McKenzie Wark,
Gamer Theory.
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 674 02519 6
US$19.95 (hb)
240pp
(Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press)
In Montevideo, a child explains :
‘I never want to die, because I want to play forever.’
Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (1992).
McKenzie Wark’s new book, Gamer Theory, is a highly inventive, reflexive, refreshingly intelligent example of ‘new media’ scholarship at its best. Indeed, as we read this sharp examination of computer games and their complexities, we encounter Wark’s aesthetic, cultural and pedagogic wisdom in writing a book that is – mercifully, contra to some of the more problematic current instances of ‘new media’ books – not locked into its own concerns and horizons. In a word Gamer Theory is a very savvy, multifaceted meta-commentary of gamers and games in the light of our ‘industrial-military-entertainment complex’.
Animating Gamer Theory is the fundamental belief – something that, if I may be permitted to say so, has been pertinent to my own trajectory as an educator and as an artist and as a theorist – that Hegel’s owl of Minerva does fly at dusk, something that is often emphatically missing in the growing critical mass of game and related ‘new media’ studies. Always leave a basic time lag between present and previous cultural forms; otherwise you will likely to be – in the Heideggerian sense – ‘enframed’ by the customary received wisdom and hype that heralds the newer digital technologies of today.
Too often, as Wark reminds us in this highly thoughtful and informative look at how computer games encapsulate the world at large, ‘new media’ scholarship is, in certain academic circles and presses, transfixed in a Bunuelesque ‘ground-hog day’ stupor and epistemological and methodological silliness. How many of our contemporary ‘new media’ theory books and essays are crippling, marinated in a presentist rhetoric of ideological blindness?[1] Gamer Theory is persuasively aware of the important critical, cultural and theoretical implications of authoring a book that is, in Edward Said’s telling expression, ‘open to the world’.
What intrigues Wark, as a bold and imaginative cartographer of gaming and gamers, is not the formal appraisal of computer games and their unique features, or the many different sub-cultural groups of gamers and their cultural and behavioural concerns and rituals. No, what motivates Wark, in his lucid and expansive Marxist and McLuhanite approach to his subject, is how computer games reflect the larger socio-cultural and technical relations that surround these ubiquitious cultural forms.
Wark’s book wisely maps out a new insightful cartography. He explains how our social reality represents an all-encompassing ‘gamespace’ where we, in our social and private lives, become ‘Cronenbergian’ harbingers of the profoundly influential algorithmic codifications emanating from our pervasive computer games and their related dynamically asymmetrical vector forces of power and panoptican culture.
The author explores how computer games frequently delineate the global ‘gamespace’ of our simulacral image-culture and govern all forms of subjectivity as we interface with our world at large. Wark’s project is to illustrate – through his far-reaching erudite grasp of critical and media theory and pop cultural expertise – how computer games italicise our prevailing Zeitgeist and our art, culture, dreams, work and play. The author’s supple ability to trawl through the annals of art, literature, cultural and visual studies and philosophy is clearly germane to the book’s overall persuasive conceptual architecture and its many illuminating diagrams and examples of gaming culture. Wark constructs his meta-narrative arguments with a varied array of different authors, artists, thinkers, filmmakers and musicians.
Anyone who can appropriately quote from Cyril Connolly, the aesthete-novelist-critic of boredom, Satyajit Ray’s mesmering movie The Chess Players (India, 1977), the criminally neglected cybernetic/Lacanian scholar Anthony Wilden, Iggy Pop, Paul Eluard, the Surrealist poet, and the misanthropic essayist-philosopher E.M.Cioran, within the larger framework of a ‘new media’ book, has got my undivided attention. For Gamer Theory in its inimitable honed prose of abstraction and aphoristic economy of expression is, to put it in the more popular vernacular of the book publishing profession, a veritable ‘page-turner’.
Although I don’t agree with some of Wark’s claim, he does present a convincing cogent argument that the computer game should be appreciated as a cardinal allegory of ‘the form of being’. For Wark, amongst many fecund suggestions, indicates that digital computer games are the form through which our contemporary condition can be negotiated. He also suggests that digital computer games should not be conceptualised in the wake of past cultural forms like the cinema and the novel, but as an issue of rethinking the whole of cultural history, because of their omnipresent appearance in our society.
Critically, for the author, play has a history that cuts across cultural forms and, equally significantly, the essential historical form of being itself. What Wark is concerned with is no less than the project of redefining the by now familiar world of digital computer games, true to the poetics of European modernism and critical theory, strange once again. This is no mere chore, given the often predictable theoretical vacuity of numerous books on the subject.
I have recently become a fan of Henry Rollins’ show on cable television. His ‘agit-prop’ x-ray vision of the doxas of the cultural industry, reminds me of how he shares, alongside with Wark, the Deleuzean view of the philosopher as “an experimentalist and diagnostician” of art, culture and society.[2]
Wark is an astute, concept-generating media theorist, who can subtly produce many far-reaching insights into how the gamespace of the digital computer game becomes the reality for all of us. Gamespace is, as the author contends, a global form of pure nihilism.
Earlier on, I posited the notion that Wark’s scholarship is thankfully anchored, to echo Said once more, in the ‘wordliness’ of our rapidly proliferating ‘algorithmic culture’. Wark’s far-ranging erudition and perceptive understanding of his subject are ‘earthed’, so to speak, in the existential and material fabric of daily life. He is concerned with the cartographic enterprise of charting the many complexities of our past and present cultural forms that have evolved from the novel (topical), the cinema (topographic), and the game (topological). Wark’s highly schematic and abstract book is, like his previous critically acclaimed book, A Hacker’s Manifesto(Harvard University Press, 2004), a post-Frankfurtian-Situationist-Deluzean ‘tool-kit’ of ideas that ideally will enable us to adopt an informed, self-reflexive understanding of computer games and how they challenge us to go beyond the agon of our gaming culture and its idealised ‘gamespace’.
Gamer Theory is explicitly characteristic of Wark’s essayistic style of theoretical exposition. It is firmly located in the prevailing aesthetic and theoretical undercurrents of the speculative literary and philosophical essay tradition (Acker, Adorno, Benjamin, Blanchot, Cage, Didion, Krauss, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Vidal, and Sontag, etc). This essay form permits Wark to pronounce many related speculative ideas in a compressed, ‘anti-genre’ and non-hierarchical form. Arguably, it is a form integral to Wark’s open-ended, comprehensive negotiation of the Frankfurt School critique of the cultural industry and our ‘administered society’ (Adorno) and the Situationists’ spectacle society critique. It is also a form that is acutely reflected in the evolution of the essay and video essay form (Cahen, Farocki, Godard, Marker, Morris, Richter, Welles, Wenders, etc.) and in its more recent critical expression in new media.
Wark’s abstract writing style is unique in contemporary media theory and it connotes, for me, the taut, minimalist, ‘stripped-down’ prose of a Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett or a Harold Pinter book. In Wark’s case, Mies van der Rohe’s famous coinage ‘less is more’ comes to the fore, time and again.
We may ask now in what ways is Wark’s invaluable book inventive in its authorial and textual configurations? Essentially Gamer Theory represents a Barthesian ‘Japanese lunch-box’ collage of digital dialogues emanating – metaphorically speaking – from the ‘democratic’ flux of the Ancient Greeks’ Angora – read online dialogues from everyday life – transformed into a highly abstract mode of meta-commentary. Gamer Theory is critically a ‘networked book’, and at the same time it is also, a fractured ‘A-Z’ book of sorts, like Czeslaw Milosz’s Milosz’s ABC’s (2001), and more recently, Carlos Fuentes’ This I Believe (2004).
Thus, Gamer Theory first appeared as an experiment in online authorship under the stewardship of Bob Stein’s The Institute for the Future of the Book. Stein is one of the pioneering figures of laser-disk technology (remember that technology?) and electronic books. So the book first appeared as GAM3R 7H3ORY version 1.1 structured as a group of virtual file cards, one for each chapter. Nine chapters in sum, representing twenty five paragraphs, originally limited to two hundred and fifty words each. Wark’s own ‘Surreal’ or ‘Oulipo’ mode of theoretical writing as a game. Practice what you preach is Wark’s authorial and pedagogic motto! Or otherwise, as Steven Shaviro reminds us in his absorbing blog-site The Pinnochio Story, James Brown’s bassist Bootsy Collins’ words ‘If you fake the funk, your nose will grow’ will come to haunt you.[3] Like most things in life, Collins’ words are fittingly true in their Shakespearian wisdom, particularly as they apply to certain instances of present day media scholarship.
All nine chapters are in alphabetical order and each one is dedicated to a particular computer game, with the exception of the first one which discusses Plato’s foundational allegorical cave and its implications for our social live world as an expression of a Borgesian illusory ‘gamespace’ which characteristically, argues Wark, there is no ‘outside’ to it (ah, the old ever-present ‘chestnut’ agon of Western epistemology) for us to go beyond the idealised allegorical maps of computer games as expressive of this only world we share as ‘gamespace’. If we scan all nine chapter theme headings from agony, to atopia, to battle, to boredom we have a vivid ‘Aristotelian’ overview of the key concepts that need to analysed in any given rudimentary critique of gaming culture, gamers and their complex aesthetic, cultural, ideological and political implications. As ever, Wark is always questioning the ‘social physics of technology’ (Avital Ronell) and its resonant imbrication in our everyday life. He provides a forensically pluralistic reading of each computer game as an ‘allegorithm’ (Alex Galloway) that is reflective of the ‘socially Darwinistic’ gamespace whereby gamers become compliant ‘reproducers’ of the status quo (read global capital), in stark contrast to hackers who produce new worlds of possibilities.
It is an increasingly ‘Cave’ within a ‘Cave’ within a ‘Cave’, an ad infinitum series of Russian dolls within other Russian dolls, non-ambiguous, ahistorical and homogenising world–as-gamespace where public and private, work and leisure entwine with each other, producing a dystopic world of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (witness the countless reality tv game shows, tv poker games, online gambling, etc, that are reflective of the ‘dog-eat-dog’ ‘exploitation’/B movies of the 1960s to the present time).
To conclude, Gamer Theory is aptly named because the author, in the wake of such authors like Adorno, Debord, Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari, focuses on computer games that are emblematic of a history of technological progress, as Shaviro reminds us, that is ‘also a history of increasing subjection.’[4] Further, I value Wark’s contribution to our ‘algorithmic culture’ because he, as is his wont, writes and teaches like an ‘untimely’ ‘go-between’ (Serge Daney) between the present, the future and the present, between the analog and the digital. Unless I am mistaken, Gamer Theory is one more welcome example (in the author’s oeuvre) and in contemporary academic enquiry, of the wisdom of continuing the conversation between the ancients and the moderns, producing “an antiquity without dates” (Octavio Paz).[5]
John Conomos,
Sydney College of the Arts, Australia.
Endnotes
[1] See W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, ch. 10.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, New York, Zone Books, 2001, p. 8 (‘Introduction’ by John Rajchman). The idea of the artist as a ‘symptomologist’ refers to “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought”, (with Jean-Noel Vuarnet) in David Lapoujade (ed) Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974., New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2004, p. 140.
[3] I recently wondered who Bootsy Collins may be. Now I know thanks to my friend Chris Caines. See Saviro’s The Pinnochio Theory blog-site.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Octavio Paz in William Paulson, Literary Culture in a World Transformed, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 147. (original source, Octavio Paz, The Other Voice, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. (trns: Helen Lane).
Created on: Sunday, 9 December 2007 | Last Updated: 22-Dec-07