GAM3R 7H30RY

Gamers are not always good Gods. It’s such a temptation to set up a Sim to suffer. Deprive them of a knowledge of cooking and pretty soon they set fire to themselves. Build a house without doors or windows and they starve. Watch as the algorithm works itself out to its terminal state, the bar graphs sliding down to nothing. This violence is not ‘real’. Sims are not people. They are images. They are images in a world which appears as a vast accumulation of images. Hence the pleasure in destroying images, to demonstrate again and again their worthlessness. They can mean anything and nothing. They have no saving power. But even though the images are meaningless, the algorithm still functions. It assigns, if not meaning, if not veracity, if not necessity, then at least a score to representations. In The Sims the world of gamespace is redeemed by providing for its myriad things the algorithm that they lack to form consistent relations.

037.

The Sim who suffers turns to face its gamer, looking out toward an absent sky, appealing directly, beyond the frame of the game itself. The gamer may not answer, or may not be able to answer. The gamer as God suffers from an apparently similar algorithmic logic as the Sim. The Sims comes with theological options. Turn on ‘free will’ and Sims stray from the powers of their maker. Turn it off and their actions are predestined, but even so, the gamer-god quickly finds that the algorithm is a higher power that the power one commands. Should the game be going badly for the Sim, it turns to face the gamer; should the game be going badly for the gamer, there is no one for the gamer to turn away and face. The Sim who addresses a helpless, hopeless or lost God lives out the allegory of gamespace itself. At least the Sim has someone to turn to. Who can the gamer turn to? Perhaps you can see now the reason for the popularity, among those troubled by gamespace but lacking a concept to account for it, of a personal God who can perform miracles, who can break the rules of His own algorithm.

038.

As a gamer you can have no sense of worth and no faith in salvation other than through your own efforts. But those efforts are fraught, and you are soon lost in the maze of the game. The gamer achieves worth through victories of character; but that character inevitably faces defeat in turn. Or worse. The only thing worse than being defeated is being undefeated. For then there is nothing against which to secure the worth of the gamer other than to find another game. One game leads to the next. It’s the same for Benjamin. After Theorist comes Mad Scientist and after that — nothing. Start over. Pick a new career. Get an expansion pack. Try some new lives. Start as a Playground Monitor, become a Teacher, a Professor, get tenure, rise to Dean, the finally, Minister of Education. Start as a Nobody, working for tips. Become an Insider, a Name Dropper, a Sell Out, a Player, a Celebrity, then finally, a Superstar. But these are just arbitrary names for series of levels. Any qualitative difference between levels is just an effect of an underlying quantity. A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing. The fruit of the digital is the expulsion of quality from the world. That’s gamespace. The consolation of the game is that at least this expulsion is absolute.

039.

Original Sims can be any mix of two genders and three colors. In The Sims 2 you start with preset templates (Caucasian, African American, Chinese, Persian — and Elf) alterable via a lot of sub-sliders. You choose gender, age, color, hair style and color, eye color, weight, height, glasses, hats, accessories, clothes, and so on, but these external attributes are merely a skin. They do not really affect the game. The sliding variables of character, however, do program in advance what careers a Sim can excel at, and which past times restore faculties. In Sims 2, they may be straight or gay. Again, it makes no difference. Either way their offspring mix the ‘genetic’ character qualities of their parents. The external representations are of no account; the internal variables determine potential. The ‘skin’ is arbitrary, a difference without a distinction, mere decoration. Underneath it lies a code which is all. The Sims 2 is committed both to a genetic view of intrinsic nature and a liberal view of the equality, and hence indifference, of extrinsic appearances.

040.

In The Sims, things proliferate. Or rather, the skins of things. You can have many different kinds of sofa, or coffee table, or lamp shade, but the meter is running, so to speak. You have to make more money to buy more things. But some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in ‘winning’ the game, they are interested in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds. If a cheat is someone who ignores the space of a game to cut straight to its objective, then the trifler is someone who ignores the objective to linger within its space. Bernard Suits: “Triflers recognize rules but not goals, cheats recognize goals but not rules.” The Sims lends itself to play that transforms it from a world of number back to a world of meaning. Algorithm becomes a more stable platform than the vicissitudes of gamespace for creating a suburban world of pretty things. But in trifling with the game, the gamer struggles to escape boredom and produce difference — and finds that this too has limits. Steven Poole: “You must learn the sequences the programmers have built in to the game — and, okay, there are hundreds of them, but that does not constitute freedom.” Games redeem gamespace by offering a perfect unfreedom, a consistent set of constraints.

(2) Comments for 036.

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Alana Perlin

posted: 5/25/2006

I wonder how Sherry Turkle’s notion of ‘evocative objects’ would relate to the idea of assigning meaning to gaming images. If computer characters and imagery are to become more than our facile, attenuated subjects, it seems that we must assign them greater evocative significance.

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McKenzie Wark responds to Alana Perlin

posted: 5/26/2006

– but there is a sort of bracketing off of the question of value in Turkle. As if what happened in the margins of gamespace where the essential thing. I argue it is what gamespace does in the main to subjectivity is what matters.

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(2) Comments for 037.

cburke

posted: 6/11/2006

typo: “higher power that the power one commands” s/b “than the power one commands”?

Kris Harris

posted: 10/24/2006

“Who can the gamer turn to?” The gamer can simply exit the game, or play a different one. It is the sim, and not the gamer who is constrained in a world for someone elses entertainmt.

And isn’t the gamer his own personal God, able, if he chooses to break the ‘algorithm’ of the game? (Cheating, exiting the game, returning to an old save, etc….)

(1) Comments for 038.

typo:
“the finally, Minister of Education.”
s/b “Then fianlly…”

(5) Comments for 039.

Janos

posted: 5/28/2006

(Actually, since this has been written, appearance *is* given value in the Sims 2. )

(heh)

Margaret

posted: 11/17/2006

Sims could be gay in the original game too.

Max Merenda responds to Margaret

posted: 3/6/2007

i fail to see the relevance

Gleb

posted: 3/16/2007

(sorry for the big block of text, it seems I am unable to make paragraphs)

The lack of any kind of qualitative difference between skins, and as you said in 038, between career paths, is what is really interesting to me here. “…these are just arbitrary names for series of levels. Any qualitative difference between levels is just an effect of an underlying quantity.” You mention that the variables of character affect the game, but only by determining which careers a Sim can excel at, which, as you have shown, are arbitrary. So the variables in character really don’t make a qualitative difference either, they just reconfigure the underlying numbers to create a slightly different algorithm, which is ultimately arbitrary as well since the larger algorithm doesn’t change at all (gain enough points and advance to the next level!) And doesn’t real life (gamespace) feel this way sometimes? As if the career choices we make, or even the choices we make while working within the career, are ultimately arbitrary and meaningless in relation to the plans of the larger power (be it supernatural or merely your supervisor)? It would be nice to be a Sim, to have our happiness be of no real connection to our jobs. The career one chooses for their Sim does not have an impact on their happiness bar. One has the same potential for happiness as a superstar and as a venture capitalist. It doesn’t matter. In this game, unlike in gamespace, the goal, the means of achieving the goal, and the rules are rather meaningless, and all that truly matters is the lusory goal (to win), and the lusory attitude.

What’s really interesting to me on this card in particular is the lack of qualitative difference between different skins and appearances. Isn’t this indeed the vision for a perfect world: “The external representations are of no account; the internal variables determine potential.”? In a sharp contrast to gamespace, the race/sex/etc within The Sims has no impact on the Sims’ happiness or their ability to work certain jobs. For me, certain video games (including The Sims and MMORPGs, among others) are interesting to consider as prototypes or blueprints for transhumanism. The transhumanist movement invisions a future wherein people are completely in harmony with emerging technology, evolving into a being “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards.” (Bostrom, World Transhumanist Organization) While we are obviously far from anything of the sort, the assumption of a digital avatar (especially one that does not have a predetermined character, as in most single-player games) seems to me like a first step, or maybe a pre-step to the convergence of humanity and artifical intelligence. This makes sense only because the avatars are better than we are: their race/sex/etc doesn’t matter, has no bearing on their lives, and is extremely customizable/changeable. They have abilities that we do not, and their happiness is relatively easy to manage. The rhetoric of life/play (gamespace?), as Brian Sutton-Smith would have it, shifts from one of power (pure agon) to one of the imaginary (improvisation, imagination, innovation).

This can all be seen as either utopic or dystopic. Of course, it would be nice if race or sex didn’t have an impact on our potential and our happiness could be easily managed. But meaninglessness can be taken too far. If all of these thing are devalued to the point where it is nothing but numbers and code, then we lose our free will as all the sub-algorithms of our lives reveal themselves to be slaves to the larger algorithm of which we are not in control.

(Sorry for the big block of text, I can’t seem to be able to make paragraphs)

(1) Comments for 040.

posted: 6/12/2006

doesn’t the practice of machinima deserve more than this oblique reference? I don’t agree that gamers are all looking for freedom when playing, but even if they were, then isn’t there a sort of freedom in redefining the mass produced world of a game by forcing it to tell your story?