216.
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.
Hi. Your last page (221-225) is broken because of a stray script tag just after the Guy Debord quote.
It may have another problem too, as after fixing that the “Conclusions” icon was missing. HTH!
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“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, a fleshy expression, answerable to a higher power — the game itself.”
I found this quote rather profound. It’s an interesting intepretation of the relationship between game and player. But such a passive role in games is more akin to other forms of entertainment, like television or cinema, then video games, no?
I don’t know that passive and active are useful terms for thinking about media, really. One may ‘act’ in a game, but within given limits.
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The move could be too fast here. Derrida’s intervention is against the notion of writing as written-down speech. For him, writing has to be thought as spacing, differencing and deferring to see that speech could never stand ‘behind’ it.
It needs a little work. But it is interesting that Theuth is more than the god of writing…
Theuth also becomes Hermes the God of speed and transmission, back to “tele.”
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