Perhaps less a conflict and more a trifling, a styling, a playing. Mihai Spariosu: “Play is ultimately ‘unthinkable’… This utopian, or rather atopian, quality of play as the Other of Western metaphysics cannot be approached with critical or analytical tools.”* Yet after play might arise a mode of being that can be though — and a gamer theory. Gamer Theory is not about asserting the absolute uniqueness of games, nor about assimilating them to other forms (novel, cinema), but rather about marking the game’s difference from these forms as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations. The form of the digital game is an allegory for the form of being. Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through. From this vantage point, the whole of cultural history can be rethought. It is not a question of adding games as the tail end of a history of forms but of rethinking the whole of cultural history after the digital game. Play may be unthinkable, but it nevertheless has a history, and that history traverses both cultural forms and the historical form of being itself. To approach it, to think this unthinkable category of play, is to play in and against language. Gamer theory calls for concepts that make the now rather familiar world of the digital game strange again.

The gamer might still be tempted to try to leave The Cave, to substitute for it’s artificial sun an order held in place by one that really burns in a visible sky. But there 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. 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 schizoid complexity or a paranoid complex. Our Virgil, our guide through the over-world of gamespace might in a schizoid light be Gilles Deleuze; in more paranoid shades, 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 though it to get beyond it.

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 is an end in itself.

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.

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, from voice to code. 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.*

Perhaps what Theuth had to offer Thamus was not a remedies but recipes — algorithms. Manuel De Landa: “These recipes… include rules of thumb and shortcuts discovered by trial and error, useful habits of mind developed through experience, and tricks of the trade passed on from one generation of problem-solvers to the next. Some of the valuable insights… may then be captured in a general purpose, “infallible’ problem solving recipe (known as an “algorithm’).”* And what if Theuth had killed Thamus, and taken His place? What if it were not writing, but all Theuth’s algorithms 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. Theuth sets himself up as King Digital. Behind appearances lies a new Helios, the artificial sun-king 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 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 voice is neither here nor there. The sun that powers SimEarth, the light which illuminates The Cave is not the sun-God Thamus, but the algorithms of Theuth. But by this light, SimEarth tells the inconvenient truth about gamespace — that it can know its limit, its end, but not what to do about it.

Perhaps you are an avatar of the Egyptian demigod Theuth, who according to Plato was the inventor of not only of writing, but also of number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, games of chance and games of skill. In a story Socrates tells in Phadrus, Theuth offers these to the sun-god Thamus, and says: “what I have discovered is [recipes] of memory and wisdom.” Thamus, the sun-God, the ultimate authority, key to the great chain of being, who speaks for being itself, considers the gifts of Theuth 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 recipe, or “pharmakon,” of writing a remedy or a poison? Writing sends the word — logos — out into the world estranged from the authority of its author, 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 Thamus the sun-god a marked man. But the sun-god only has to give the word. 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.” Thamus refuses Theuth’s gifts. But perhaps that’s not the end of the story.*

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.*

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. I’m the decider! But it is the game which plays the gamer. 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 incarnate, answerable to a higher power — the game itself.

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.