Julian Dibbell has written a lovely little column on GAM3R 7H30RY in the Village Voice. He really gets what’s going on here, form-wise and content-wise:
In an age of the hyperlink and the blogosphere, there has been some question whether there’s a future of the book at all, but the warm, productive dialogue that’s shaping G4M3R 7H30RY may well be it.
Then again, if G4M3R 7H30RY’s argument is right, books may well have to cede their role as the preeminent means of understanding culture to another medium altogether: the video game. Wark sets out here on a quest for nothing less than a critical theory of games….and the mantric question he carries with him is “Can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?” Turns out we can, but the complexity of contemporary games is such that no one mind is up to mapping it all, and Wark’s experiment in collaborative revision may be the best way to do the exploring.
My favorite comment on the “form-wise and content-wise” question is the one that points to what goes beyond either one:
Not since Steal This Book has a book’s radical packaging so threatened to upstage its radical content.
“Packaging” has made the whole difference between scanned books or e-books, and books that are born within, and respond to, the complexity of our era. Call it games or the world we live in, our book in all its richness of possibilities is becoming its own metaphor.