Benjamin gets up in the morning. He goes to the toilet. He leaves the seat up. He showers and fixes breakfast. He reads the paper. He finds a job — as a Test Subject — starting tomorrow. It’s not much, but times are hard. He reads a book, and then another. He fixes lunch, naps, reads again. He goes to bed. He gets up. Toilet, shower, breakfast again. He does not make his bed. He goes to work. He comes home, prepares another meal. He talks to his room mate Bert a bit. Hannah drops by. He flirts with her some. He goes to bed, gets up, does the whole thing all over again.
027.
Days go by. Not much changes. His cooking improves. He makes new friends — Ted, Gersholm, Asja. They drop by sometimes; sometimes he visits. There is the new furniture. That makes him a bit happier, but not much. He gets a promotion to Lab Assistant. It’s the night shift, but the pay is better. Then he makes Field Researcher and is back working regular hours. After a while he becomes a Scholar. He is so creative, but it helps to have friends if you want to get ahead. He aspires to being a Theorist. The pay is better. And the hours. He dreams of yachts and big screen TVs. Benjamin is a Sim, a character in a game called The Sims.13 One could be forgiven for imagining this was somebody’s life.
028.
In The Sims, you create characters like Benjamin, build and furnish homes for them, find them jobs and friends. All in a world without a sky. Perhaps a game like The Sims could be a parody of everyday life in ‘consumer society’. Benjamin and his friends dream of things. Things make them happy. They find a nice sofa so much more relaxing than a cheap one. As the game’s designer Will Wright says: “If you sit there and build a big mansion that’s all full of stuff, without cheating, you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when all these objects had been promising to save you time…. And it’s actually kind of a parody of consumerism, in which at some point your stuff takes over your life.”14 Others disagree. Game scholar Gonzalo Frasca: “Certainly, the game may be making fun of suburban Americans, but since it rewards the player every time she buys new stuff, I do not think this could be considered parody.”15 In The Sims, characters can have lots of different jobs, but as Fredric Jameson says: “parody finds itself without a vocation.”16
029.
Perhaps a game like The Sims could be an allegory for everyday life in gamespace. In the allegorical mode, says Walter Benjamin: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict can be passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.”17 For Benjamin, the fragmenting of the modern world by technique, the profusion of commodities that well up in the absence of a coherent whole, finds its expression in allegory, which fragments thing still further, shattering the illusion of bourgeois order, revealing the means by which it is made. “What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the commodity world is its distortion into allegory.”18 And yet this possibility too seems exhausted. The fragmenting of the fragmented seems routine to a Sim. No other world seems possible.
030.
Perhaps a game like The Sims is not just an allegory but also an ‘allegorithm.’ To be a gamer is a slightly different persona to being a reader or a viewer. Lev Manovich: “As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game.”19 Alex Galloway: “To 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).”20 What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm. The intuitive experience and the organizing algorithm together are an allegorithm for a future that in gamespace is forever promised but never comes to pass. The allegorithm by which the gamer relates to the algorithm produces a quite particular allegory by which gamer and algorithm together relate to gamespace. In a game any character, any object, any relationship can be given a value, and that value can be discovered. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict can be passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which any value is arbitrary or absurd.
[...] Shaviro reviews GAM3R 7H30RY, a beautiful and practical thing, not to mention a fantastically rich and inspiring read. Shaviro’s correct: you wish you had written GAM3R 7H30RY. It’s perfectly scheduled, arriving when many are wondering how electronic texts, specifically networked books, will figure into both literary criticism and everyday life. You can comment on GAM3R 7H30RY, read other people’s comments, search GAM3R 7H30RY, and navigate your way through it as you choose. Plus, it is written in a style that is simultaneously academic and casual, e.g., paragraphs 26 and 27, which read: Benjamin gets up in the morning. He goes to the toilet. He leaves the seat up. He showers and fixes breakfast. He reads the paper. He finds a job — as a Test Subject — starting tomorrow. It’s not much, but times are hard. He reads a book, and then another. He fixes lunch, naps, reads again. He goes to bed. He gets up. Toilet, shower, breakfast again. He does not make his bed. He goes to work. He comes home, prepares another meal. He talks to his room mate Bert a bit. Hannah drops by. He flirts with her some. He goes to bed, gets up, does the whole thing all over again. [...]
YOU KNOW WHAT? THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE PERFECT IDEA FOR A VIDEOGAME!!
Keep pushin’ for the fortune and fame
You know it’s, it’s all a gamble
When it’s just a game
Ah yes, take me home to the Paradise City.
Life is most definitely a path filled with imagination and adrenaline running our moves and bringing us into the space of game vs. reality. There are the battle games and there are the games of put the flower in the pot. It is the mindset that claims the difference. When the individual is involved in pursuing the games to run the path of the future in a collaborative sort of sense there is a mentality or realization that “gaming” is cultural, culture is part of game. There can be independent and futuristic games of knoweldge that it is a unique part of the modern world. But in a sense games are programmed into the mind, back to the cave, the Greeks learned games from being human, in a sense.
On another note, I agree with the quote the “economy is a casino.” Kenneth Wark presents his ideas of philosophy and games with a borader view of the global atmosphere. This further highlights the fact that what we are presented with in sense of game is run by different levels or yearning for power, and vise versa. We can obviously note this is the way various games are designed and presented. With Wark’s analysis of Sims we see his allegories of value and power. Therefore it is definite to analyze games as depictive of the power struggle of life, and survival.
Shannon Lin suggests that “culture is part of game”. I was just reading in the New York Times about billionaries who create their own private museums to show off their stuff. But i have to wonder what get’s left out when culture is just a stake in a game. Is that all there is? (as Peggy Lee might say…)
I agree. The conclusion that brought my thought to the idea of “culture is part of game” was meant to be a whimsical look. It brings back the idea of what really is a game? Since it is synonymous with so many as a thing which does not produce social or intelligible discourse, the idea of cultural inside the sphere of a game is indeed disenchanting. What is the jaded part of game or no game? Is it the force that produces a better look into society or a heightened sense of boredom. I am thankful for the critique of my outlook looking simplistic and have decided to work on the flow of words I come up with. It makes me think of the rigors of games as well, the rigors of life cannot be denied and never will be. If gaming is trying to giev light to a cup that is half full instead of half empty, it can be hoped that in this process there is also gaming that has the feat of acknowledging the suffering of the world.
Shannon writes: “it can be hoped that in this process there is also gaming that has the feat of acknowledging the suffering of the world.”
Interesting question. I don’t know if games can really be about suffering, other than in the obvious sense that one’s character has hit points and can die. But that isn’t suffering, and the subjective side of playing a character isn’t necessarily about suffering either.
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Poor Adorno is doubtless rolling in his grave at the idea of being a character in the Sims.
Perhaps it should read “Gerschom” or “Gershom,” shouldn’t it? Adorno might turn over in his grave at being SIMified, while Benjamin would probably be enthralled by the structure of the project and its articulation.
Gershom Scholem is how his name appears on his books in nglish and German.
Right, but still not “Gersholm.”
you treat you’re sims better than i did mien staid at home and made garden gnomes all day for £25 per gnome. the way that this was put over made it sound as if the person you where describing was some one in real life not a sim. this really drives home the fact about gamerspaes as in the sims theirs no real obgetie no end point to this game like real life. when this game came out i chod never get in to it as i whoud get bored cheat billed a big home and go do something else in real life raler than getting the sim to do the same thing in the game.
ps sorry about spelling i am disliksic
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This confused me a little, because when you said “For Benjamin…” I couldn’t tell whether you were referring to Walter Benjamin, as quoted above, or Benjamin your Sim.
Just a thought.
it’s meant to be a bit ambiguous.
and ambiguous it is.
“which fragments thing[s] still further”
I wonder if there’s a productive way of riffing here on the term “avatar” in games as a manifestation of deities in “incarnate form” (OED) or Benjamin’s “profane world”?
Yes, i have a little bit about avatars later, at 218-220. I think it could be a useful concept, precisely in this sense of the ‘incarnate deity’.
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Galloway’s allegorithm seems connected to Riemannian space under Deleuze, and even possesses a bit of that ol’ Benjaminian transcendentalism, which I totally support! Bring back the Kabbalah as metaphor, religious scholars and pop stars be damned, I have games to play.
Perhaps this is one way of coming to grips with the excess of game culture. Doing a youtube search for “Duracell – Turrican”, where a drummer plays the themes to Turrican and Space Harrier on a couple-tuned drumkit is actually a response to the playing mode of those games. Again, the bursting out of the sensation of play from its confines is key.
Game culture’s myriad associations are exploratory and expansive in a way that doesn’t quite cohere with our ideas of participatory culture and emergent discourses a la Henry Jenkins, although he was among the first to identify those patterns; games imprint the eternal catastrophe of the digital environment upon us to take elsewhere, and some great differences are emerging in how game fanatics extend their experiences beyond the text. A hacked NES console that sets off bottle rockets with each button press is a development, however small, that these types of ideas are well placed to interpret.
I like that ‘eternal catastrophe line — can i quote it? Under what name?
Use the line, of course; that’s the new form of peer review, after all.
For reference, the eternal catastrophe line is in my thesis, currently ‘Playland’, as “Games imprint the eternal catastrophe of the digital environment, allowing us to take them elsewhere and synthesize their disruptions with our own messy corporealities.” if that’s any better, although likely not.
And I really like the one-game-one-chapter rule, I think many more ideas can come out that way. However, games have the habit of being indiscreet lovers. If the first thing people say is “you should do other games”, you probably chose a fruitful model.
i look forward to reading Playland when it is also a book!
[...] 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 [...]
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