041.
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 bit rot of signs, games make allegorithms. The signs point to numbers, the numbers to algorithms, the algorithms to allegorithms of everyday life in gamespace, where signs likewise are devalued, arbitrary, but can still stand as allegories of the one thing that still makes sense, for the logic of the digital.
I really love your concept of allegorithm. I am an MFA candidate in Interactive Design and Game Development and I am fascinated by the concept and content of the book. Is allegorithm something that you came up with, or have other writers been working this concept out as well?
I got allegorithm from Alex Galloway, whose book Gaming: essays in Algorithmic culture comes out soon from U Minnesota Press.
The allegory/algorithm/allegorithm constellation is an interesting and powerful conceptual tool for thinking about this type of game (or, perhaps any type of game)). However, I am not clear on its relationship to the gamespace of real life, unless you mean, perhaps, what we might vulgarly call “culture.” What I mean is, I don’t understand “nature” to work according to number and algorithm, and find Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza on this issue compelling. Despite what Daniel Dennett says about evolution, I do not believe it happens in the series of discrete steps that, in my understanding, is the means by which an algorithm progresses. Of course, you have nowhere stated that you’re speaking about “nature,” and of course “nature” is nothing if not at least a partial construction of/by culture. But nature red in tooth and claw is also competitive in the manner of a game broadly speaking, even if it is massively multi-player. Just wondered about your thoughts on this issue.
Gamespace is about treating nature as if it were an algorithm — and nothing more. Or rather: it is the incorporation of nature into real algorithmic logics.
I disagree, Deleuze’s Spinoza has a little clause in it which says, secretlty: “Everything is Nature”… as in living entities shape Culture rather than submit to it. Not “Nature” as the return to, getting back to but in advance of evertything.
We are Nature and Culture, as Nietxsche described it. ..” the skin disease of the earth”.
Hence the not talked about much in these bureaucratic times “counter culture”?
Well, then matt you wouldn’t be disagreeing with me as disagreeing with what i call gamespace. Gamespace would be what represents a blockage or inability for ‘nature’ in this spinozist sense to create new forms.
… on the contrary! I’m glad you have the wit.
M
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Maybe this is just me conceitedly struggling to find my own POV in your critique, but I am not sure your last sentence encompasses those who play games to learn about their own desires and creative impulses. I know that you have called this trifling, but I am also not sure that term does justice to those who obsessively push the game engine to allow them to venture ever further to the outer edges of the 3D world.
[...] Art Game allows you to experience the trials and tribulations of life as a professional artist, but it also speaks to how value is determined in the collective creative industries. There’s an obvious commentary to be made here on the fickleness of the games industry, but also the world of literary publishing, and arguably academia as well. If you’ve ever had that nagging feeling that your own industry determines value arbitrarily, Art Game turns that feeling into a randomized algorithm, or an “allegorithm” in Alexander Galloway’s terms. For Galloway, “[t]o play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm)” (qtd. in Wark 30). In GAM3R 7H30RY, McKenzie Wark adopts and expands on Galloway’s term in relation to his own concept of “gamespace,” our contemporary social reality construed as an algorithmic, procedural space: Allegory becomes a double relation: one the one side, there is the relation of gamer to algorithm in the game, its allegorithm; on the other, there is the relation of allegorithm to everyday life in gamespace. In relation to gamespace, the game itself works as an escape from the agony of everyday life, where the stakes are real and uncertain, to the unreal stakes of a pure game. But the game can also work as a critique, in turn, of the unreality of the stakes of gamespace itself. (McKenzie Wark 42) [...]
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very nice technique here and it benefits from the direct reference to something (a company run by real people) in gamespace.
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excellent. Hmm, a good plot for a machinima film made using the Sims?
The Sims photo galleries are what gave me the idea, but why not? Even more ambitious!
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