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.
042.
Allegory becomes a double relation: on 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. When Sims devotees assign values to non-existent furniture, truly the idea of economic ‘utility’ has lost all meaning. The game can also work as an atopia, where play is free from work, from necessity, from seriousness, from morality. Kill your Sims, if you want to. Play here has no law but the algorithm. And yet there is a tension between the game and gamespace. The relation between them is at once analog and digital, both a continuum and a sharp break. The gamer struggles to make of the game a separate world, for escape, for critique, for atopian play, and yet gamespace insinuates itself into the game.
043.
Start over: Benjamin begins as a Beta Tester, becomes a Hacker, and finally a Game Designer. After that you are supposed to level up to Venture Capitalist then finally Information Overlord. But something goes wrong along the way. Benjamin’s game design company goes broke. The whole industry is consolidating. So Benjamin goes to work for a much bigger game company. He starts work. It’s a mild sort of ‘crunch’ time — normal when there’s a project with a deadline. Benjamin is working eight hours, six days a week. The project is on schedule, so its not so bad. It’s temporary. He complains a bit to Asja. The deadline for ending the crunch comes and goes. And another. Then the hours get longer. Benjamin is working twelve hours, six days a week. Benjamin’s bar graphs slide into the red. Then the real crunch time begins. Benjamin is working seven days a week, “with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior.”
044.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is just a game, but it is somebody’s life — as reported in a widely circulated text written by EA Spouse. EA, or Electronic Arts, is a game company best known for its Madden sports games, but which also which owns Maxis, which makes The Sims. EA’s slogan: Challenge Everything — everything except EA, of course — or the gap between game and gamespace. In the gamespace of contemporary labor, things are not like the measured progression up the ranks of The Sims. In The Sims, Benjamin could work his way from Game Designer to Information Overlord much the same way as he had worked up the levels below. At Electronic Arts, things are different. Being an Information Overlord like EA’s Larry Probst requires an army of Benjamins with nothing to work with but their skills as game designers and nowhere to go than to another firm which may or may not crunch its workers just as hard. As the military entertainment complex consolidates into a handful of big firms, it squeezes out all but a few niche players. Gamespace is here a poor imitation of its own game.
045.
Start over again: This time Benjamin begins as a Bucket Runner. He quickly works himself up to Coltan Miner. Coltan? What is coltan? Quit The Sims for a moment. Pop the cover off your Playstation or your Apple or PC computer. You are looking at stuff that has come from all over the world — brought together by a global logistics. In the guts of your machine you may spot some capacitors made by Kemet, or maybe semiconductors from Intel. These probably contain tantalum, a marvelous conductor of electricity, also very good with heat. They were quite possibly made with coltan (short for columbite-tantalite) dug out of the ground in the Congo, where there’s plenty of coltan, from which tantalum is refined. The Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Congo is home to gorillas, monkeys and elephants as well as the okapi, a rare relative of the giraffe. Thousands of Mbuti, or pygmies, also live there. Their livelihood is compromised by the coltan miners, who dig what one journalist called “SUV-sized holes” in the mud, out of which they can extract about a kilo of coltan a day. A kilo of coltan was worth $80 during the technology boom. There was a world shortage of the stuff, which even delayed the release of the Sony Playstation 2.
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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