Content in GAM3R 7H30RY, new video game consoles

I talked a little before about format in GAM3R 7H30RY, and now I wanted to comment a little on the actual content.

I enjoyed reading the first few chapters in the "book," but as the author started getting overly theoretical with his ideas and new words like agon, alea, heterotopia, and atopia, I had a difficult time following along. I thought it was interesting that McKenzie chose to talk about these ideas in such an extensive manner and didn't actually concretely define what he meant by each term until the fifth section, "Atopia." By then, he starts defining alea as "chance" and agon as "competition," (card 115) and I literally had to write down all his definitions and constanty refer to them in order to remind myself of what he was referring to.

Anyway, other than the confusion with some of the words, some of the ideas that McKenzie Wark introduces in the first few chapters really resonated with me, especially in light of the recent releases of several new video game consoles. McKenzie's idea that we literally live in a competitive gamespace is manifested everywhere in our lives. The phrases and idioms we use, our actions, every little thing we do is--if we want to see it this way--a game of winning or losing. I was at Target tonight, and there was a line of people camped outside, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new Nintendo Wii. Everyone's reasoning is that if they can get ahead in the game, then they'll get their share--and someone else loses. When the Playstation 3 was released this past week, there were definitely nationwide reports of chaos and violence, of people trampling one another to get their hands on this game. I don't really see the point because I'm not a gamer, but I can imagine a serious gamer's excitement over something like this.

The world which McKenzie Wark describes in his first chapter is definitely real, but also highly pessimistic, in my opinion. He says "every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win – a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games." (card 5) That definitely seems like a very negative view of life. While I agree that we often live in a dog-eat-dog world, I definitely think that most of us still believe more than one person can "win" in any given situation. Life isn't always a zero-sum game like in most video games.

Another interesting point that I definitely agreed with appeared in the "allegory" section. He says that "the contradiction is that for there to be a game that is fair and rational there is still a gamespace that is neither." (card 49) I took this to mean that the gamespace that we live in (aka our "real" world) encourages capitalism and exploitation of real people which is what makes the other kind of gaming (video-gaming) possible. Real labor and hard physical work went into putting together the hardware. As McKenzie Wark puts it: "There is no realm of the pure digit which does not betray the hand marked with muck and blood, somewhere." His references to political events in the real world make us realize that a gamespace does exist outside of games that isn't fair.

McKenzie has a lot of interesting ideas swirling around in GAM3R 7H30RY about gamespaces, but even after reading this beta-book, I'm still not sure if I have a tight grasp on this material. I still feel like I was distracted by all the new terms and the theoretical nature of gaming, which is a subject that I don't normally see in theoretical terms. However, reading his writings during a week when many new video game consoles were released definitely made me see the relevance of "gamer theory" to people as gamers.