161.
(see Version 1.1 of this card)
What if boredom has less to do with the essence of time and more to do with particular qualities of space? Benjamin (the Sim): “Boredom is the basis of the allegorithmic insight into the world. Boredom lays waste to the appeal of the game as game, and calls attention to the ambiguous relation of game to gamespace.” Boredom isn’t a longing, a lengthening of time. It is a spacey feeling, of being spaced out. What is boring is a space in which either one cannot act, or one’s actions amount to nothing — waiting at an airport mall, or choosing one more or less identical game over another. When you are bored, even home feels like a waiting room. Gang of Four: “At home she feels like a tourist.”* What displaces boredom is the capacity to act in a way that transforms a situation. It doesn’t matter that the Chaos mode in State of Emergency is pointless. It displaces a bit of the gamer’s boredom in a making-over of gamer and game, changing the space the gamer can access, extending the place of the riot from the Capitol Mall to Chinatown to Downtown to the Corporate Center, changing the powers of the gamer to change the space itself. At least within the confines of the game, at least for a while. When it stops working — boot up another game.
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