Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Surely we need to know something about the present order to know in what way it transformable? To just posit a state outside it is utopian. Or worse. Maybe it is part of the legitimation of what i call gamespace.

Why are you still invested in the category of play? Even if it means the oh-so-daring "playing with the rules"? What could be more co-opted than that? It's the whole discourse of 'creativity'. On which see Pat Kane's The Play Ethic.

This idea of playing with the rules is in any case nothing but Bataille's transgression, which of course merely affirms the law. This is the whole point of Gamer Theory: The really startling critical leverage is to be found inside, not outside, the game.

Gamer Theory is however 'playable' in your sense, it just takes a bit of imagination. The only rule governing how one plays with it is the (cc) license, and why not ignore that as well? That i did not make it easy to play with does not mean there's no play. (And, in fact, we did give away the whole version 2 text as a text file. Do with that what you want.)

Authorship and control is always fluid anyway, but the challenge for critical thought is to be always singular without being individual. I'm not interested in a wikified consensus.

Of course the IFBook version is set up like a 'game', in which one might say that the unit operations are subordinated to system operations. That's the ruling order. But the argument of the book is that what is critical works its way about from the inside.

I agree with you about Second Life. It is really a mask for total recouperation. Better to talk about WoW, where gamers pay for the privilege of their own labor.

But the argument you don't want to confront is this: maybe there's no outside. Maybe play is so thoroughly incorporated that it has to be abandoned, both as theory and practice. That's why this book is called Gamer Theory, not Player Theory.

What nobody wants to do is think the persona of the gamer through to the end. Everyone keeps wanting to jump back to the old transgressive figures, back to the romantic legacy. But that game is played out. It is now the very engine by which gamespace sustains itself by permutating itself -- as always more of the same.