Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Well, it depends whether you merely want to mirror the process of commodity production in informational capitalism, or whether you want to suggest models that go beyond that.

But I guess there's a confusion of terms here: for you playability means playing by the rules, while for me it means playing with the rules.

So Gamer Theory is playable in your sense of the word - because it hides the labour of unpaid contributors under a fun interface and pretends that it's just a game between friends.

However, there are no mechanisms for rendering authorship and control more fluid - in other words, it's impossible to break or bend the rules, other than to hack the IFB server or to copy the book and sell it under a different name.

What you do with the book, then, is exactly what game providers do when they realise that players will create content for free. They pretend to relinquish control, but of course they don't really want the players to take control either.

So you get half-baked experiments like Second Life, where users can license their creations under Creative Commons, but the rules of the game remain under tight control by Linden Lab.

Maybe I just misunderstood your intention: if you are not interested in challenging totality, you are playing an entirely different game than I thought you were. But then I don't understand what the hacker is doing in that book?