Annotations ¶
“The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.”
THEODOR ADORNO
“There is an absolute in the moment of the game; and this absolute, like every reality or moment taken to the absolute, represents a specific form of alienation.”
HENRI LEFEBVRE
Sure, reality TV doesn’t look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games. Both become a seamless space in which gamers test their abilities within contrived scenarios. The situations may be artificial, the dialogue less than spontaneous, and the gamers may merely be doing what the producers tell them. All this is perfectly of a piece with a reality, which is itself an artificial arena, where everyone is born a gamer, waiting for their turn.*
THE GAME has not just colonized reality, it is also the sole remaining ideal.* Gamespace proclaims its legitimacy through victory over all rivals. The reigning ideology imagines the world as a level playing field, upon which all folks are equal before God, the great game designer. History, politics, culture—gamespace dynamites everything that is not in the game, like an outdated Vegas casino.
HERE IS the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: “To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.”* In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a placeless, senseless realm where quite a different maxim rules: “From each according to their abilities—to each a rank and score.” Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire; they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony.
The digital game plays up everything that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level playing field, unfettered competition.
THE IMAGES and stories that populate games are mostly cribbed from other media—from novels, films, or television. Games mostly just recycle, or “remediate,” bits of representation from other media. Bolter and Grusin: “Remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media.”
The game is a knowable algorithm from which you know you can escape; gamespace is an unknown algorithm from which there is no escape. The game is just like the gamespace of everyday life, except that the game can be saved. The game can overcome the violence of time. The game ties up that one loose end with which gamespace struggles—the mortal flaw of an irreversible time. No wonder the Sim turns in vain to the gamer as a God, for it is the gamer who has turned toward the game as a messianic, reversible time.
Should the game be going badly for the Sim, it turns to face the gamer; should the game be going badly for the gamer, there is no one for the gamer to turn away and face. The Sim who addresses a helpless, hopeless, or lost God lives out the allegory of gamespace itself. At least the Sim has someone to turn to. Who can the gamer turn to? Perhaps you can see now the reason for the popularity, among those troubled by gamespace but lacking a concept to account for it, of a personal God who can perform miracles, who can break the rules of his own algorithm.
Games redeem gamespace by offering a perfect unfreedom, a consistent set of constraints.*
Julian Dibbell: “In the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the realm of games and make believe.”
The gamer is a manager, confronting uncertainty with an inventory of resources. It’s a hard game to win at first, but after you have beaten it, you play it again and again. Gamer theorist Glen Fuller: “It has a complex array of logics for warding off boredom.” It draws the gamer’s attention not to the storyline but to the combinations of elements from which any given storyline might be selected.
When playing Civilization III, it doesn’t matter if the civilization you choose to play is Babylon or China, Russia or Zulu-land, France or India. Whoever wins is America, in that the logic of the game itself is America. America unbound.
What is saved does not suffer from erosion or decomposition or decay. It always comes back as the same—unless the system crashes and the digital can no longer impose its code, in which case it may never come back at all. The digital cosmos is more perfect, yet so much more fragile. It is the realm of Plato’s forms made concrete and saved to disk.
ATOPIA has one quality in common with utopia—its aversion to ambiguity. Vice City may take place in a dark world of guns and drugs, but every mission produces an exact and tangible reward. If your mission is to find porn stars Candy and Mercedes, you drive to the right location, dispatch some body guards, chase Candy’s pimp, run him over, return to pick up Candy, drive to the pizza joint, collect Mercedes, drive them both to the Studio and deliver them to the director. Your reward is always exactly one thousand dollars. If utopia thrives as an architecture of qualitative description, and brackets off quantitative relations, atopia renders all descriptions arbitrary. All that matters is the quantitative relations. By excluding relations, utopia excludes violence; by privileging relations, atopia appears as nothing but violence, but only because it excludes instead any commitment to stable description.
IN VICE City, the world exists already made over as a complete gamespace, an atopia. It is not “nowhere” (utopia) or “elsewhere” (heterotopia), but “everywhere” (atopia). Far from being new-fangled neologism, “atopian” is a word Plato used to describe the philosophical cruising of his Socrates, passing in and out of various niches of Athenian life, playing illicit word-games with the champions of each.
Roland Barthes: “It does not reveal, does not transform, does not develop, does not educate, does not sublimate, does not accomplish, recuperates nothing, save for the present itself, cut up, glistening, repeated.”* That’s the game. It hovers on the lip of boredom, able to defeat time but not to abolish nothingness.
Buzzcocks: “I’m living in this movie, but it doesn’t move me
ON THE whole a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it.”* So writes the rogue Surrealist Georges Bataille
AND AS for those slack times between engagements, who knows what to do with them? You are sitting, for example, in the tasteless departure lounge of some provincial airport. It is four hours until your flight, which—of course—is delayed. The shops around are uninspiring. You do have a book in your backpack. It’s Heidegger, bought on impulse. Shall you read? No. Or think through some problem? No. Or play games on your handheld? Not even. You are unable to. You look at the departures and arrivals on the screen. You look at the clock, again. You count the chairs. You walk up and down. To pass the time you look at the stores in the airport mall, but they all seem mere clones of one another or of stores in other chains. Look, there is even a franchise of The Cave! You imagine the satisfaction of throwing a rock through the plate glass window. What’s the good? Martin Heidegger: “What is at issue in boredom is a while, a whiling, a peculiar remaining, enduring … A confrontation with time.”*
Louis
BOREDOM no longer affects just the restless young or the idle rich. Gamespace offers nothing to anybody but the Sisyphean labor of rolling the rock to the top, until this arbitrary necessity abates. Then what? One’s actions at the crest of the hill become useless, indifferent—boring.
Karl Marx: “The people make history, but not as they please; not under the circumstances of their own choosing.”* Now the people choose their circumstances, just as they choose new furniture, but there is no history to be made of it.
BOREDOM can be displaced only so far. Even the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number. Boredom always returns. Poet of boredom Giacomo Leopardi: “The uniformity of pleasure without purpose inevitably produces boredom.”* The very action of overcoming boredom reproduces it, when gamer and game reach some impasse. There is always a limit. In games this limit is always given in advance. That’s the very merit of games.
GAMESPACE is an animation machine. The digital and the human lead an uneasy existence there. On the one hand, there are constant attempts to “humanize” the technological, to make it appear as if it were there for you. On the other, it reduces the human to the status of the digital. It marks all of space as a battlespace with yes/no triggers.
A. J. Greimas: “Perhaps out of a desire for intelligibility, we can imagine that, in order to achieve the construction of cultural objects (literary, mythical, pictorial, etc.), the human mind begins with simple elements and follows a complex trajectory, encountering on its way both constraints to which it must submit and choices it is able to make.”*
The problem with schizos is that they take words for things; the problem with paranoiacs is that they take things for words.
IN DEUS Ex: Invisible War the name for what is at the center of this universe of futures is Helios. This sun around which all revolves is said to be—like Eden in Rez—an “artificial intelligence” but is in effect a game engine, and what is at stake is the relation, via this game engine, of the gamer with the game. A game engine is a maker of worlds, but of worlds that appear as if they were made for the gamer, as if they lent themselves to actions that could uncover their protocols. While other media present the world as if it were for you to look at, the game engine presents worlds as if they were not just for you to look at but for you to act upon in a way that is given. The realm of the not-game is the domain in which the gamer cannot act as a gamer. The separation of the game from the not-game creates this space of possible perceptions and actions.
Marx showed how each act of concrete, specific, particular labor is made equivalent, by the wage relation, to every other. Concrete labor is also abstract labor.
FORMS of games evolve in a quasi-Darwinian manner, not unlike forms of organisms. Game designers breed new forms out of existing forms, and the military entertainment complex throws the resulting variations on a waiting market, where they compete to save you from boredom. Very few forms succeed. It’s almost Darwinian: The designer proposes; gamespace disposes. Franco Moretti: “In Darwin, in other words, history is the interweaving of two wholly independent paths: random variation and necessary selection. In our case, [formal] innovations, which are the result of chance, and a social selection, which by contrast is the daughter of necessity.”* Through a subtle inversion of the logic of natural selection, gamespace claims to be the full implementation of a digital Darwinism. Here for one and all the rule is survival of the fittest. Only what actually happens is quite the reverse: the demise of the unfit.
Deleuze and Guattari: “One can never go far enough in the direction of [topology]: you haven’t seen anything yet—an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature… we cry out, ‘More perversion! More artifice!’—to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of [topology] creates of necessity and by itself a new earth.”*
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