hmmm. “the gamer is not interested in playing the citizen”
mightn’t it be more accurate to say that the people are not interested in playing “the citizen” when the effort fails to produce a measurable or recognizeable effect.” however in games like World of Warcraft, which value cooperation within guilds or tribes, it seems that gamers are willing to play the role of contributing group member (citizen).

–in which case, its a matter of being willing to play the role of the citizen within a game. But how can one be a citizen within a game?

i’m not suggesting that one can be a real-world citizen within a game, but that game play can also function in the realm of desire — i.e. that gameplay in some ways, in some cases seems to function as a substitute for what is lacking in the real-world — in this case, the yearning to be a contributing member of a group, ie. a citizen.

That is in part what i argue: that games are an almost-utopian (atopian) realm in which to ‘be’ — in the strong sense of the word. But this is not without its peculiarities. Being pays a high price in gamespace. Foreclosure of its borders, self knowledge reduced to the quantitative, and the need constantly to repeat the gesture of aiming at the target, over and over….

As I read through the cards and the comments, it occurs to me that it would be really helpful to see an outline of the book. Not just the chapter titles you’ve got above the cards, but a more detailed outline. That way, your readers wouldn’t necessarily have to read every word before making a comment that might turn out to be premature. For example, it seems to me that so far, most of your comments apply to competitive games for multiple players, or shooters, or sports games, etc. But what of adventure games? Yes, there is a competitive element to them, but there is much less a sense of winning or losing and more a feeling of experiencing and problem solving. I’m not that comfortable making this observation yet, however, because I haven’t read far enough to know whether you address adventure games. Okay, I just did, but I think you get the idea.

Thanks for making this comment – I was about to observe the same thing. I think this writing so far deploys tired old stereotypes about games and gamers, and much more complex thinking on both is possible. It may well be that some of this addressed later in the work, but for now it frustrates hell out of me. I’m quite enjoying some of the reversals in the text, but I’m not finding them enough to quell the irritation with oversimplifying games and gamers.

Of course it starts with the ‘stereotype’, SO THAT IT CAN BE FLIPPED AROUND LATER, AS PEOPLE WHO CAN READ MORE THAN 200 WORDS AT A TIME WILL FIGURE OUT.

Absolutely collosal. All forums need a bit of all-caps action. How much easier would the history of critical theory be if people just let the emotions fly sometimes?

Oh, right.

Besides, you know, writing… stereotypes.. its how writing works. You make useful choices, some of which generalise about your topic. I think Sal speaks to a frustration that’s important, though. Academics will always be the ultimate outsider for gamer culture, while academics see themselves as the ultimate membrane between realms. Its a final sort of relationship.

HEY KEN, YELLING AT ME FOR HAVING A SHORT ATTENTION SPAN DOESN’T ACTUALLY MAKE ME FEEL MORE WELL DISPOSED TOWARDS YOUR ARGUMENT.IT’S JUST A PUT-DOWN. IF YOU DONT WANT PEOPLE TO COMMENT UNTIL THEY’VE READ THE WHOLE FUCKING BOOK, DONT PUT THE FACILITY FOR COMMENTS THERE TILL THE END.

This highlights a frustration many readers have felt with the somewhat paradoxical nature of the site’s design. As Sal points out, we’ve provided paragraph-based discussion areas that implicitly invite readers to comment as they go, in many cases before they’ve seen where an argument is headed. This can sometimes lead to unpleasant (and ultimately un-useful) confrontations. A major goal of this experiment from the Institute’s point of view was to better understand the fault lines between print-based reading and participatory online reading. It’s proved incredibly fertile in that respect, but it can be a bumpy road.

This and other questions have been explored in one of the forum threads:
Act of Reading.

Sorry Sal. I responded to your impatience with impatience.

That’s ok Ken, I apologise for yelling back. Don’t think I’ve yelled in caps on a board since about 1996. It was interesting.

Having read the ‘act of reading’ thread on the forum, I do think our interchange was in part a reflection of the tension between the ludic and the narrative forms in this book. Games are about feedback loops, about constant interaction (the comments). A good narrative holds a tight structure and the author crafts it for the reader. Some games also progress along tight linear trajectories. You can maintain a little of the authorial control that guides the user in a particular way through the experience. Enforcing a levels structure might indeed, force your users/readers to read to the end of the argument before interacting with it.

But actually, emergent games, which are often the online, social games, tend to lack that string of pearls structure. I think the commenting structure of this book probably reflects the more open architecture of emergence. Thus if what you have produced is a linear narrative, the commenting structure needs to reflect that. If you can’t bear for people to jump to conclusions without reading to the end, then don’t give them the opportunity.

I find this an interesting issue in relation to the content of your book (thus far – please don’t beat me up for commenting before reading to the very end!). I have taken your argument so far to be, in part, a comment on how we structure our understanding of life and culture. That we are shifting to a game-like structure of understanding. The dominant sense-making structure till now has been narrative. We construct stories about our lives, our morals and ethics and so on, and these inform our practices. If we are shifting to a game-like understanding, then narrative is under threat. Ken, your narrative is under threat here, from your own argument. If the form of your argument can’t reflect the content, is it a valid argument?

That’s a good point! But if you think of it more in terms of dominant, residual and emergent forms, it’s a bit different. ie, games are no longer emergent, they’re dominant, and narrative is becoming a residual form. But residual forms might have interesting potentials, nonetheless. They might have the lattitude to be really critical and creative. Dominant forms, after all, have work to do maintaining the dominant culture.

i am still not quite clear on the word”atopia.” i know you clarified it in an earlier comment, but i think this is the first time it appears in your text and it may be useful to define it in the book.

The gamer is not interest in playing the citizen. Not true. The gamer is not interested in having no affect as the citizen as the subject as the low rung. Gamers choose games where they have an impact, an effect, where they can see what the product of their actions are.

Think of it this way. An assembly line worker only sees what his job is. He puts a bolt in place, and worries a robot will take his job. If he never sees the car at the end he has no pride or sense of accomplishment, just an empty bucket or tray of bolts if he finishes.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says that man needs his basic needs covered but once they are he developes other needs. Like the need for fulfillment. A citizen is a faceless soldier, a sell-out, someone who has no soul left. Someone run into the ground by the politically correct and who’s only release is a Friday night booze fest and even that is slowly being absorbed into drinks with the boss after work.

Latent destiny seems more like lazy destiny..or attainable destiny. A gamer has the resources to be more than a cog when she is in the game. Potential comes and the rewards are quicker, the rush is there. Instead of work where compliments mean raises and are therefore used sparingly…gaming breaks into honesty. Either you’re good or you aren’t and if you aren’t you have the chance to try again.

Has anybody ever done a study on the correlation between atheism and gaming?

If Wark compares games to life then wouldn’t life have a creator, since all games have been created by an individual(s).
I also adore Wark’s line about grace “revealing itself in the roll of the dice”

Actually, that’s an interesting point you brought up. Wark describes gamespace as something that is almost perfect, but also has some inherent flaws. Notice that this space was designed by a creator.

The real world, on the other hand, sucks ass. But it works together flawlessly. Quite the opposite. So then, wouldn’t it be more correct to say that the real world could not have been designed, else it be inherently flawed like the gamespace? Afterall, though we may view the world as gamespace, that does not MAKE it gamespace.

Or: if there was a God, the world would be more like a game…

Yeah, I guess that would make sense.

It is so delightfully fitting that there would be no comments posted on the first page to turn its logic so directly on the game of forum posting that I will almost not post this.

While I am reading those pages about games in games I remind myself of a piece of art written by Stanislaw Lem, Polish S-f writer who died recently. In a book called “A perfect vacuum” he is reviewing books that don’t exist. His explanation to this is following: “I think that as the years passed my impatience for conscientious and slow craft steadily grew. In order to turn illumination into narration one has to work very hard – on a quite nonintellectual level. This was one of the main reasons for taking this shortcut – from which these books emerged.”
Anyway one review really corresponds and even extends what is written here:
“”The New Cosmogony” is the acceptance speech of a Nobel prize winner in physics. He describes his remarkable theory about the source of physical laws. The universe is more than ten billion years old. Several generations of stars have come and gone. Billions of years have elapsed since the first civilizations could have arisen, so the question becomes, where are they? Why don’t we see their names spelled out with galaxies for pixels? His answer is, they are there, in fact they are everywhere, and the structure of physical law is their handiwork. Laws did not arise out of the inherent structure of the universe; they are rules established by competing primordial civilizations. All the players are operating under game theory, so they adopt certain conventions to prevent catastrophic upsets. Thus, physical laws are homogeneous throughout the universe because all the players pick the same, optimal strategy. There is no travel through time because that would give an unfair advantage, and for the same reason information cannot travel faster than light. Relics of past conflicts can be seen in quasars and in the microwave background radiation. We haven’t been visited by a dozen space-faring races because the big boys suppress young cultures that get too uppity. And the clincher is that the “psychzoics” (how the hell does that get translated from Polish?) have not yet finished with physics. There are subtle little asymmetries still to be worked out. For instance, left and right are indistinguishable except in the beta decay of a certain kind of muon. If we can see these inconsistencies being smoothed out we can tell that the psychozoics are still at work.” (John Redford,http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/Lem.html)
Book can be easily obtained through e.g Amazon.com (God bless the Internet). Sorry for using words of others, but I barely remembered this book.

You misspelled Raoul Vaneigem’s name.

This was the text I was waiting for when reading the first 14 cards. I was looking for the distinction between play and game. I read through the rest of this chpater and got a “hint” of where you might be going with this but definitely wanted more here. Perhaps this is just the set-up. . .And I would wonder “Play no longer functions as a fulcrum for a critical theory.” Has it ever? Maybe for brief moments, with a few theorists (Nietzsche) but I’m not sure it has ever been a fulcrum. Indeed I think the lack of it as a fulcrum has been a problem. Even those who seem to be talking about play (Callois, Huzinga) seem to me to actually be talking about serious/work. But perhaps here we have another crucial problem, how is it that we can distinguish play from the serious? or is this even possible?(I think perhaps not, but the borders and crossings seem useful places to start-as in this book.

‘fulcrum’ might not be the right word there. maybe ‘foil’ would be better.

This makes me think of a couple of trends in the gaming industry. First the move towards games that center around asset management (Animal Crossings might be the most loath example.) But second and perhaps more distrubing is the movement to justify the legitimacy of games by reference to “real world positive effects.” Wired recently had an article about how playing World of Warcraft was great training for corporate management. Add to this the gaming industries quick move to capatilize on “serious games” and educational games. This would seem to me to quickly appropriate the play space into a game space that re-inforces a work ideology.

Some Greek film makers I know just sent me their film World War Virtual, which starts with Ronald Reagan explaining how computer games are equipping kids with the skills they will need for the future — like being fighter pilots. So i think maybe that’s going in the book here too….

The recent cultural illustration of this is the character “Mike Tevea” in Charlie and the Choclate Factory-the kid who plays video games all the time, played as some sort of genius brat who is above the game, figures out the algoryhtmns that govern play and appears to play only to win, never for fun.

trying to avoid relying on cinema as a reference point here (there’s another chapter that does that), but thanks for the tip.

Enjoyed this card the most. The tone of many of the others seemed to ape certain european postmodernists, who, by their own admission, seek the obscure. As someone who plays games do i feel you are capturing something important about my experience. Yes, no, maybe – you seem to be aiming for some zeitgeist thing. But here i do recognise this phenomenon that games are often like (hard work), and that is very interesting

Who could blame play for dancing forever just beyond the reach of anyone who wanted to use it as a fulcrum for anything other than, say, launching water balloons? The delicious boredom of sultry summer afternoons can lead to play that does open the way to discovery: the upside down bicycle whose blur of spokes speaks of gestalt, illusion, persistence of vision, flicks, an intricate play of concepts flashing and spinning in that moment of spontaneity. But play sulks and wanders off when gamers try to box it up, and mourns those who mistake depression for boredom.

Nicely put, Kafkaz.

“Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom of the player with endless games of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same.”

I agree with your point about the work elements of play. I think this is seen especially within mmorpg communities since players often go to game forums for advice on the best character builds. Due to the repetitive nature of leveling, there is discontent with having to reset or delete a character later on in the game. There’s also a determination to pass all the “boring” levels to get to the more interesting aspects of the games asap. For instance in Rose Online, the first desired level is 50 because the character can drive a car. However, in order to get that nice sports car you want, you must have at least 4 million or more in the game’s currency. The unique high level gear and clothing is also expensive. So, in between leveling your character, it also needs to vend in the marketplaces. I think this does tie into Suits essay “Construction of a Definition” since all aspects of this game do have goal-directed activities and it is frowned upon by the game community if players use hacks to break the constitutive rules of the game. But, I wonder how Suits would view players seeking detailed character build knowledge from forums. Would he possibly equate this to the high-jumper using a ladder?

LM writes: “But, I wonder how Suits would view players seeking detailed character build knowledge from forums. Would he possibly equate this to the high-jumper using a ladder?”

Depends on what Suits calls ‘lusory attitude’ , i think.