Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

I will say that when I have a sandwich that is full of unexpected meat, I find the surprise usually pretty pleasant - as not only do I get a meal but also a disruption to expectation and routine. Which is another form of nourishment. In that spirit, I am holding off on a review of my own until I eat the paper version and revel in massive tree slaughter.

I take Gamer Theory to be a strategy guide to philosophically inflected action. At least, a manual for rhetorical engagement given the gaming situation (to use an old familiar term.) The situations developed in each of the chapters share a typal range with the strategy guide; which is increasingly less a repository of impossible actions and more an eschatology of the possible.

I think, for example, the narrative-as-target metaphor in the Rez / Battle chapter appeals to a style of play/labour/action and occasions it with the crown of material trace.

And in Boredom / State of Emergency, the implicit critique in the quoting of Adorno's assertion that sport is tightly regulated (it is, by form, not) gives another sense of 'best practice' (to abuse a term plucked straight from the sulfuric netherworld of bureau-geddon) but which coheres to this sensation of guided strategy. A path taken, mapped according to hope and revelatory discourse, as primary rhetorical device. It is this form I feel underpins (or not) a drive toward a simulogy of activity. "Simulation forces binary actions > forces binary interpretations of the world > what comes next?"

The formal construction of the book, which is comparable to similar projects such as The Electronic Book Project and even texts such as the New Media Reader, or ye olde Film Art - is I would argue, a subset of this formula - a kind of 'pataphysical dovetail necessitated by the strategy formulation. To 'open up the text' a la forum necessarily forces roles to occur and creates audience/author situations for us to ironically inhabit while guffawing with incredulity at Barthes.

I have suggested elsewhere that this constitutes a kind of automatic lynching by which I meant first that the form invites critique (and by critique I mean the type of binary assault described above) but more importantly that sense of continual inward-forming. I don't know enough about the conceptual realm of the word 'immanence' to deploy it with any gusto, but I would tentitavely offer it here as a way that I imagined the process in its purest form. The poetics of lynching are such that they generate mass activity and continually form new possible targets; so there's a fit for my reading of the text, at least. In the forum, Wark said that the book was intended to be in "as open and generous a way as you can" and that "people pick up the vibe and take it from there. "

Which is probably true of any academic text but probably especially in regard to games, at this time. Game studies is hysterical about its origins and doubly hysterical about its borders; which is perfect and natural, I think, for a study of border action, origin manipulation and mass hysteria. 'Picking up the vibe and taking it from there' is pretty 'chicken', but I think a more 'tuna' approach would be to say that this book is a playthrough, and wants to act as guide for a reiteration, reformulation, re-address.

The call out for possible responses perhaps wasn't so much in the forum - I know the parts of the book I liked most never got commented on. Rather, in the implicit act of ensorcelling a reading of actions in specific games which provoke more material, contextual and situational gravities than general, typical ones. What can we say about Rez that can practically be said of other games? (Panzer Dragoon and Space Harrier nonewithstanding.)

So the book provokes. For one, it provoked Julian! :) The inability to review is totally coherent to me as a response to the book; I share some element of the instinct just by dint of the way I arrived to the text. But I think, Julian, you make a comment here which is so very important for all study, not just games and not just this book - "the book does not render these rules manipulable, and it does not explicate how such manipulability could be achieved."

That is a great aim for us to have as scholars; to make what exists as law, communal force or assumptive election totally manipulable. That is how a theory-through-games would be. An enactment of games's other tendency aside from the construction of binaries (which I think Wark's focus in this book). That is, the farming of doubt; the forming of situations in which doubt gains the properties of a force and reigns over even law. I don't even know how possible it is, but glancing at my bookshelf I can see its been done before, at other times, in different ways. It has been suggested to me that this kind of doubt, an ongoing reference point for me, is acutely covered by the Deleuzian fold, but I'll have to get back to you on that.

Anyway, whatever the processes, knowing another method of how and how not to find my way through this particular maze has been some tremendous food for thought - as is Julian's critique here of the formal properties of the book.

I will leave off with a link; a reference point for open texts, I suppose. This one is an extreme example of gaming labour and I think a good illustration of the guide metaphor I have been trying to unpack here; as well as a situation in which all us good smutty marxist carbunkles would do well to pay attention to.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/8.37471

Back to work, you hippies.