GAM3R 7H30RY

225.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:05:09 +0000

Guy Debord: “No vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey.” And perhaps now by a conflict within the game, and a journey deeper into it.

224.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:04:49 +0000

The gamer might still be tempted to try to leave The Cave™, to substitute for its artificial sun an order held in place by one that really burns in a visible sky. But here is the paradox: you only know the value of that sun, its energy, the consequences of turning it into this or that allocation or resources, because there is a game. Only by going further and further into gamespace might one come out the other side of it, to realize a topology beyond the limiting forms of the game. Deleuze and Guattari: “… one can never go far enough in the direction of [topology]: you haven’t seen anything yet — an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature… we cry out, ‘More perversion! More artifice!’ — to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of [topology] creates of necessity and by itself a new earth.” The method for so doing may now be apparent: pressing against the limits of the game from within, to find the contrary terms behind the agon. Contrary terms which may open toward a paranoid complex (Debord) or a schizoid complexity (Deleuze).

223.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:03:50 +0000

The final question for a gamer theory might be to move beyond the phenomena of gaming as experienced by the gamer to conceive of gaming from the point of view of the game. K-Punk: “What do we look like from [game]space? What do we look like to [game]space? Surely we resemble a Beckettian assemblage of abstracted functions more than we do a holistic organism connected to a great chain of being. As games players, we are merely a set of directional impulses (up, down, left, right); as mobile phone users, we take instructions from recorded, far distant voices; as users of SMS or IM, we exchange a minimalized language often communicating little beyond the fact of communication itself (txts for nothing?).” Gamespace becomes an end in itself.

222.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:03:16 +0000

History is history, but there may be a history to its passing, to its transformation into another form. Here again (with amendments) George Lukács: “[The military entertainment complex] destroyed both the spatio-temporal boundaries between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the estates. In its [topology] there is a formal equality for all [gamers]; the economic relations which directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, in the true sense, a [gamer] being. [Gamespace] becomes the reality for man. Thus the recognition that [gamespace] is reality becomes possible only under [the military entertainment complex], in [topology]. But the [military entertainment complex] which carried out this revolution did so without consciousness of its own function; the [agonistic] forces it unleashed, the very forces that carried it to supremacy seemed to be opposed to it like a second nature, but a more soulless, impenetrable nature than [topography] ever was.” SimEarth prompts a surprising theoretical conclusion: history is back with a vengeance, and where least expected, the historicization of nature. History on earth becomes history of earth. History becomes total history.

221.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:02:13 +0000

Game time may be either geological, biological or sociological, but it is no longer historical. History is history. Or rather, a certain conception and a certain practice is history. History can no longer be a storyline about free agency constructing its own conditions of existence. Fredric Jameson: “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis…”. In gamespace, history is where random variation meets necessary selection. The game is what grinds. It shapes its gamers, not in its own image, but according to its algorithms. The passage from topography to topology is the passage from storyline to gamespace, from analog control of the digital to digital control of the analog, from the diachronic sequence of events to the synchronic inter-communications of space. Perhaps history reappears, but at a more synthetic, even photosynthetic level. Perhaps there is never any history without the installation of a game. Events have to mesh in causal chains, bouncing off given limits, to be something more than the subject of mere chronicles.

220.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:01:38 +0000

Perhaps what Theuth had to offer was not remedies but recipes — algorithms, indifferent to their effect on human. Perhaps Theuth killed Thamus, and took His place. His recipes are, after all, for killing one’s father. This God was not killed by us, nor was it a suicide. It is a regicide, performed by something neither God nor human, but something inhuman, a posthuman techne. What if it were not writing, but all Theuth’s algorithms meshed together which were His power? The algorithms of writing, calculation, navigation and the game, at first separately, and then coming together, create a topology, a world no longer logocentric, but ludocentric. Behind appearances lies a new Helios, the artificial sun of the algorithm, able to name, locate, value, calculate and set in play anything and everything but the sun itself. If in Plato history moves in the difference between mythos and logos, it comes finally to rest between logos and ludus, between writing and the game, in a world where the originary power of speech is neither here nor there.

219.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:01:04 +0000

Perhaps you are an avatar of the Egyptian demigod Theuth, who according to Plato, was the inventor not only of writing, but also of number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, games of chance and games of skill. In the story Socrates tells in Phadrus, Theuth offers these things to the sun-god Thamus, who considers them one by one. In Socrates’ telling, it is writing about which Thamus has the most qualms. For the problems of memory, recording, delineating, is this ‘pharmakon’ of writing a remedy or a poison? Writing sends the word — logos — out into the world estranged from the authority of the voice that authors it, erasing the line of its paternity, making of it an orphan. In this sense, it’s a father-killing poison, and it would make of the sun-god a marked man. But the sun-god only has to give the word and Theuth’s sneaky inventions are denounced. Behind writing lies speech, and behind speech, the pure light of the good. Jacques Derrida: “The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden illuminating, blinding source of logos.” Or so it was, in the beginning.

218.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:00:06 +0000

When gamespace chooses you as its avatar, which character does it select for you to play? Perhaps in SimEarth the gamer is the avatar of the Angel of History. Walter Benjamin: “Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees only one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them.” Or perhaps you are an avatar of the Luckless Angel, with rather different hitpoints. Heiner Müller: “The past surges behind him, pouring rubble on wings and shoulders thundering like buried drums, while in front of him the future collects, crushes his eyes, exploding his eyeballs like a star wrenching the word into a resounding gag, strangling him with its breath.” This suits the experience — and the times — rather better. The droll experience of being flung forward into nothingness by the terminal transformation of nature; an experience of hell seen too late. SimEarth is an allegory of the ends of gamespace, which declares its victory over the gamer, and over any other residue of contraries outside its form of forms. It pops the blue eye of the gamer’s world.

217.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:56:22 +0000

SimEarth is by genre a ‘God game’. Some God! Again and again, you fail your creation. SimEarth is not so much about the death of God as God’s suicide. It takes away the empowering thought of being responsible for His disposal. Suicide is either fast and violent, in which God throws himself into the flames of global warming. Or very, very slow; hooked, like a helpless junkie, to the sun. A sun which finally overcomes your ability to maintain. Mark Amerika: “Oblivion is the only cure for agony.” The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller. But it is the game which plays the gamer. Kline et al: “The construction of that willing delusion by which the players imagine they are controlling their own fantasy defines the magic of gaming.” 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.

216.

gamer theory — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:55:03 +0000

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.