Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark

Product Details

Synopsis

Listen to a short interview with McKenzie Wark
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

Michael McArthur - Library Journal

Gamer Theory, or GAM3R 7H30RY, as it would be better known to those following its progress, began its public life was published in draft form under a Creative Commons license. Following Wark's book about intellectual property, A Hacker Manifesto, it attempts to ascertain whether it is possible to establish a critical theory of games. Further, it explores similarities between games and life. Online, the book was organized into little vignettes, and the organization used here can be traced to that formatting, as each page retains the online numbering scheme. A wonderful addition to universities supporting science or media and cultural studies.

Biography

McKenzie Wark is Associate Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions.