At first glance, McKenzie Wark’s book Gamer Theory resembles nothing more than a religious text. With its numbered sections which suggest a biblical citation style, its unclear textual status and the apocryphal comments of numerous exegetes, it lures its readers into uncritical acceptance of what it sets before them. After all, hasn’t the book already been reviewed, criticized, and partially rewritten by a group of readers who participated in the open-source publishing experiment that was Gamer Theory’s (or rather GAM3R 7H30RY’s) first incarnation? Hasn’t the text itself been miraculously reborn as a hardcover book by the canonical Harvard University Press, cleansed of the sin of using vernacular leetspeak in its title? Hasn’t the revised and updated version of the text been re-published on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Book (IFB), along with illuminations in glorious colour? And shouldn’t these visualisations alone suffice to make us see the light? Isn’t seeing believing?
GAM3R 7H30RYwas advertised as a “networked book” but it looked and felt like a regular old hypertext, more specifically a hypertext made with HyperCard, that most authentic of publishing systems for hypertext writers of yore. It was kind of like the text had been written on a replica Underwood for the digital generation, but with enhanced functionality for the readers, such as commenting, an RSS feed, and a clever “save” feature that allowed them to bookmark individual sections of the text. What was even more astonishing was that the entire book was made available under a Creative Commons license, also known as Copyright 2.0. A whole book for free! The bloggers loved it. The IFB blog’s Technorati ranking went off the chart and then some. And all came to see the miracle with their own eyes, and they digged it, and subscribed to the RSS feed, and commented like crazy. It was like the heyday of hypertext all over again, but with Mozilla® Firefox™.
I, too, came and commented and subscribed to the RSS feed. And I was happy because here was a book on videogames by the author of A Hacker Manifesto, a book that would blow all the ludologists and narratologists out of the water and show them that videogames were more than just an electrified version of Tic Tac Toe or a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a couple of pretty polygons on top, because its author was known as a guy who knows his stuff, i.e. someone who is aware of the fact that you can take technology out of context but you can never take the context out of technology. Curiously, however, after I had bookmarked the site, I never found the time to return to the book and actually read it. It may sound almost sacrilegious, but I felt like there were already enough people reading the book, leaving comments, and populating the forums. In other words, I felt like my presence was no longer needed.
Plus, there would be the book version of the book, i.e. the actual physical fact of a bound volume of paper with the text of GAM3R 7H30RY imprinted upon its pages. And this version would also include the readers’ comments; not all of them of course, but selected ones – not the ones that said ‘THIS BOOK SUXS, U R A LOOSER’, those would be deleted. They had nothing to do with the text, after all. There was really no reason to read the 1.1 version of the book, when there was a better, more beautiful, and more user-friendly 2.0 version just around the corner. So I unsubscribed from the RSS feed, stopped commenting and did not return to the website until the printed version of Gamer Theory hit the shelves of the Harvard University Press warehouse; a copy was sent to me, and settled on my desk with an audible thud.
It sat there for a while and gathered dust, as real books do. Then, one evening I picked it up, blew the dust off its cover, and started reading. While I was surprised by the fact that all of a sudden the book was copyrighted by Wark, comments and all, I found it much easier to read offline than on. Yet there was a nagging doubt in the back of my mind that had to do with the book’s history. I felt like I had to read the book quickly, before the next update came along, which would be even better than 2.0. Because that’s what happens when you submit to the logic of the perpetual update economy, isn’t it? The text transmogrifies into an index of things to come, a mere pointer pointing towards the actual thing – but then the actual thing never arrives. It becomes, as it were, an empty signifier, a MacGuffin, a fetish which seems to refer to something which is missing, but ultimately only refers to itself.
Okay, I know what you are going to say. If you are anything like me, and prone to fall prey to the intentional fallacy, you are going to say that that is precisely what Wark was trying to do: to write a book which operates within the same kind of economy that videogames operate in, a book which raises the same kinds of questions about authorship that videogames raise, a book which is both free and proprietary at the same time, like a videogame mod. Or, if you are McKenzie Wark, you will say: “I will probably not produce a Version 3.0 of this book.” Because that’s what it says on the website, emphasis mine. Or, if you are Julian Dibbell, writing for the Village Voice, you will say: “Not since Steal This Book has a book’s radical packaging so threatened to upstage its radical content.” But you will add that “the power of the packaging is more than title deep” because it answers the question “Can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?” in the affirmative.
Well, I beg to differ. Taking games as allegories of the world we live in is the tritest cliché imaginable, but Gamer Theory somehow manages to sell it as an original insight, which is the main rhetorical strategy employed by the book. But we will have to tread carefully because this is dangerous territory. First of all, let us aver, without even a hint of reproach, that Gamer Theory is not a book about videogames. Rather, it is a book about the world we live in, which uses videogames to make sense of it. I think this is a legitimate endeavour for an Associate Professor of Cultural Media Studies, which is what Wark is, according to the back flap of the book’s cover, and I think he has done a reasonably good job of making sense of the world, which is remarkable considering how many people fail at doing that.
The second thing about Gamer Theory we should keep in mind is that it is very aware of the fact that it is full of clichés. In fact, the method used to get at the truth is to take a cliché and work it so long and so hard that the kernel of truth that lies at its centre is laid bare. This is actually very similar to the way religious texts work, if you think about it. A phrase like “As you sow so shall you reap” is a cliché in its purest form, something so evident that it hardly bears stating. But by repeating it over and over again with minor variations, the phrase is turned into a truth, and what’s more, it becomes an ethical guideline. While Gamer Theory does not go quite as far, it is undeniable that the book has a moral dimension. Paraphrasing Adorno, we could say that Wark shows us that there is no right life in the falsehood of what he calls gamespace, except the brief respite of games proper, which are at least honest about the fact that they are false.
This neo-Platonic cliché – wrapped into the metaphor of The Cave™ – is what Gamer Theory begins with, and with a similar post-modernist cliché it ends. Wark calls for “concepts that make the now rather familiar world of the digital game strange again”, echoing Morris Berman’s appeal for a re-enchantment of the world, albeit with an ironic twist. After all, in Wark’s catechism, videogames are an incantatory technology, a form of secular magic, which has lost its lustre due to the fact that the world itself has become like a videogame. This raises the question how many times we can rub the magic lamp before the genie grows tired. In other words: can we re-enchant a technology we have already become disenchanted with? And maybe even more importantly: what about the legion of people who have only recently fallen under the spell of games for the first time?
Raising these questions is perhaps Gamer Theory’s greatest achievement, but unfortunately this achievement is obfuscated by Wark’s oracular style and his disregard for cultural and individual differences. His claim that “all games are digital”, for example, is nearly as presumptuous as Jesper Juul’s declaration that his game model applies to at least a 5,000-year history of games. Ultimately, however, it is not very productive to criticise the content of a book which has already been scrutinised and commented upon by scores of readers – a process which effectively pre-empts any form of traditional criticism. However, what none of these commentators were able to tease out is the book that is hidden inside Gamer Theory, a book which formulates a critical media theory, a book whose outlines can be glimpsed in certain turns of phrase, but which unfortunately remains elusive throughout.
So what remains to be criticised is the form of the book, its various incarnations on the web and on paper, its absorption of the labour and intellectual property of the commentators, its self-referentiality and its mise-en-scène as a project rather than a product. But in the final analysis, all Gamer Theory accomplishes with these shenanigans is an exposure of the rules that underlie academic publishing, free labour on the web, and the transformation of knowledge into IP. Yet despite all its efforts, the book does not render these rules manipulable, and it does not explicate how such manipulability could be achieved. This may seem like a tall order for such a slim book but it is a demand justified by its premise, which is to formulate not a game theory but a gamer theory.
Wark himself points out that a gamer theory is characterised by “a playing with the role of the gamer within the game, not by stepping beyond it, into a time or a role beyond the game, but rather by stepping into games that are relatively free of the power of gamespace.” This seems like good advice, and therefore it is all the more disappointing that he does not heed it himself. He offers us the gamer as “the new model of the self” but his answer to the question what comes after the persona of the gamer is, rather unconvincingly, the hacker. Is the Cold War figure of the hacker, which Wark already glorified in his previous book, really a model for the future, in which the contradictions between work and play and between necessity and surplus are somehow magically suspended? I don’t think so.
And Wark doesn’t seem very convinced of this solution himself, otherwise he wouldn’t deem it necessary to cite from one of his own books in order to make this point. But rather than to discuss the lack of good taste that this betrays, I would like to point out that his fall into the trap of self-referentiality is not entirely undeserved, and it is far from unexpected. Despite all his radical posturing, Wark is still enmeshed in a binary logic, and thus fails to see that his juxtapositions of the hacker with the worker and of the player with the gamer only produce a hall-of-mirrors effect of endless reflection. The only way out of this trap of self-referentiality, as readers of literary scholar Winfried Menninghaus know, is to chip or crack one of the mirrors, so the light refracts at a different angle, and this is, ultimately, what Wark fails to accomplish.
So, if both the criticism of content and the criticism of form fail, what else remains but self-criticism? As I said earlier, I did not participate in the process of commenting on the first version of the book, so perhaps I have no one to blame but myself if I am disappointed with it. Somehow I doubt that this would have changed much, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume it would have made a difference. What would I have done differently? Well, first of all, I would have changed the title. I would have called it “H4X0R 7H30RY”, because that what it is, after all is said and done. Wark may pretend that this is a book about gaming as a way of life, but his gamers are actually hackers, even when they are playing games. Because if there’s one thing that Gamer Theory teaches us, it is that you can take gamers out of games, but you can’t take the game out of the gamers. The same is true for hackers, and Wark himself is a true blue, dyed-in-the-wool hacker.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and I am not saying that a hacker can’t write about gaming. If hackers couldn’t write about gaming, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang’s Hacking the Xbox had never seen the light of day, and that would be a sad loss indeed. But it is a little disappointing to read a book which is supposedly about gaming, only to find out near the end that it is really about hacking. It’s kind of like buying a chicken sandwich only to discover that it is filled with tuna. Both are good, but tuna’s a bit of a letdown when you are looking forward to eating chicken. As a final point, perhaps, I should clarify that my issue is not with the fact that Gamer Theory is not about games, but with the fact that it is not about gamers. I am all in favour of books who demonstrate the validity of gaming as a cultural practice beyond the domain of games, but a book that only pretends to do so is just absurd.
So at long last I am coming to explain the title of this article, which is much longer and much more detailed than I ever expected. The prosaic reason why this is not a review of Gamer Theory is that I was not able to write one. I tried and I failed and I tried and failed again. Because Gamer Theory is a difficult book, I’ll grant it that. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without the help of friends who advised me and cautioned me, and did their best to keep my tongue in check. But for all their help I wasn’t able to write a review. All I can offer is this rather incoherent account of my fascination with Gamer Theory and my disappointment upon the discovery that it is not what it pretends to be.
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