Art tried again and again to break out of its heterotopia. Not only was it no match for the game, it ends up playing a subordinate role within the expansion of the game beyond a mere heterotopia. Art provides the images and stories for mediating between the gamer and gamespace. Rather than actual games played in actual arenas, art expands the reach of the game to imaginary games played in a purely digital realm, anywhere and everywhere, an atopia of gamespace.

Heterotopias of the game have never been of much interest to theory, but to gamer theory they may be a key precursor to gamespace. Among them are separate worlds pitting different attributes of body and mind into contests of skill or luck, from badminton to backgammon. Every way of measuring what one body does against another — each finds its own special heterotopia, its field, its court, its track, its pitch, its arena. Says defrocked Situationist Ralph Rumney: “It is now sport, not painting or sculpture, which defines the limits of the human, which offers a sense or image of wholeness, of a physical idea, which no honest art can now repeat.” Nor, need one add, can writing.

If aesthetic play suffers from enclosure within heterotopian margins; the agon of games is leeched out of its pure domains. Rumney didn’t count on 24 hour sports channels, internet gambling, reality TV game shows, or the subtle, corrosive imposition of the digital gamespace on every aspect of life. Conceptual art is no match for conceptual sport, with its fantasy baseball teams and its perpetual pep talks urging everyone always to just do it! — where ‘it’ is stripped of any possibility not marked and measured in advance. Not only was aesthetic play no match for the game, it ends up playing a subordinate role within the expansion of the game beyond a mere heterotopia. Art provides the images and stories for mediating between the gamer and gamespace. Rather than actual games played in actual arenas, art expands the reach of the game to imaginary games played in a purely digital realm, anywhere and everywhere, on every desktop and cellphone.

For a gamer theory the genealogy of gamespace might pass through these heterotopias of the game more than those of play, and those of play more than those of necessity. Theory has been looking in all the wrong places. The playtime aesthetics of the avant gardes of art yields to the ‘ludology’ of gamespace. It was the genius of Caillois, the lapsed Surrealist, to grasp this. In topography, what he calls alea (chance) and agon (competition) become the dominant modes; what he calls ilinx and mimesis — intoxicating vertigo and dissimulating spectacle — the minor modes. The obsessions of the Situationists — passive spectacle and active insurrection against it — form an obsolete couple, each drawing support in decline from the other. The action is elsewhere.