GAM3R 7H30RY

It’s a strange Eden that is promised here — an atopia of indifference, absorbing the gamer even as the gamer struggles to power-up the self by targeting it. Perhaps Eden only appears to become conscious and commit suicide. Perhaps it’s a ruse to draw the gamer into risking the self. There is, of course, a backstory behind the backstory — its signs slip-sliding away from any closure. Eden is the product of ‘Project K’. Mizoguchi says the K stands for the artist Wassily Kandinsky, from whom he borrowed the synthetic synasthesia that is the defining characteristic of Rez. Kandinsky: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” Sound, luminance, color, movement and vibration all pulse together. Mizoguchi updates Kandinsky for topological times. The digital controller of the Playstation replaces mechanical one of the piano as the machine for drawing the self out of the body so that it might find itself in its struggle with something technical.

147.

Plug in the Japanese edition with Trance Vibrator and Rez can be not only aural and visual but also a sexual machine, if the Vibrator is applied to the right spot. Jane Pinckard: “We sat side my side on our makeshift couch, I with the Trance Vibrator and Justin with the controller. As the levels got more advanced, so did the vibrations… revving up to an intense pulsing throbbing… ‘Oh, God!’ Pretty soon the levels and the images onscreen were just a faint blur to me. I knocked off my glasses and leaned back. I was in a daze. From far away, it seemed, I could hear Justin saying things like, ‘I made it to the next level!’ and ‘This is cool!’ but I was lost in my own little trance vibrating world.” To each their own target.

148.

“Open your senses” is the game’s demand. The desire for an enhanced and empowered self that comes to know itself by targeting an other is the very thing recruited into the game to produce the opposite — a synasthesia in which self dissolves into the needs of the network. The repetition of the act of targeting repeats the production of the gamer as fleetingly distinct and enhanced, but permanently engaged and subsumed in the network. The gamer is the new model of the self. The gamer is not subject to the law; the gamer is a function of an algorithm. The moral code of the storyline is just an alibi for the computer code of the game.

149.

What kind of being is a gamer? One who comes into existence through the act of targeting. To target is to isolate something against the dense, tense fibers of the network, maybe to destroy it, but always to assign it a unique value. Weber again: “… precisely the insistence that ‘opportunity’ be treated strictly as a ‘target’ that can be seized or missed itself misses the mark, because the mark involved is never simply present but always involved in other marks and other opportunities.” Targeting is a — temporary — solution to the problem of alterity. But it has its limits. It works to perfection in the game, but not in gamespace. James Der Derian: “… the temptation grows to use coercive interventions or technical fixes to seemingly intractable problems of alterity, like immigration, ethnic cleansing, and fundamentalist politics…. Questions of violence are always already problems of identity.” But this is precisely the value of games — they are allegorithms of what gamespace is not. The allegorithm of the game points to the ruins of a topology that is always supposed to arrive from the future but never comes. In Rez, the future perfection of topology even threatens to commit suicide rather than come to meet us.

150.

Over and over, the gamer oscillates between connection and break with the character; over and over, the character oscillates between connection and break with its target. The whole pulses and jives to this tempo of making, breaking and remaking alterity, the bounds of one and zero, presence and absence. It is as if the whole world were a Sadean playpen, an episode from his Justine or Juliette, where no storyline can pose as the quest for the unique (truth, beauty, justice) but is merely the framing device for an oscillation of identity, between phallus and orifice, targeter and target. Welcome to The Cave™, pure other of gamespace, oscillating in and out of contact with it as its target. Roland Barthes: “It does not reveal, does not transform, does not develop, does not educate, does not sublimate, does not accomplish, recuperates nothing, save for the present itself, cut up, glistening, repeated…”. The game hovers on the lip of boredom, able to defeat time, but not to abolish nothingness.

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NBLOCK

posted: 10/24/2006

when i observed an individual playing Rez the other day, i was blown away by how stimulating the syncopated audio/video was – it’s direct correlation to the gamers actions was really interesting to observe, and very hypnotic. as wacky as the notion of an individual reaching orgasm via a vibrator associated with a gamers every battle move is…..i can really see how it would make Rez go from one of the most stimulating things to watch and hear, to a full body exploration of the senses. kudos to this game designer for really going the extra mile in watching out for the consumers every need. and, in all seriousness, for exploring a new, very comedic route in involving the gamer in the experience, tightening the gap between the very real world of human eroticism and the parallel realities of video-game-land. one can only wonder how the vibrator would react if someone beat the game?

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McKenzie Wark responds to NBLOCK

posted: 10/25/2006

This is the other side to Rez being about targeting. It’s also about very blurry, boundary-less experiences as well.

sarah loyer

posted: 2/13/2007

it seems a little distracting to me… although i can’t tell you the number of times i have sat on couches in boredom as my male friends played video games, so this may add a new element to that scenario… a little ilinx with your agon…

McKenzie Wark responds to sarah loyer

posted: 2/17/2007

That could almost be the slogan for the Trance Vibrator: “A little ilinx with your agon!” — only nobody would understand it…

John Tyson

posted: 4/2/2007

Ah, so I see that you did find the Trance Vibrator. I hadn’t gotten to this page yet when I wrote my previous comment, sorry!

McKenzie Wark responds to John Tyson

posted: 4/14/2007

John: I like the idea of exploring Rez as music creation, and thanks for your ref re the Trance Vibrator.

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simon

posted: 5/25/2006

I think you have two chapters here. Let me say that Battle is a great chapter heading: But Battle is command and conquer battle epic scale: 1000 tanks destroyed in two hours, physical numbers games with logistics or miltiary industrial complexes or elephants Romans or Soviets on the Eastern Front – I dunno what I’m saying – I’m tired

Battle is not Fighting.
So you have to deal with Hand to Hand and Killing as a different Genre…I think this is a bigger (and more worthy) subject than “targeting” versus “firing” which is an intersting (and clearly personally but rather obscure) distinction. Obviously “targeting” depersonalises the killing and that’s a whole area to explore…and Res-Eden-etc is worth exploring more – but to pull out the stops – this is a chapter where there is MUCH work to be done. IMHO. Whatever the reference to the CAVE again on 150 is contexturally bizarre unless you are taking us back there on purpose.

Lost the plot a bit here, Sorry found myself reading but thinking what I wanted to say. I guess thats the problem with the “future of the book” I realise now I’ve stopped reading, your words, and written MY WORDS DOWN without assimilating your thesis properly. I really wanted to get the the BATTLE chapter. It was like: “Here is interesting stuff” And, since there are two chapters to go I have started to play a game where I want to get to the end (level) in THIS READING COMMENTING GAME tonight. Umm. I think I’ll stop writing waffle now. (There is something of value in that post though)

McKenzie Wark responds to simon

posted: 5/26/2006

Like Roland Barthes said: the death of the author… which is the birth of reader — as writer, as meaning maker in her/his own right.

For big thoughts, i suggest moving over to the forum.

Alexandria Ingold

posted: 2/12/2007

Ok so this is for the assignment in your Game Culture class. After reading this chapter I can only say that for me, when I think of game, I automatically think of battle. Perhaps this is because the word ‘game’ (for me) is attatched to ‘competition’. That is why I chose this chapter to comment on. Speaking as a person who is not really involved in video/computer games, I am still interested in how you compare the gamer to self and the game to world. The fact that there is a comparison of the game to ‘reality’ makes me think of how the game designer brings in vivid colors to exaggerate the gamespace world and stimulate the experience to the point where the gamer may choose living the ‘game life’ instead of ‘real life’. The idea of Rez, experience of battle, defeat or win, and then move up to the next level. Even though the game is simply targeting and moving up a level, I feel there is great similarity in our ‘culture’ today. We are always being timed and it is usually the time that makes us run out. We live, we have moments of victory and we die. The storyline is there, just like our ‘reality’. This sense of allegory is very relevant within this game even if it is a target game. Just as success is the top ambition through virtue, target is the goal. It feels all the same in the end.

McKenzie Wark responds to Alexandria Ingold

Alexandria writes: “We are always being timed and it is usually the time that makes us run out. We live, we have moments of victory and we die” The movie Run Lola Run perhaps best exemplifies this feeling of ‘running against the clock’.