(see Version 1.1 of this card)
The old class antagonisms have not gone away, but are hidden beneath levels of rank, where each agonizes over their worth against others as measured by the price of their house, the size of their vehicle and where, perversely, working longer and longer hours is a sign of winning the game. Work becomes play. Work demands not just one’s mind and body but also one’s soul. You have to be a team player. Your work has to be creative, inventive, playful — ludic, but not ludicrous. Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen any more. Not least for children, who if they are to be the winsome offspring of win-all parents, find themselves drafted into endless evening shifts of team sport. The purpose of which is to build character. Which character? The character of the good sport. Character for what? For the workplace, with its team camaraderie and peer enforced discipline. For others, work is still just dull, repetitive work, but the dream is to escape into the commerce of play — to make it into the major leagues, or compete for record deals as a diva or a playa in the rap game. And for still others, there is only the game of survival. Biggie: “Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”* Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is morality, it is necessity.
Hi Ken,
Great to return to your space.
Jae
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The game has become god. The cave is the tabernacle. The god gives guidance and direction for life. “Value the high score. Ethics are relative. No worries play the game.”
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my grandfather was a gamer.
when he was asked by the nazis ”where are you come from”? in the place of his execution, he replied: i know where i come from..i am coming from there..the east the Ionean coast. where are you coming from?
my father was a gamer too.
he had to face 2 dictatorships and his neighboords.
i am a gamer as well.
i have to face what you call the ”gamespace” since years ago. have a look at that if you have some time to dispose: http://www.balkanwars.org
and: http://www.balkanwars.org/doc
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The Virno quotation here is fascinating given the current zeal for theories of constructed and fluid identity. “Qualities of being,” as you put it, represented as autopoeitic algorithms.
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