will work out which are which. They will choose cultural, business and technical options that maximize long term advantages. If it doesn’t work out, they will do it over. Time is essentially of a piece. It is homogenous, but it can be divided into equivalent units, just like space. Civilization III models not so much ‘civilization’, as the game design business...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 06 JUL 2024
The Digital is All About Boundaries
The digital is all about boundaries. The digital does not follow a moving line, it imposes a grid of lines which produce a series of boundaries. In the analog, difference is the productivity in excess of itself; in the digital, difference is a negation that comes from without. Roll the ball as much as you like, but unless it reaches the size King Digital demands within the time He allows, you fail — and are subjected to His lofty disdain.
The analog is variation along a line, a difference ... 1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Digital Allegorithm of Sisyphus
Digital object, digital subject — these are byproducts of a boredom that, seeking respite from nothingness, projects its lines across all space and time, turning it into commodity space and military space. This is the reckless act of creation with which Katamari Damacy begins — the King’s destruction of the mythic heaven of the old Gods, and the project of replacing it by commanding the transformation of a human, analog movement into an airless matrix of machine code. This is the new la... 1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Heterotopias
Heterotopias of the game have never been of much interest to theory, but to gamer theory they may be a key precursor to gamespace. Among them are separate worlds pitting different attributes of body and mind into contests of skill or luck, from badminton to backgammon. Every way of measuring what one body does against another — each finds its own special heterotopia, its field, its court, its track, its pitch, its arena. Says defrocked Situationist Ralph Rumney: “It is now sport, not pain...Folksonomies: gamespace heterotopia
Folksonomies: gamespace heterotopia
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notesNot distopias or utopias, but an "otherness" form or world.
06 JUL 2024
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 game...Folksonomies: gamespace allegorithm
Folksonomies: gamespace allegorithm
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Another way of looking at "flow" is to call it "non-conte...
As the gamer becomes attuned to the game, they become one event, one action; an oscillating between the line dividing self from other, and the line connecting them as one substance. If the line dividing provides a moment of autonomous self; the line connecting provides a moment of selfless purpose. In games, action has its limits. It is an endless bit-flip between targeter, targeting and target. And yet at least it effects a transformation of gamer and game. Games are a repository for a certa...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notes06 JUL 2024
Boredom Always Returns
Boredom can be displaced only so far. Even the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number. Boredom always returns. Giacomo Leopardi: “The uniformity of pleasure without purpose inevitably produces boredom.” The very action of overcoming boredom reproduces it, when gamer and game reach some impasse. There is always a limit. In games...Folksonomies: gamespace
Folksonomies: gamespace
1 notes
notesThere were issues with this book, but I appreciate how the Critical Theory aspects of it serve as a sort of "red pill" to break us out of our complacent acceptance of the world--specifically in video games. Many reviews complain about the erudite verbiage, but all Critical Theory makes use of newly-invented words in order to circumvent our preconceptions about the social constructs that rule our lives. I appreciated the concept of the "allegorithm" of how the programming of games is used to define a world, the questioning of "play" in games when really many games are actually work, criticizing the concept of "flow" and calling it "non-contemplation," and the idea that the best gamers are merely the ones who most internalize the algorithms. This book is not for everyone. It is dense and obtuse, but also highly effective and will be very enjoyable for the right readers.
