Listen in on this Class
 

Fitzpatrick: ... We are talking about the online book GAM3R 7H3ORY by McKenzie Wark today. There are two obvious ways of coming at this. One is via content, the other is via form. I’m willing to start in either direction with you guys. One of the things that made me choose this was, of course, form—what happens to the scholarly text when you attempt to reenvision the way the work gets done. The other is that he’s dealing with this question of games that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about.

Rachel: I think it would be helpful for me if we talked about what play is, versus what a game is, versus what game space is.

Fitzpatrick: That is a really interesting set of questions. Do you have any initial stabs? How do you distinguish these things from one another? How is Wark attempting to distinguish these?

Rachel: Play is a positive thing, but it can be corrupted by Games can become like work, not play.

Mary: If you have a set series of rules and you have to perform certain tasks in a certain order and you get a prize at the end, then it can turn into a game, whereas play is more of a loose interaction. ...

Fitzpatrick: ... So games manage to turn play into work by enforcing rules, by having an end goal? And that is related to game space?

Amanda: Game space struck me—the way he dealt with it—as a fancy, souped-up way of saying “the world and its parameters.”

Fitzpatrick: This book is one great big algorithm, right? Amanda pointed out online that every chapter has exactly 25 paragraphs, which is really unnerving, and there are also places in the comments in which he defends the “one chapter, one game” rule. So clearly he’s set this whole series of rules: I shall write a book in which every chapter has 25 paragraphs and in which I use each game to explore one idea, and I’ll do it in alphabetical order. There’s something very strange about a book that’s subject to this many rules. What did you make of it as a reading experience?

Rachel: In the chapter on boredom, you could argue that making it a really long, boring chapter, where you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon, is really effective as a literary device. He both had a lot to say and didn’t have much to say at all. It was a really awkward chapter.

Fitzpatrick: What did you make of the readers’ comments that were interspersed throughout? Were they revealing of anything in particular?

Rachel: I can’t say they helped me much. Either they were from a gamer’s perspective and I had no idea what they were talking about, or they were from a theorist’s perspective and I had no idea what they were talking about. ...

Fitzpatrick: ... Indeed. It’s pretty much where most of the comments seemed to fall—either someone who is speaking Wark’s language and is able to respond to him about theoretical issues, or someone who is not speaking Wark’s language but knows more about games and is responding to his readings or misreadings or non-readings of the games themselves.

Max: To be a game theorist, it’s expected that you’re going to be a gamer. If you want to be a literary theorist, it’s expected or required that you have an incredible amount of reading under your belt to validate your opinions. If you’re going to set yourself up to be an authority you have to have a certain level of accomplishment.

Hilary: I think you may be right about that, but some of that divide may be because you have a split between the medium and the message. It’s very possible to be familiar with the nature of the medium without knowing a ton about all the details of the content. I do not play games at all and am very familiar with the premises and the basic way that all of these games operate because I have friends who do play them. It’s very possible to be familiar with the way the games work without necessarily knowing what exact combination of keys you have to press to defeat the boss on level 7. ...

Fitzpatrick: ... I wonder how much that divide can really be bridged. One of the major tenets of post-modernism has been that there is no more distinction between high art and low art—everything is just intermingled promiscuously. My contention has been that this is true, but only from the perspective of the keepers of what has traditionally been high culture. It is now possible for an academic to write a book about video games, and to take them very seriously and to use them as the jumping-off point for some very serious thought. But do people who traditionally only have access to the things we think of as low culture, popular culture, have the same entry into that form of elite discourse as those who are producing elite discourse have into popular culture?

Katie: The academics who are studying the theory first are coming at it from a top-down, critical angle, whereas the gamers who are playing. It’s just a very different way of understanding.

Paul: Some of the most interesting critical literature coming from gamers doesn’t come from current gamers; it comes from exgamers, people who have quit games and write about them. And you say that academics have a certain entry into popular discourse that gamers don’t have into the elite discourse in academia. I find it interesting that Wark chooses these games, because none requires a serious time investment. He didn’t do WoW, he didn’t do StarCraft, he didn’t do Half-Life 2. You can look online at the massive community games that have huge discourse going on in the gaming community around them. You’re talking between 40 and 60 hours a week if you want to be at the top of a game. I’m not sure that it’s possible to be that immersed in something and write about it. ...