GAM3R 7H30RY

In Vice City, the world exists already made over as a complete gamespace, an atopia. It is not ‘nowhere’ (utopia) or ‘elsewhere’ (heterotopia), but ‘everywhere’ (atopia). In the game, spaces all have the properties required of them of a certain kind of play. Hidden on Vice City’s islands are one hundred secret packages. Some are Downtown, some are in Little Havana, some in Little Haiti, some on the golf course, some at the airport. Collect them all and you can trade in even your best motor vehicles for the ultimate ride. Or if that is not your preferred goal, pick another one. Either way, the qualities of space always guide you to its real values, which always have a score. This space is perfect, seamless — and bounded, like Thomas More’s Utopia. And just as the utopia points to what is lacking beyond the page; so too atopia points to what is lacking, beyond the game. Atopian space is a real enclave within imaginary social space. The possibility of atopian space is a result of the impossibility of adequate and effective spatial and social quantification and calculation.

122.

For quite opposite reasons, the utopian text and the atopian game both stand accused of incitements to violence. What if the atopian game, like the utopian book, is merely the scapegoat? What if the book was merely a harmless repository of the potential of the line that was already imprinting itself on the world? What if the game is merely a repository of a new potential of the line? In utopian books, the writing shows the everyday world transformed as only writing can transform it. The utopian book merely pushes writing’s abilities the furthest, to a point of almost complete consistency, within the special topic of the book. The atopian game, likewise, is the algorithmic in a more complete and consistent form. Neither book nor game is ever wholly complete and consistent. They always negotiate with what is beyond their bounds. In Vice City as in More’s Utopia there is a traveler who mediates between one world and another. But in either case, the utopian book or the atopian game lacks the power to transforms the world. But where signs and images may bleed off the utopian page into the world, the algorithm of the game, in which each relation depends on one another, may not. At least not yet.

123.

It is not the ‘content’ of Vice City which might give a gamer theorist cause to pause. It really contains no sex, no violence, no drugs, no guns. These are merely the art — the images and stories — via which the game mediates between what is within its own purely algorithmic line, and the less than perfect topology within which the gamer lives. Rather, it is the form of the game itself and its compromises with a world beyond that can work as the topos of a critical gamer theory. The atopian game, like the utopian book, expresses what has the power to remake the world of its time, but is not itself that power. It is a useless, impotent form of a powerful line. Which is why critical theory best becomes gamer theory, and why gamer theory best becomes critical. The critical attaches itself to what power is but not where it is. It attaches itself to power in a powerless form. The atopian game is exactly the site that has this ambiguous property when things reach the topological level, when the lines run everywhere through space and everything is coming together as potential for digital calculation.

124.

In games, as in gamespace, some calculations happen quicker than others. Sometimes there is a moment to think it over, negotiate. Sometimes not. When there is no time for calculation, the gamer must act on the basis of a calculation made in advance. There’s always a backstory, providing some dividing line along which to weigh one’s interests. It’s never quite as game theory proper would predict. The gamer is rarely an autonomous agent, acting on rational self interest. If game theory was objective, rational, abstract; gamer theory is subjective, intuitive, particular. If game theory starts with the self contained agent, like a prisoner in a cell, looking out at the world; gamer theory wonders how the agency of the gamer comes into being as something distinct in the first place. In the midst of battle, how does the gamer decide when and where to pull the trigger? The atopia of the game is a safe haven in which to enact the problem of being as it appears in gamespace, but without the oppressive stakes of one’s own life on the line.

125.

Everyday life once had the resources to resist, adapt, appropriate or embrace utopian schemes. It pushed the promise and threat of other ways of being off into the corner, while it got on with the business of wresting freedom from necessity, building a world in which to dwell. With the very success of that labor comes a renewed challenge to its resourcefulness. Having developed a topography in which to dwell, mined and molded from raw possibility by collective labor, boredom rises to a new pitch, and the heterotopian past-times become more than a mere recompense for a dull life. They become the driving force of development itself. Out of the heterotopias of agon and alea arise the atopias of gamespace, via which topology makes itself known to us, as an ever more intricate matrix of the digital line. It’s not that theory, even a gamer theory, can achieve all that much when confronted with the digital indifference of gamespace. It might aspire merely to describe what being now is.

(3) Comments for 121.

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Hyperdyne

posted: 10/24/2006

I think it is interesting how games continue to have easter egg hunts, though they now seem more oriented to the casual participant than they used to be. In my mind, this has evolved into everything from sidequests to minigames that unlock options in games.

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davide

posted: 10/25/2006

It’s a bit much to say the space is perfect in Vice City. What is perfection? It’s an individual opinion based on one’s liking and having it absolutely said and done the way they would have it and not wanting it any other way. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there is a perfect video game and am not sure if there ever will be. I agree with labeling it an atopian society because it truly is everywhere. There aren’t really any limits in the game, especially since you can fly cars into the air.

McKenzie Wark responds to davide

davide: It’s just your opinion that it is just my opinion. Or wait a minute, is that just an opinion too…? That line of argument doesn’t get us anywhere.

Rather: one could ask, in what sense can a game be said to be perfect? That there are no unresolved events. Every event leads to a definite conclusion.

We see in the last two chapters how games achieve perfection by a certain process of exclusion.

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(2) Comments for 122.

Abe Elmourabit

The game creates a world in which we are already living in. Yes, it may be to the very extreme but nonetheless it still creates an element of reality. People get car-jacked, robbed, beaten-up, and solicited by prostitutes, to one unlucky person this can happen all in one night, but it still happens. Just because it hasnt happened to you doesnt mean it hasnt happened at all.

McKenzie Wark responds to Abe Elmourabit

Abe: but if it happened to everyone all the time, as it does in Vice City, everything would collapse in an instant. What i find more interesting that comparing one element in a game to one element in life is compare both as systems. That’s when you notice the real difference — and similiarity — between them.

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(9) Comments for 125.

simon

posted: 5/25/2006

Ok I read that a bit quickly
First wanted to say that for MOST “players” games are still sport (analogue) and not digital (thats a reference to the last chapter

In this, on ethe subject of UTopia, DYStopia etc then I have to say (a) Winston Smith uses writing because in 1948 Orwell didn’t have a mental picture of a digital world – in every dream home a heartache AND A PC! So that needs attention.

I think, because I have never played Vice City etc that probably the sex is unrewarding because there is no intimacy…I confess to an “interest” in sex and IT/internet and I’m working on how and why people aren’t interested in UTOPIA or making their lives more interesting…perhaps it is as simple as the fact that our lives have become comfortable. I mean only 50 years ago, there were rats, disease, cold slums in the UK. We have become “comfortably numb” living in what would be (to our grandparent’ generation) a UTOPIA surely.

I am interested in how the “entertainment” element of the MIEC places a focus on “our” western livestyle as the norm. 85% of people on this planet of course don’t have this lifestyle…but you’d never believe it from what the MEIC puts out!

McKenzie Wark responds to simon

posted: 5/26/2006

simon: it may seem counter intuitive, but to me games like soccer and basketball are also digital. The play might be analog, but it all comes down to absolutely binary decisions. Ball in or out, score or not score.

On entertainment, see the chapter on boredom, which addresses yr concerns from a somewhat different angle.

Comments on the diagrams (e.g. Fig 5)
The later diagrams aren’t really saying or doing anything are they? They are “just” word association football?

stephen duncombe

You are right on here; Vice City and all the GTAs both share something in common with, but are also radically different than utopia. Utopia might mean “no place” but the problem with the utopias of More and Bellamy and others is that it is all too clearly someplace. It is perfection, the end of history. (“Actually existing socialism,” as Stalin had the audacity to proclaim.) Boring. Static. Dead. What excites me when I play GTA is that the “magic circle” of the gameplay is relatively open. Yes, it is boundaried in the end (it is guided by algorithms after all) but it takes a long time to discovert those boundaries, and the fun lies not in completeing the missions but in the exploration and the mastery of the space. I believe that reason that GTA is so popular — besides good ole fashioned vicarious violence — is because of this relatively open play space. To me this suggests a new way to think about utopia and politics. That is: build space to explore into the very architecture of utopia itself. Utopia should not be an end point but a playing field.

In any case, exciting work you are doing!

McKenzie Wark responds to stephen duncombe

thanks stephen, and yes, of course i agree with this line of thinking, with the proviso that there is still a problem of the ‘nothing’ that is outside the game. The last 2 chapters return to this — Complex and Conclusions, as firstly a spatial, then a temporal problem.

cburke responds to stephen duncombe

posted: 6/23/2006

////I believe that reason that GTA is so popular — besides good ole fashioned vicarious violence — is because of this relatively open play space.////

Game designers call this the “sandbox elements” and they are thought to extend the gameplay past the point that the player gets bored. GTA seems to have given these elements new importance. For me, everytime I play a game for the first time, I go right for the exploration immediately. I want to test the edges, find the seams and experience the realness of the space by finding it’s limits. At least I think that’s what I am doing.

McKenzie Wark responds to cburke

posted: 6/26/2006

GTA is interesting, not least because it privileges ‘trifling’, as Bernard Suits calls it. I wanted to get a bit of Allan Sillitoe’s book The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in here. Its a story about a ‘delinquent’ kid, who one could almost imagine in GTA, who ‘beats’ the game by triffling. He’s the champion runner in his Juvenile Prison, expected to win at the big meet with other institutions. He leads right up till the end and then sits down just before the finish line. He wins by losing.

Christian McCrea

posted: 7/13/2006

GTA concerns itself with the privilege of violence and its neighbor, accidental physics, which is comforting for many players, but it strikes me as an evolution of the Metriod and especially Turrican era, which we still mistake for topographical pleasures when they are better described as clinamen, after Christian Bok and his work on Jarry. The endless swerve gets its pleasure from the delay we have from a potential heterotopia, it is the unnecessary clause in the contract that delays the process.

I don’t think we’ll really know what impact GTA’s violent overlay had on games until Take-Two sinks and the genre becomes truly aged; violence has been dismissed by both those interested in aesthetics and those pursuing politics. That we still accede to the idea that they are merely sandbox games is as fascinating as the games themselves. There is so much going on in our rhetorical strategies and needs; games have become theory’s sandbox. But as we know from the Motorhead song, Ace of Spades, the pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say; its the only card you need.

McKenzie Wark responds to Christian McCrea

That’s so well said, Christian. Can’t add anything to it!