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001. Ever get the feeling you are playing some vast and useless game to which you don't know the goal, and can't remember the rules? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there's no umpire, no referee, no regulator, to whom to announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can't win it, can't even know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don't even know who your real opponent might be? Ever get mad over the obvious fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table rigged, and the fix — in? Welcome to gamespace. It's everywhere, this atopian arena, this speculation sport. No pain no gain. No guts no glory. Give it your best shot. There's no second place. Winner take all. Here's a heads up: In gamespace, even if you know the deal, are a player, have got game, you will notice, all the same, that the game has got you. Welcome to the thunderdome. Welcome to the terrordome.Welcome to the greatest game of all. Welcome to the playoffs, the big league, the masters, the only game in town. You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it.

002. Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The CaveTM. It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you are a gamer in The Cave. You test your skills against other gamers. You have played in The Cave since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: "Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere." The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Here reigns the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.

003. Perhaps you are not just any gamer. Perhaps you want to break with the stereotype. You are the one who decides to investigate the assumption of a real world beyond the game. You turn away from the screen and unplug the headphones. You get up and stagger out of the darkened room, toward the light outside. You are so dazzled by the light that the people and things out there in the bright world seem less real than the images and sounds of The Cave. You turn away from this blinding new world, which seems, strangely, unreal. You return to the screen and the headphones and the darkness of being a gamer in The Cave.

004. Suppose someone, a parent maybe, a teacher or some other guardian, drags you back out into the light and makes you stay there. It would still be blinding. You could not look directly at things. Maybe the guardian prints out some pics of your family or maybe a map of the neighborhood, to acclimatize you, before you can look at things. Gradually you see the people around you, and what it is that they do. Then perhaps you remember the immense, immersive games of The Cave, and what passes for wisdom amongst those still stuck there. And so you return to The Cave, to talk or text to the other gamers about this world outside.

005. You communicate to fellow gamers in The Cave about the outside world of which The Cave is just a shadow. Or try to. Plato: "And if the cave-dwellers had established, down there in the cave, certain prizes and distinctions for those who were most keen-sighted in seeing the passing shadows, and who were best able to remember what came before, and after, and simultaneously with what, thus best able to predict future appearances in the shadow-world, will our released prisoner hanker after these prizes or envy this power or honor?" You bet! The Cave is a world of pure agon, of competitive striving after distinction. But suppose you are that rare, stray, thoughtful gamer who decides to try this new game of getting beyond the game again? Suppose you emerge from The Cave and decide to take stock of the world beyond? You find that this other world is in some curious ways rather like The Cave. The pics of family, the map of the 'hood, seem made of the same digital stuff as your favorites games inside The Cave. If there is a difference, it may not be quite what it seems.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

006. Here is what you observe about the world outside The Cave: The whole of life appears as a vast accumulation of commodities and spectacles, of things wrapped in images and images sold as things. But how are these images and things organized, and what role do they call for anyone and everyone to adopt towards them? Images appeal as prizes, and call us to play the game in which they are all that is at stake. You observe that world after world, cave after cave, what prevails is the same agon, the same digital logic of one versus the other, ending in victory or defeat. Agony rules! Everything has value only when ranked against another; everyone has value only when ranked against another. 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. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many and varied games. Work is a rat race. Politics is a horse race. The economy is a casino. Even the utopian justice to come in the afterlife is foreclosed: He who dies with the most toys wins. Games are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, itself. These games are no joke. When the screen flashes the legend game over, you are either dead, or defeated, or at best out of quarters.

007. The game has colonized its rivals within the cultural realm, from the spectacle of cinema to the simulations of television. Stories no longer opiate us with imaginary reconciliations of real problems. The story just recounts the steps by which someone beat someone else — a real victory for imaginary stakes. The only original screen genre of the early 21st century is not called "reality TV" for nothing. Brenton & Cohen: "By signing their release forms, contestants agree to end up as statistics, each player's feelings and actions manipulated... leading to infidelity, tears, perhaps heartbreak." 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 already a gamer, waiting for their turn.

008. 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 men are equal before God, the great game designer. History, politics, culture — gamespace dynamites everything which is not in the game, like an out-dated Vegas casino. Everything is evacuated from an empty space and time which now appears natural, neutral and without qualities — a gamespace. The lines are clearly marked. Every action is just a means to an end. All that counts is the score. As for who owns the teams and who runs the league, best not to ask. As for who is excluded from the big leagues and high scores, best not to ask. As for who keeps the score and who makes the rules, best not to ask. As for what ruling body does the handicapping and on what basis, best not to ask. All is for the best in the best — and only — possible world. There is — to give it a name — a military entertainment complex, and it rules. Its triumphs affirm not just the rules of the game but the rule of the game.

009. Everything the military entertainment complex touches with its gold plated output jacks turns to digits. Everything is digital and yet the digital is as nothing. No human can touch it, smell it, taste it. It just beeps and blinks and reports itself in glowing alphanumerics, spouting stock quotes on your cellphone. Sure, there may be vivid 3D graphics. There may be pie charts and bar graphs. There may be swirls and whorls of brightly colored polygons blazing from screen to screen. But these are just decoration. The jitter of your thumb on the button or the flicker of your wrist on the mouse connect directly to an invisible, intangible gamespace of pure contest, pure agon. It doesn't matter if your cave comes equipped with a Playstation or Bloomberg terminal. It doesn't matter whether you think you are playing the bond market or Grand Theft Auto. It is all just an algorithm with enough unknowns to make a game of it.

010. Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don't kid yourself. War is a video game — for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn't matter what happens on the ground. The ground — the old-fashioned battlefield itself — is just a necessary externality to the game. Slavoj Žižek: "It is thus not the fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the face to face killing of another person; on the contrary it is this fantasy of face to face encounter with an enemy killed bloodily that we construct in order to escape the Real of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological operation." Even the soldier whose inadequate armor failed him, shot dead in an alley by a sniper, has his death, like his life, managed by a computer in a blip of logistics.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

011. The old identities fade away. Nobody has the time. The gamer is not interested in playing the citizen. The courtroom is fine as a spectator sport, but being a citizen just involves you in endless attempts to get out of jury duty. Got a problem? Tell it to Judge Judy. The gamer elects to choose sides only for the purpose of the game. This week it might be as the Germans vs. the Americans. Next week it might be as a gangster against the law. If the gamer chooses to be a soldier and play with real weapons, it is as an Army of One, testing and refining personal skill points. The shrill and constant patriotic noise you hear through the speakers masks the slow erosion of any coherent fellow feeling within the remnants of national borders. This gamespace escapes all checkpoints. It is an America without qualities, for everyone and nobody. All that is left of the nation is an everywhere that is nowhere, an atopia of noisy, righteous victories and quiet, sinister failures. Manifest destiny – the right to rule through virtue – gives way to its latent destiny – the virtue of right through rule.

012. The gamer is not really interested in faith, although a heightened rhetoric of faith may fill the void carved out of the soul by the insinuations of gamespace. The gamer's God is a game designer. He implants in everything a hidden algorithm. Faith is a matter of the intelligence to intuit the parameters of this geek design and score accordingly. All that is righteous wins; all that wins is righteous. To be a loser or a lamer is the mark of damnation. When you are a gamer, you are left with nothing to believe in but your own God-given abilities. Gamers confront each other in games of skill which reveal who has been chosen by the game as the one who has most fully internalized its algorithm. For those who despair of their abilities, there are games of chance, where grace reveals itself in the roll of the dice. Roger Caillois: "Chance is courted because hard work and personal qualifications are powerless to bring such success about." The gambler may know what the gamer's faith refuses to countenance.

013. Outside each cave is another cave; beyond the game is another game. Each has its particular rules; each has its ranks of high scores. Is that all there is? The gamer who lifts an eye from the target risks a paralyzing boredom. Paolo Virno: "At the base of contemporary cynicism is the fact that men and women learn by experiencing rules rather than 'facts'... Learning the rules, however, also means recognizing their unfoundedness and conventionality…. We now face several different 'games', each devoid of all obviousness and seriousness, only the site of an immediate self-affirmation -- an affirmation that is much more brutal and arrogant, much more cynical, the more we employ, with no illusions but with perfect momentary adherence, those very rules whose conventionality and mutability we have perceived." Each game ends in a summary decision: That's Hot! Or if not, You're Fired! Got questions about qualities of Being? Whatever.

014. So this is the world as it appears to the gamer: a matrix of endlessly varying games – a gamespace – all reducible to the same principles, all producing the same kind of subject who belongs to this gamespace in the same way – as a gamer to a game. What would it mean to lift one's eye from the target, to pause on the trigger, to unclench one's ever-clicking finger? Is it even possible to think outside The Cave(TM)? Perhaps with the triumph of gamespace, what the gamer as theorist needs is to reconstruct the deleted files on those who thought pure play could be a radical option, who opposed gamespace with their revolutionary playdates. The Situationists, for example. Raoul Vanegeim: "Subversion… is an all embracing reinsertion of things into play. It is the act whereby play grasps and reunites beings and things hitherto frozen solid in a hierarchy of fragments." Play, yes, but the game – no. Guy Debord: "I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don't intend to play the game." Now there was a player unconcerned with an exit strategy.

015. 'Play' was once a great slogan of liberation. Richard Neville: "The new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and they'll suffer society's penalty)." Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom of the player with endless games of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same. Play no longer functions as a fulcrum for a critical theory. The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game; the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

016. “Play” was once a great slogan of liberation. Richard Neville: “The new beautiful freaks will teach us all how to play again (and they’ll suffer society’s penalty).”* Play was once the battering ram to break down the Chinese walls of alienated work, of divided labor. Only look at what has become of play. Play is no longer a counter to work. Play becomes work; work becomes play. Play outside of work found itself captured by the rise of the digital game, which responds to the boredom of the player with endless rounds of repetition, level after level of difference as more of the same. Play no longer functions as a foil for a critical theory. The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game; the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it.

017. Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level and bargain with your current employer. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you wanted, secretly, all those years ago… Only now you can’t remember. You became a win-win Situationist. Your critical theory became hypocritical theory. It is against everything in the whole wide world except the gamespace that made it possible. But gamespace is now the very form of the world, and this world eluded your thought even as it brought home the glittering prizes. It is gamespace that won. The hypocritical theorist, in an agony of fitful sleep, dreams of meeting the ghost of Guy Debord, and proudly cites a list of achievements: Ivy League job, book deals, grants, promotion, tenure, recognition within the highest ranks of the disciplinary guild. The ghost of Debord sighs: “So little ambition in one so young.”

018.(see Version 1.1 of this card)

 

What then has the gamer seen in that bright world, that gamespace, beyond The Cave? You see people hunched over screens, their hands compulsively jerking controllers. Each sits alone, and talks or texts to unseen others, dazzled by images that seem to come from nowhere, awash in pulsing and beeping sounds. No one out here in the ‘real world’ really looks all that different to the stereotypical gamer, thumb jittering on the controller. Now you are an enlightened gamer, you see how the world beyond the games of The Cave seems like an array of more or less similar caves, all digital, each an agon with its own rules, some arbitrary blend of chance and competition. And beyond that? Not much. The real has become a mere epiphenomenon without which gamespace cannot exist, but which is losing, bit by bit, any form or substance or spirit or history that is not sucked into and transformed by gamespace. Beyond gamespace appear only the spent fragments of nameless forms.

019. Gamer theory starts with the suspension of the assumptions of The Cave: that there is a more real world beyond it, somewhere, and that someone — some priest or professor — knows where it is. The gamer arrives at the beginnings of a reflective life, a gamer theory, by stepping out of The Cave — and returning to it. (See Fig. A) If the gamer is to hold gamespace to account in terms of something other than itself, it might not be that mere shadow of a shadow of the real, murky, formless, that lurks like a residue in the corners. It might instead be the game proper, as it is played in The Cave. Grand Theft Auto, maybe, or Deus Ex. Here at least the game shadows the ideal form of the algorithm. Here at least the digital logic to which gamespace merely aspires is actually realized. The challenge is — ah, but even to phrase it thus is to acknowledge the game — to play at play itself, but from within the game. The gamer as theorist has to choose between two strategies for playing against gamespace. One is to play for the real. (Take the red pill). But the real seems nothing but a heap of broken images. The other is to play for the game (Take the blue pill). Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid.

020. For a gamer to be a theorist might not require the ability to play any particular game especially well. The prizes have nothing to do with thinking the game. Nor might it be the ability to dismiss the game as unreal in the name of some supposedly more solidly grounded outside. What? These luminous pixels are not real, you say? Then neither is your world. If anything, The Cave seems to be where the forms, the ideas, the abstractions behind the mere appearance of things in the outside world can be found. Whether gamespace is more real or not than some other world is not the question. That even in its unreality it may have real effects on other worlds is. Games are not representations of this world. They are more like allegories of a world made over as gamespace. They encode the abstract principles upon which decisions about the realness of this or that world are decided.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

021. 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 gamer as theorist at first sight seems to have acquired an ability that counts for nothing in gamespace. The gamer as theorist might begin with an indifference to distinction, to all that the gamespace prizes. You does not play the game to win (or not just to win). You trifle with it — playing with style to understand the game as a form. You trifle with the game to understand the nature of gamespace as a world — as the world. You trifle with the game to discover in what way gamespace falls short of its self-proclaimed perfection. The digital game plays up everything that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level playing field, free competition.

022. No wonder digital games are the emergent cultural form of the times. The times have themselves become just a series of less and less perfect games. The Cave presents games in a pure state, as a realm where justice — of a sort — reigns. The beginnings of a critical theory of games — a gamer theory — might lie not in holding games accountable as failed representations of the world, but quite the reverse. The world outside is a gamespace that appears as an imperfect form of the computer game. The gamer is an archeologist of The Cave. The computer games the gamer finds there are the ruins, not of a lost past, but of a lost future. Gamespace is built on the ruins of a future it proclaims in theory yet disavows in practice. To the extent that the gamer as theorist wants to hack or “mod” the game, it is to play even more intimately within it.* The gamer as theorist is not out to break the game. The point is not to reduce the game to the level of the imperfect world outside it. Like any archeologist, the gamer as theorist treats these ruins of the future with obsessive care and attention to their preservation, not their destruction.

023. Gamespace needs theorists — but also a new kind of practice. One that can break down the line that divides gamer from designer, to redeploy the digital so that it makes this very distinction arbitrary. It is a characteristic of games to render digital decisions on all shades of difference. One either wins or loses. One either hits or misses. The practice of the gamer as theorist might be to reinstall what is undecidable back into the gamespace whose primary violence has nothing to do with brightly colored explosions or mounting death counts, but with the decision by digital fiat on where everything belongs and how it is ranked. Lars Svendsen: “How boring life would be without violence!” The real violence of gamespace is its dicing of everything analog into the digital, cutting continuums into bits. That games present the digital in its most pure form are reason enough to embrace them, for here violence is at its most extreme — and its most harmless.

024. Of all the kinds of belonging that contend for allegiance — as workers against the boss, as citizens against the enemy, as believers against the infidel — all now have to compete with one which makes agon its first and only principle. Gamespace wants us all to believe we are nothing but gamers now, competing not against enemies of class or faith or nation, but only against other gamers. A new historical persona stalks the earth. All of the previous such persona had many breviaries and manuals, and so this little book seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new persona. An ABC of theory for gamers. Not a strategy guide, a cheat sheet or a walk-through for how to improve one’s score or hone one’s trigger finger. A primer, rather, in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, made over as an imperfect copy of the game. The game might not be utopia, but it might be the only thing left with which to play against gamespace.

025. No wonder gamers choose to spend their time holed up in The Cave. Here at least the targets really are only polygons, and the prizes really are worthless, mere colors and numbers. These are not the least of its merits. And yet The Cave is a world you can neither own nor control. Even this substitute for utopia is in someone else’s possession. The digital game is both an almost utopian alternative to gamespace and its most pure product. Or was. Perhaps the game is collapsing back into business as usual. Perhaps the single-player game will become an anachronism, superceded by multiplayer worlds as venal and benighted as the rest of gamespace.* Perhaps, like silent cinema, the stand-alone game will be an orphaned form. Perhaps game designers such as Will Wright and Tetsuya Mizogushi will be the Sergei Eisensteins and Dziga Vertovs of a lost art. Perhaps, in this moment of eclipse, the classic games have something to show us. So by all means necessary, be a gamer, but be a gamer who thinks — and acts — with a view to realizing the real potentials of the game, in and against this world made over as a gamespace. One might start with the curious gap between the games one loves and an everyday life which, by the light of the game, seems curiously similar, and yet somehow lacking.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

026. Benjamin gets up in the morning. He goes to the toilet. He leaves the seat up. He showers and fixes breakfast. He reads the paper. He finds a job — as a Test Subject — starting tomorrow. It’s not much, but times are hard. He reads a book, and then another. He fixes lunch, naps, reads again. He goes to bed. He gets up. Toilet, shower, breakfast again. He does not make his bed. He goes to work. He comes home, prepares another meal. He talks to his room mate Bert a bit. Hannah drops by. He flirts with her some. He goes to bed, gets up, does the whole thing all over again.

027. Days go by. Not much changes. His cooking improves. He makes new friends — Ted, Gersholm, Asja. They drop by sometimes; sometimes he visits. There is the new furniture. That makes him a bit happier, but not much. He gets a promotion to Lab Assistant. It’s the night shift, but the pay is better. Then he makes Field Researcher and is back working regular hours. After a while he becomes a Scholar. He is so creative, but it helps to have friends if you want to get ahead. He aspires to being a Theorist. The pay is better. And the hours. He dreams of yachts and big screen TVs. Benjamin is a Sim, a character in a game called The Sims. One could be forgiven for imagining this was somebody’s life.

028. In The Sims, you create characters like Benjamin, build and furnish homes for them, find them jobs and friends. All in a world without a sky. Perhaps a game like The Sims could be a parody of everyday life in ‘consumer society’. Benjamin and his friends dream of things. Things make them happy. They find a nice sofa so much more relaxing than a cheap one. As the game’s designer Will Wright says: “If you sit there and build a big mansion that’s all full of stuff, without cheating, you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time, when all these objects had been promising to save you time. … And it’s actually kind of a parody of consumerism, in which at some point your stuff takes over your life.” Others disagree. Game scholar Gonzalo Frasca: “Certainly, the game may be making fun of suburban Americans, but since it rewards the player every time she buys new stuff, I do not think this could be considered parody.” In The Sims, characters can have lots of different jobs, but as Fredric Jameson says: “parody finds itself without a vocation.”

029. Perhaps a game like The Sims could be an allegory for everyday life in gamespace. In the allegorical mode, says Walter Benjamin: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict can be passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” For Benjamin, the fragmenting of the modern world by technique, the profusion of commodities that well up in the absence of a coherent whole, finds its expression in allegory, which fragments things still further, shattering the illusion of bourgeois order, revealing the means by which it is made. “What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the commodity world is its distortion into allegory.” And yet this possibility too seems exhausted. The fragmenting of the fragmented seems routine to a Sim. No other world seems possible.

030. Perhaps a game like The Sims is not just an allegory but also an ‘allegorithm.’ To be a gamer is a slightly different persona to being a reader or a viewer. Lev Manovich: “As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game.” Alex Galloway: “To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel allegorithm).” What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm. The intuitive experience and the organizing algorithm together are an allegorithm for a future that in gamespace is forever promised but never comes to pass. The allegorithm by which the gamer relates to the algorithm produces a quite particular allegory by which gamer and algorithm together relate to gamespace. In a game any character, any object, any relationship can be given a value, and that value can be discovered. With this possibility a challenging but fair verdict can be passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which any value is arbitrary, yet its value and its relation to other values can be discovered through trial and error.


All contents by McKenzie Wark, some rights reserved. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

031. An algorithm — for current purposes — is a finite set of instructions for accomplishing some task, which transforms an initial starting condition into a recognizable end condition. Greg Costikyan: "Algorithmic games are ones in which underlying calculations or rules determine the game's response to the player's input." The recipes that Benjamin and other Sims learn from the cookbooks on their bookshelves are algorithms. Benjamin's career as a Theorist is also an algorithm. There is a start condition: he must have 8 friends, 4 charisma points, a 7 in creativity, and so on. It has end conditions, too. With 10 friends, 5 charisma points and 10 for creativity, the Theorist career can end, and another begin. The gamer selects one sequence after another, and gradually learns what they do — that's algorithm. The gamer discovers a relationship between appearances and algorithm in the game which is a double of the relation between appearances and a putative algorithm in gamespace — that's allegorithm. (See Fig. B) But there is always a gap between the intuitively knowable algorithm of the game and the passing, uneven, unfair semblance of an algorithm in the everyday life of gamespace — this is the form that allegory now takes.

032. The images and stories that populate games are mostly cribbed from some other media, from novels, films or television. Games mostly just recycle, or 'remediate', bits of representation from other media. Bolter & Grusin: "remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media." And hence not specific to games. From the point of view of representation, the game is always inadequate to everyday life. A Sim in The Sims is a simple animated character, with few facial features or expressions. In The Sims 2 they seem a little more lifelike, but the improvement of the representation in some particular ways only raises the standards by which it appears to fall short in others. From the point of view of allegorithm, it all seems more the other way around. Everyday life in gamespace seems an imperfect version of the game. The gamespace of everyday life may be more complex and variegated, but it seems much less consistent, coherent and fair. Perhaps this was always the atopian promise of the digital — a real of absolute, impersonal equity and equanimity. The game opens a critical gap between what gamespace promises and what it delivers. What is true is not real; what is real is not true. This is what the double movement of allegorithm and allegory have to report. The game is true in that its algorithm is consistent, but this very consistency negates a world that is not.

033. Imagine that Benjamin, our character in The Sims, makes it to the penultimate level and becomes a Theorist. Perhaps then you buy him a computer because he seems bored with reading. What would he do with it? Play The Sims, of course. Being a Theorist, perhaps he starts to think about it. Perhaps he jots something like this in his notebook: "The gamer whose listless gaze falls on the controller in his hand is ready for the allegorithm. Boredom is the basis of the allegorithmic insight into the world. Boredom lays waste to the appeal of the game as game, and calls attention to the ambiguous relation of game to gamespace. Allegorithmic perception is n-dimensional, it intuits behind appearances interactions of many variables. The allegorithmic mode of apprehension is always built on an evaluative relation to the world of appearances. More and more relentlessly, the everyday life of gamers is coming to wear the expression of gamespace. At the same time, gamespace seeks to disguise the ungamelike character of things. What heightens the mendacious transformation of gamespace is its appearance in an undistorted form in the game. Still, gamespace wants to look itself in the face. It celebrates its incarnation in the gamer."

034. In the gamer, Benjamin might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. "Only, there is no longer a Socrates, so there is no one to address the idler. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist." In The Sims, as in gamespace, one wonders if the idler has disappeared also. There is no idle time in The Sims, or in the gamespace of which it is the more perfect double. The quartz heart of the computer on which The Sims runs ticks over remorselessly. All of its moments are equivalent, and so too, in a way, are all moments in The Sims. Sleeping, napping, conversation or reading all advance one's scores. Benjamin has to go to bed to get up again to go to work to earn the right to sleep, and dream, again.

035. To be a gamer is to come to understanding through quantifiable failure. The bar graphs measuring Benjamin's being trend negative and refuse to budge. You are too busy elsewhere to get Benjamin to the toilet on time, and he pees himself. He needs sleep, he needs love, he needs a new kitchen. He turns to face you, the gamer, and gestures wildly, as if cursing his God. When things were going well, you forgot to save the game, so there is no better time to go back to. Nothing for it but to work with what you have, or quit and start again. 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 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.


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036. Gamers are not always good Gods. It's such a temptation to set up a Sim to suffer. Deprive them of a knowledge of cooking and pretty soon they set fire to themselves. Build a house without doors or windows and they starve. Watch as the algorithm works itself out to its terminal state, the bar graphs sliding down to nothing. This violence is not 'real'. Sims are not people. They are images. They are images in a world which appears as a vast accumulation of images. Hence the pleasure in destroying images, to demonstrate again and again their worthlessness. They can mean anything and nothing. They have no saving power. But even though the images are meaningless, the algorithm still functions. It assigns, if not meaning, if not veracity, if not necessity, then at least a score to representations. In The Sims the world of gamespace is redeemed by providing for its myriad things the algorithm that they lack to form consistent relations.

037. The Sim who suffers turns to face its gamer, looking out toward an absent sky, appealing directly, beyond the frame of the game itself. The gamer may not answer, or may not be able to answer. The gamer as God suffers from an apparently similar algorithmic logic as the Sim. The Sims comes with theological options. Turn on 'free will' and Sims stray from the powers of their maker. Turn it off and their actions are predestined, but even so, the gamer-god quickly finds that the algorithm is a higher power that the power one commands. 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.

038. As a gamer you can have no sense of worth and no faith in salvation other than through your own efforts. But those efforts are fraught, and you are soon lost in the maze of the game. The gamer achieves worth through victories of character; but that character inevitably faces defeat in turn. Or worse. The only thing worse than being defeated is being undefeated. For then there is nothing against which to secure the worth of the gamer other than to find another game. One game leads to the next. It's the same for Benjamin. After Theorist comes Mad Scientist and after that – nothing. Start over. Pick a new career. Get an expansion pack. Try some new lives. Start as a Playground Monitor, become a Teacher, a Professor, get tenure, rise to Dean, the finally, Minister of Education. Start as a Nobody, working for tips. Become an Insider, a Name Dropper, a Sell Out, a Player, a Celebrity, then finally, a Superstar. But these are just arbitrary names for series of levels. Any qualitative difference between levels is just an effect of an underlying quantity. A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there's nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing. The fruit of the digital is the expulsion of quality from the world. That's gamespace. The consolation of the game is that at least this expulsion is absolute.

039. Original Sims can be any mix of two genders and three colors. In The Sims 2 you start with preset templates (Caucasian, African American, Chinese, Persian – and Elf) alterable via a lot of sub-sliders. You choose gender, age, color, hair style and color, eye color, weight, height, glasses, hats, accessories, clothes, and so on, but these external attributes are merely a skin. They do not really affect the game. The sliding variables of character, however, do program in advance what careers a Sim can excel at, and which past times restore faculties. In Sims 2, they may be straight or gay. Again, it makes no difference. Either way their offspring mix the 'genetic' character qualities of their parents. The external representations are of no account; the internal variables determine potential. The 'skin' is arbitrary, a difference without a distinction, mere decoration. Underneath it lies a code which is all. The Sims 2 is committed both to a genetic view of intrinsic nature and a liberal view of the equality, and hence indifference, of extrinsic appearances.

040. In The Sims, things proliferate. Or rather, the skins of things. You can have many different kinds of sofa, or coffee table, or lamp shade, but the meter is running, so to speak. You have to make more money to buy more things. But some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in 'winning' the game, they are interested in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds. If a cheat is someone who ignores the space of a game to cut straight to its objective, then the trifler is someone who ignores the objective to linger within its space. Bernard Suits: "Triflers recognize rules but not goals, cheats recognize goals but not rules." The Sims lends itself to play that transforms it from a world of number back to a world of meaning. Algorithm becomes a more stable platform than the vicissitudes of gamespace for creating a suburban world of pretty things. But in trifling with the game, the gamer struggles to escape boredom and produce difference – and finds that this too has limits. Steven Poole: "You must learn the sequences the programmers have built in to the game – and, okay, there are hundreds of them, but that does not constitute freedom." Games redeem gamespace by offering a perfect unfreedom, a consistent set of constraints.


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041. Allegory is about the relation of sign to sign; allegorithm is about the relation of sign to number. Signs don't open to reveal chains of other signs, pointing in all directions. Or rather, it is no longer of any importance what signs reveal. They billow and float, pool and gather, arbitrary and useless. There is no way to redeem them. But signs now point to something else. They point to number. And number in turn points to the algorithm, which transforms one number into another. Out of the bit rot of signs, games make allegorithms. The signs point to numbers, the numbers to algorithms, the algorithms to allegorithms of everyday life in gamespace, where signs likewise are devalued, arbitrary, but can still stand as allegories of the one thing that still makes sense, for the logic of the digital.

042. Allegory becomes a double relation: on the one side, there is the relation of gamer to algorithm in the game, its allegorithm; on the other, there is the relation of allegorithm to everyday life in gamespace. In relation to gamespace, the game itself works as an escape from the agony of everyday life, where the stakes are real and uncertain, to the unreal stakes of a pure game. But the game can also work as a critique, in turn, of the unreality of the stakes of gamespace itself. When Sims devotees assign values to non-existent furniture, truly the idea of economic 'utility' has lost all meaning. The game can also work as an atopia, where play is free from work, from necessity, from seriousness, from morality. Kill your Sims, if you want to. Play here has no law but the algorithm. And yet there is a tension between the game and gamespace. The relation between them is at once analog and digital, both a continuum and a sharp break. The gamer struggles to make of the game a separate world, for escape, for critique, for atopian play, and yet gamespace insinuates itself into the game.

043. Start over: Benjamin begins as a Beta Tester, becomes a Hacker, and finally a Game Designer. After that you are supposed to level up to Venture Capitalist then finally Information Overlord. But something goes wrong along the way. Benjamin's game design company goes broke. The whole industry is consolidating. So Benjamin goes to work for a much bigger game company. He starts work. It's a mild sort of 'crunch' time – normal when there's a project with a deadline. Benjamin is working eight hours, six days a week. The project is on schedule, so its not so bad. It's temporary. He complains a bit to Asja. The deadline for ending the crunch comes and goes. And another. Then the hours get longer. Benjamin is working twelve hours, six days a week. Benjamin's bar graphs slide into the red. Then the real crunch time begins. Benjamin is working seven days a week, "with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior."

044. You could be forgiven for thinking this is just a game, but it is somebody's life – as reported in a widely circulated text written by EA Spouse. EA, or Electronic Arts, is a game company best known for its Madden sports games, but which also which owns Maxis, which makes The Sims. EA's slogan: Challenge Everything – everything except EA, of course – or the gap between game and gamespace. In the gamespace of contemporary labor, things are not like the measured progression up the ranks of The Sims. In The Sims, Benjamin could work his way from Game Designer to Information Overlord much the same way as he had worked up the levels below. At Electronic Arts, things are different. Being an Information Overlord like EA's Larry Probst requires an army of Benjamins with nothing to work with but their skills as game designers and nowhere to go than to another firm which may or may not crunch its workers just as hard. As the military entertainment complex consolidates into a handful of big firms, it squeezes out all but a few niche players. Gamespace is here a poor imitation of its own game.

045. Start over again: This time Benjamin begins as a Bucket Runner. He quickly works himself up to Coltan Miner. Coltan? What is coltan? Quit The Sims for a moment. Pop the cover off your Playstation or your Apple or PC computer. You are looking at stuff that has come from all over the world – brought together by a global logistics. In the guts of your machine you may spot some capacitors made by Kemet, or maybe semiconductors from Intel. These probably contain tantalum, a marvelous conductor of electricity, also very good with heat. They were quite possibly made with coltan (short for columbite-tantalite) dug out of the ground in the Congo, where there's plenty of coltan, from which tantalum is refined. The Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Congo is home to gorillas, monkeys and elephants as well as the okapi, a rare relative of the giraffe. Thousands of Mbuti, or pygmies, also live there. Their livelihood is compromised by the coltan miners, who dig what one journalist called "SUV-sized holes" in the mud, out of which they can extract about a kilo of coltan a day. A kilo of coltan was worth $80 during the technology boom. There was a world shortage of the stuff, which even delayed the release of the Sony Playstation 2.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

046. The Congo is arguably the region in which the 'great game' of colonial exploitation has done the most harm and conferred the least benefits. The Congo's first democratic leader, Patrice Lumumba, was ousted in a CIA sponsored coup that brought to power the notorious Mobutu Sese Seku. With the collapse of the Mobutu regime, there was civil war, and little else. One of the things that kept the civil war going was the coltan. Coltan both fueled the war, and accelerated the destruction of wildlife habitats. And so the military entertainment complex, with precious brands to protect, didn't want protest movements sullying their reputations by calling attention to all the gorillas coltan kills, or the guerrillas it feeds. The military entertainment complex would like to believe, and would like you to believe, that gamespace is not a Nietzschian struggle of naked forces, beyond good and evil, but a clean, well lighted, rule-governed game.

047. "Kemet requires its suppliers to certify that their coltan ore does not originate from Congo or bordering countries." Motorola says much the same: "We believe we have done as much as any reasonable company could do by mandating compliance from our suppliers on this important issue." Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia is a little more sanguine: "All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it." The bad publicity around Congo coltan is good news for the Australian company Sons of Gwalia, which provides much of the world supply. The destruction of Australian habitats seems somehow less picturesque. No gorillas or giraffes are involved. This is the way its played in gamespace. It's all separate caves, with dim reports of each other. By all means, save the gorillas and okapi, but it doesn't change the equation.

048. The line that connects gamespace to game also divides one from the other. There's no getting away from the materials that make it possible to own a Playstation console or a computer with Intel Inside. There's no getting away from the labor that makes it possible to run The Sims on your machine. Benjamin: "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Benjamin (the Sim): "There is no realm of the pure digit which does not betray the hand marked with muck and blood, somewhere." And yet the whole point of a game is its separation, the line dividing it from gamespace and enclosing it in a self contained, algorithmic world of its own. To Benjamin – the Benjamin who is a Sim – everything outside The Sims is just metaphysics. The double relation of allegory and allegorithm is at once this intimate line connecting and yet separating game from gamespace.

049. The Sims is a very peculiar kind of game, in which everyday life is the subject of play, but where play is nothing but work. And yet there's a difference between play in game and gamespace, which permits the former to offer an allegory for the latter, an allegory which may function as escape and critique of gamespace, perhaps even as an almost utopian alternative. In the game, unlike in gamespace, the contest between gamer and game is over nothing. There are no precious minerals. There is no labor contract in dispute. The difference between play and its other may have collapsed, but there is still a difference between play within the bounds of an algorithm that works impersonally, the same for everybody, and a gamespace that appears as nothing but an agon for the will to power. If it is a choice only between The Sims as a real game and gamespace as a game of the real, the gamer choose to stay in The Cave(TM) and play games. The contradiction is that for there to be a game that is fair and rational there is still a gamespace which is neither.

050. The game is what gamespace isn't, particularly for those for whom it is the dominant cultural form. EA Spouse writes: "We both have been steeped in essentially game culture from an early age, and we watched that 'culture' gain legitimacy as we got to the point of thinking about our future careers." The gamespace of making games as commodities cannot live up to the games themselves. On EA Spouse's website, some forlorn gamer has written, and perhaps again in vain: "On the simes busten out please do not make a meter for the items you buy. Same with walls or aniny thing eles. So bottom line no metter in any of the simes games ever again please. Thank you if you do it." But, sadly, the meter is always running. It is integral to gamespace, if not necessarily to what makes gamespace possible. Beyond the critique of actually existing gamespace, games can point also to an almost utopian promise, in which games are something else again. But while the game opens toward new worlds, gamespace forecloses anything but its own relentless agon.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

051. Of what use is the past to a gamer? Peter Lunenfeld: "For the most part, its blood, mischief and role playing that gamers revel in. They live in an alternative universe, a solipsistic one scripted by designers whose frame of reference extends no further back than Pong, Pac-Man and Dungeons and Dragons. The visual and storyline tropes that most of us bring with us as cultural baggage are… all but forgotten ancestral memories, thrown off, on purpose, too cumbersome to be of any use." In this new world that appears indifferent to history, with only halls of fame for its champions, chronicles of its big battles and charts of its greatest hits, accounting for how this digital gamespace came into being presents something of a problem. Perhaps it is best to approach it in its own style, as a series of levels, each of which appears to the gamer on battling through to the end of the last. If one is defeated, one starts over. But remember: these are the grind levels. The going is hard here, even a little boring. You may need to attempt it more than once. In gamespace, time is measured in discrete and constant units, and while one cannot always win a level, one can always start over and do it again.

052. Click to start. Here is a new world. The first level opens onto a topic (from the Greek 'topos', or place). Here a topic is a place both on the ground and within language. Jacques Derrida: "The themes, the topics, the (common-)places, in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site." One can place one's foot on a topic because one can place one's tongue on it, and vice versa. Or one can point toward it and say: "there it is…". All around the topic it is dark, unknown, unmapped, without stories. Move around a bit and you bump into others, from other tribes, other settlements. Via others one learns of still others. The topics start to connect. A map forms. Once there is a map, there is the topographic, which traces lines that connect the topics, and which doubles the topical with the space of maps and texts. These outline the contours in space and time of what was the topical, redrawing and rewriting it a continuous and homogenous plane. The lines of the topic are traced into the page; the lines on the page are traced back onto the earth as the topographic. History is a story and geography an image of this topography, in which the boundaries are forever being expanded and redrawn. This play between the topical and topographic is the first level.

053. In the first level, every topical feature that resists inscription as a continuous space is erased and replaced. Impassable mountains yield their passages, joining once separate topics. Every recalcitrant people with its own indigenous topos is exterminated and forgotten. James Fenimore Cooper: "In a short time there will be no remains of these extraordinary people, in those regions in which they dwelt for centuries, but their names." The names persist, on maps, or in books with titles like The Last of the Mohicans. The first level is this dissolution of the topical into the topographic, where an oral lore is erased and replaced by inscription: Lines on maps, lines on pages; lines that evolve from trail to rail. The first level is where the topographic unfolds as the line between what is charted and what is uncharted. (See Fig. 3) The storyline dwells between the autonomy of the topical and the authority of the topographical, always lagging behind.

054. In the cinema, mapping and writing meet. The emergence of the topographic and its struggle to subsume the topical becomes the great theme of western cinema, above all of John Ford. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, cinema functions as the form that can reveal retrospectively the workings of topography, its creation of a storyline that justifies the imposition of the line. The completion of the topographic is the subject of film noir. Here the topographic has connected all of space in a loose network, and one cannot run beyond the frontier to escape it. One escapes within, looking for ill-lit, interstitial topics, like the rail yards and wholesale markets of Jules Dassin's Thieves Highway, for example. In The Naked City, this power of telesthesia – perception at a distance – is everywhere. The police, forensics, the coroner are all brought together via the switch board operator, enabling and overcoming a division of labor with the telephone, and compacting space into a temporal event.

055. This is the point where the line splits, into one that moves objects and subjects, and another, faster one that moves information, the line of telesthesia, of the telegraph then telephone. Through the telegraph, the sheriff has advance warning of the approach of his nemesis. Through the telephone the police chief coordinates action in space. Telesthesia allows the speeding up and coordination of the other line, setting the railway timetables by which vast armies of goods or soldiers may be mobilized. Telesthesia makes possible topographic space, where vast territories are coordinated within the bounds of the line. As telesthesia develops, from telegraph to telephone to television to telecommunications, topographic space deepens and hardens, but always with gaps and exclusions.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

056. Eventually, even the out of the way topic within the topographic is mapped and storied. In Dassin's Night and the City, made in political exile in London, the whole of space has become telegraphic. There is no escape. This completes the first level. Topology begins when the topical ceases to have any autonomy, when the line along which communication flows closes the gap between map and territory. The open frontier is enclosed in a field of calculation. History and geography cease to dwell between the topical and the topographical, always rushing to keep up. History and geography are subsumed within a topology, which tends towards a continuous field of equivalent and exchangeable values, instantly communicable everywhere. Where the topical was once bounded within the lines of the topographical, it is now connected along the lines of the topological. The fixed geometry of topography gives way to the variable forms of topology, in which the lines connecting points together lends themselves to transformation without rupture from one shape to another. The storyline of outward movement is complete; the gamespace of interior play commences. Welcome to the second level.

057. Topology announces its ambitions through radio and particularly television, a signal for everywhere and nowhere, potentially interested in anyone or anywhere, a Candid Camera. The key genres for working out the subsumption of the topographic into the topological are the situation comedy and the game show. On a game show, anyone can be taken out of everyday life and brought into the magic circle of television; on a sitcom, television can extend itself to the everyday life familiar to the average viewer, anywhere. Sitcom and game show announce the coming of a topology in which all of space might be doubled simultaneously, without lag, by lines of image, lines of sound, which as yet still broadcast out of central nodes. The lines run only one way and indiscriminately.

058. What completes topology and prepares it for the next – unknown – level is when the line splits again. The telegraph is a line that connects, but it is also a code, a line that makes distinctions, chopping information up into digital bits. Gradually, the digital extends and expands to the whole of telesthesia, from telegraph to the internet and beyond. This combination of the speed of telesthesia, its perpetual advantage in its war with objects and subjects, with the digital code that divides all information and makes it malleable, is what makes possible a vast and inclusive topology of gamespace. This is the third level: The world of topology is the world of The Cave(TM). Any and every space is a network of lines, pulsing with digital data, on which players act and react. In work and play, it is not the novel, not cinema, not television that offers the line within which to grasp the form of everyday life, it is the game. Julian Dibbell: "…in the strange new world of immateriality toward whcih 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."

059. If the novel, cinema or television can reveal through their particulars an allegory of the world that makes them possible, the game reveals something else entirely. For the reader, the novel produces allegory as something textual. The world of possibility is the world of the linguistic sign. For the viewer, the screen allegory is something luminous. The world of possibility is the world of mechanical reproducibility. For the gamer, the game produces allegory as something algorithmic. The world of possibility is the world internal to the algorithm. So: a passage from the topic to the topographic, mediated by the novel; a passage from the topographic to the topological, mediated by television; a passage, mediated by the game, from the topological to as yet unknown geographies, a point where the gamer seems to be stuck.

060. Start over with another new world. (This time with a little gamer theory.) Welcome to the first level: The novel is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities, a storyline. It arises at the moment when topic gives way to topography. For Georg Lukács, what is to be valued is the historical novel and its ability to trace a line across an historical moment and reveal the forces at work in it. "It is the portrayal of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy and complexity, in their manifold interaction with acting individuals." The historical novel shows historical events through secondary characters, perhaps not unlike the reader, and shows the historical event as at the same time a transformation of everyday life. And yet the novel suffers this paradox: it can only represent the line of which it is only a part to the reader. If it explores the possibilities of the line within its pages it opens itself to a 'formalism' that leaves the reader behind.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

061. The first level continues: Cinema is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities, an illumination of the dark corners of topography. For Walter Benjamin, what is to be valued is the 'optical unconscious', cinema's machinic vision of a world that is itself machined with a dense grid of lines. Cinema can expand or shrink space, extend or compress time, it can cut together images of diverse scales or forms – intimations of topology. It creates a 'Speilraum', a playroom, for dividing up the machine world otherwise. Contra Lukács, Benjamin opens towards the formal properties of the line at the expense of its representation of an historical situation as a totality. But what doesn't change is that the spectator, like the reader, is external to the line itself.

062. The first level ends: The novel languishes. Cinema fails to realize its allegorical potential. Guy Debord: "But this life and this cinema are both equally paltry; and that is why you could actually exchange one for the other with indifference." Boredom reigns.

063. The second level begins: Radio is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities. For Brecht, what is to be valued in it is a certain unrealized potential for the line to point both ways: "radio is one-sided and it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him." Radio could be like a public telephony. But it is all flow; it lacks a code. It radiates from one point to every other, without distinction. It lacks the transformational geometry of topology, where any three specific points could be connected, anywhere, and still make the same 'triangle' connecting sender and receiver and the third 'line' – telesthesia itself.

064. The second level continues. Television expands the line of radio, but does it add much to it? Does it yield much by way of a space of possibility? Fredric Jameson: "The blockage of fresh thinking before this solid little window against which we strike our heads being not unrelated to precisely that whole or total flow we observe through it." Television appears as an analog flow. The digital has not yet prevailed.

065. The second level ends: The tension between the topographic and topological is also one between a declining sphere of representation, will and interest, and one a new topos that is statistical, digital, simulated – algorithmic. The topographic is incomplete. It can project its lines across space and annihilate time, but it cannot yet mark or measure out the space it encloses. It has some feeble mechanisms – the opinion poll, for example. Through the laborious means of seeking out and recording opinion, topological space can be given the appearance of agency. Jean Baudrillard: "It is, paradoxically, as a game that the opinion polls recover a sort of legitimacy. A game of the undecideable; a game of chance… Perhaps we can see here the apparition of one of these collective forms of the game that Caillois called alea – an irruption into the polls themselves of a ludic, aleatory process, an ironic mirror for the use of the masses."


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066. The third level begins. Where the topographic develops one dimension of telegraphy – its flow of information across space – the topological develops the other – its intricate coding and addressing. Where the topographic is an analog flow; the topological is the digital divide. It is a line of a another type. It is a line of a new type which, for a brief, burning moment, reignited the dreams of a new topos. But the cycle accelerates. If it took twenty years to get from Brecht or Benjamin's optimism to Debord's foreclosure, the same cycle in net time took perhaps five years. Geert Lovink: "Cyberspace at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer position itself in a utopian void of seamless possibilities."

067. The third level continues. Games have storylines like the historical novel, which arc from beginning to end. Games have cinematic cut scenes, pure montages of attraction. Games subsume the lines of television just as television subsumed cinema and cinema the novel. But they are something else as well. They are not just an allegory but a double form, an allegory and an allegorithm. Appearances within the game double an algorithm which in turn simulates an unknown algorithm which produces appearances outside the game.

068. Stuck again. Start over. Another new world. Welcome to the first level. Let's loop back to Lukács, and ask: rather that insist on the possibilities of the technicity of the line itself, perhaps there's something to be said for the possibilities of a certain genre that makes use of it? Bonus points! Skip straight to the third level: The strategy game is a genre of a certain type within a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities. Click on the Government pull down menu and choose Revolution. Your Republic turns to Anarchy. Certain parameters shift. You are playing Sid Meier's Civilization III. It is not so much an allegory for world history as an allegorithm for gamespace itself. Everything here is a relation between quantifiable processes. Everything is a question of the allocation of resources. There's a perverse sense of base and superstructure. You can change the form of Government but there's not much you can do to change the underlying form of production. Invest in science and qualitative technical changes accumulate, which in turn expand military, cultural and political possibilities. Invest in culture to keep the plebs from revolting. Interestingly, civil disorder comes from below, but revolutions come from above, but these are just two functions within an algorithm: a small variable with a big effect; a big variable with a small effect.

069. Gamespace turns descriptions into a database, and storyline into navigation – an interface to line upon line of data. Sid Meier, known as a voracious reader, turns history and anthropology books into strategy game. Civilization III even comes with its own 'Cyclopedia', a one-eyed reference work for to a parallel world. But this is more than the remediation of old forms into new. Rather, the algorithm consumes the topographic and turns it into the topological. In the database, all description is numerical, equivalent in form. Everything within it can be related to or transformed into everything else. A new kind of symmetry operates. The navigation of the database replaces a narration via description. The database expands exponentially. Rather than a politics of allegory, an economics of allegorithm operates, selecting and reducing possibilities.

070. This is how the world appears to a gamer playing Civilization III: There are dependent and independent variables. Gamers, through trial and error, will work out which are which. They will choose cultural, economic and technical options that maximize long term advantages. If it doesn't work out, they will start another and do it over. Time is essentially of a piece. It is homogenous, empty, but it can be divided into equivalent units, just like space.


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071. This is how the world appears to game design: There are dependent and independent variables. Designers, through trial and error, will work out which are which. They will choose cultural, business and technical options that maximize long term advantages. If it doesn't work out, they will do it over. Time is essentially of a piece. It is homogenous, but it can be divided into equivalent units, just like space. Civilization III models not so much 'civilization', as the game design business, which in turn models gamespace, or topology as it presently exists.

072. This is how the world appears to gamer theory: Seen from the point of view of topology, with its dense databases and navigating tools, the topical world with its loosely connected topics was a world of limited data and few possibilities. Transformations of one thing into another are purely magical. The topographic – and telegraphic – flattened out the differences between topics while describing them in much more detail. A tension arises between enriched description and the poverty of storyline, bursting to contain it. The expansion of description nevertheless opened towards allegory. Accumulations of images burst out of their storyline bounds. It opened towards a politics of allegory, of the writing and mapping of the world, and also towards utopia, arresting the flux of the world in ideal form. Topology closes the frontiers of space within its lines, and expands the dataset again, but by reducing data to equivalent calculable points, it is able to break with storyline as principle of temporal order, replacing it with navigation. Storyline becomes gamespace.

073. Strategy games such as Civilization III presents an allegorithm of topology as gamespace. It subsumes the text, audio, images and movies into the database, while the algorithm calculates the moves of all its elements relative to the gamer. It collapses the difference between the everyday and the utopian. It embraces all differences by rendering all of space and time as being of the same quality – by reducing space and time to quantity. And finally, the next level appears: the expansion of topology outwards, beyond America, to make America equivalent to all of time and space.

074. America itself, as a construct, as a latent structure of feeling, is always only available via particular mediating lines, which may do more than merely represent a pre-existing America. The form of the line may itself participate in the creation of America. There may well be an America that resides successively in the novel, in the cinema, in television and the game, and is shaped by each. Each, in turn, presents history itself as a passing on of memory from one form to another. The line forms through the repetition of movement, and the topic emerges as the trace marked on the world by the line. The transformation of space and time, from topic to topography to topology, is an effect of the development of the lines with which to mark and manage it.

075. The line makes its way across the world, making it by marking it. The line passes across valleys, pages, mountains, rivers, tracing trails, roads, railways, highways, doubling itself with telegraph, television, telecommunications, doubling itself again as the code of the letter migrates from text to telegraph and explodes into the myriad lines of the digital. The line makes topics, maps them into the topographic, then folds the topographic into a digital topology. The line does something else as well. For every line drawn are an infinite number undrawn. Every line is an allegory of the possibilities for a line of its type. The line may also intimate the possibilities of lines of another type. One can find gamespace in the pages of Leibnitz. But the possibilities of a given type of line are not infinite. Allegory always touches the virtual – which one might define as the possibility of possibility – via a particular line. At each level of the actual unfolding of the line across the world, it offers a glimpse of the virtual in its own image. This is the limit to allegory. If allegory yearns for something ahistorical, a topos beyond all particulars, it does so over and over in the most particular and mediated way.


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076. Sisyphus, founder of Corinth, father of Odysseus, founder of the Ismithian Games, is best know for a most cruel and unusual punishment, meted out to him by the Gods. He was to roll a huge stone up the mountainside, watch helplessly as it rolled back down again, and then start all over again. Nobody knows what he did that required such a punishment. Perhaps it was for revealing the designs of the Gods to mortals. Revealing the forms beyond the mere particulars of mortal life would, in topical times, be a serious crime. Or perhaps, more prosaically, it was for his habit of murdering seafarers and travelers. Topical space, where each law, each God, is bordered by zones of indifference, would surely be troubled by such a transgression of the rules of 'xenia', of the gift one owes to strangers. Anne Carson: "The characteristic features of xenia, namely its basis in reciprocation and its assumption of perpetuity, seem to have woven a texture of personal alliances that held the ancient world together." Or so it was in topical times.

077. In topographic times, Sisyphus is a hero. He revels in this new world from which the Gods and their intangible forms have fled and a great industrial engine usurps their place. The task of Sisyphus becomes everyone's labor: pointless, repetitive, endless, shoulder to the wheel of fortune. There are no longer any lawless spaces. There are no gaps between topics. All of space is within the law. There are no more border zones where indifference prevails. Certainly it gets much harder to get away with murdering travelers. But in topographic times, it is time itself that is not quite so completely subordinated to rules, to ends, to purposes. There is a limit to the working day, and even within the working day, not every second is called to account. Albert Camus: "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world." The topical Sisyphus played fast and loose with the gaps of space, between the topics; the topographic Sisyphus played in the gaps of time, and exploited those gaps to turn everything to account for himself alone.

078.Where is Sisyphus now? Using the analog sticks on the game controller, you move a little character who rolls a ball called a Katamari. The game is called Katamari Damacy.* The name translates roughly as 'clump spirit', which might in turn translate as 'analog'. As the Katamari ball rolls, things stick to it. At first it is small things that stick, household items picked up off the living room floor. The ball gets bigger as things stick, and so it can pick up bigger things. Once your ball is big enough, you move out of the house and into the world. To move the ball, you twizzle the little analog joysticks. Push the sticks forward, and the character rolls the ball forward. Pull the sticks back and the character rolls the ball back. Turn left, turn right — it feels as though the variable pressure on the sticks translates into variable movements. This is analog — a relation of continuous variation. Only it isn't really. It is a digital game. The game converts the continuous movement of your thumbs on the sticks into a digital code. It turns movements into decisions — back/forwards, left/right, stop/start. An algorithm calculates the outcome of each movement. If you roll your ball over a small object, you pick it up. If you roll your ball over one that is too big, you collide with it, throwing off a few things you have already gathered. Analog spirit becomes digital code (see Fig. D).

079. All games are digital. Without exception. They all come down to a strict decision: out or in, offside or onside, goal or no goal. Anything else is just 'play'. Game studies scholar Jesper Juul: "The affinity between computers and games is one of the ironies of human history." But not at all surprising. From the start, games were a proto-computer — machines assembled out of human motion, inanimate materials and the occasional dubious call by the referee — to make a decision, a yes or a no. Sisyphus — founder of the Ismithian games — is condemned to a useless labor which is at the same time useless play, in that it cannot bring about a decision. The rock he rolls never crosses a line. It rolls right past the notional top of the mountain, and overshoots the bottom of its own momentum. But in Katamari Damacy, things are different. Rather than the rolling of the ball being entirely useless, now it is entirely purposeful. Time, like space, no longer harbors indifference. Brenda Laurel:"...even the smallest fragments of your idle time have been colonized...". As you roll your ball around, making it bigger and bigger, an icon in the corner of the screen shows your progress. The icon shows your ball as a circle inside a larger one, which is the size it must grow to if you are to win this level. It grows, gradually, incrementally, but at some point - a decision. Big enough! An analog progression stops at the digital threshold.

080. Here is a version of the Katamari myth: You are a Prince send down to earth by a careless King who in a moment of boredom got drunk and destroyed the heavens. The Katamari balls you roll up are offerings to him. If your ball is big enough he replaces one of the stars in the sky he trashed with it. The King then sets for the Prince the task of rolling up a bigger one. Perhaps this storyline is an allegory for the relation that holds now between the analog and the digital. The twizzling of the sticks on the controller, the rolling up of the balls on the screen, is the task demanded by gamespace, and which gamespace can only recognize by rewarding the gamer with a score. Topology, with its endless, intricate lines — wireless, satellite, fiber optic — turns anything and everything into a meaningless smear of data. Gamespace installs itself in topology to reduce that smear to a decision, a yes, a no, a straight line, and to convey back to the gamer the result of the gamer's actions. The analog is now just a way of experiencing the digital. The decision on whether something can appear or not appear is digital. You and your character the Prince are confined to the analog, rolling from topic to topic. The King commands the digital heavens. He decides what point in the sky each ball is to occupy.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.

081. The reign of topology subordinates the analog to the digital. Where once analog and digital maintained an ambiguous and continuous – analog – relation to each other and to the world, the digital now distinguishes itself sharply from the analog, subsuming the analog difference under the digital distinction. This is a transformation not merely in forms of communication or entertainment, not even in forms of power or of topos, but a change in being itself. The digital appears, finally, to install topology in the world – only in reality it has installed the world within topology.

082. The screen in Katamari Damarcy shows a clock in the corner, an old-fashioned analog clock with a sweeping hand. The game is an allegory for a double process, by which the analog movement of the body is transformed into the digital, but also where the digital decisions of the game are expressed to the eye in a familiar analog form. Gamespace subordinates all of time and space to the digital. Paul Virilio: "... space had been measured, mapped, time has become clock time, the diversity of relief, of topography, gave way to topology..." In topographic times the clock tower showed its face to the town over which it presided; in topological times the digital face of time appears anywhere and everywhere. The hands of the analog clock simplify movement in space, reducing it to a rotation on a plane. The digital clock substitutes one coded sign for another, at fixed intervals, drawing each from an abstract space where all the signs of the code exist simultaneously. All of time becomes a series of discrete, abstract and interchangeable units under the reign of the digital. At each interval, time can be arrested and made to yield a number. The analog temporalizes space; the digital spatializes time.

083. The analog doubles one continuum with another. It records, in this second continuum, how several movements, operating together, produce a transformation. It tracks the movement that transforms itself out of itself. Twist the sticks and the Prince turns the ball. Roll the ball and it gradually grows as it picks up things. The icon in the corner grows. One movement doubles another, and another. The analog is all about relations.

084. The digital is all about boundaries. The digital does not follow a moving line, it imposes a grid of lines which produce a series of boundaries. In the analog, difference is the productivity in excess of itself; in the digital, difference is a negation that comes from without. Roll the ball as much as you like, but unless is reaches the size King Digital demands within the time He allows, you fail – and are subjected to His lofty disdain.

085. The analog is variation along a line, a difference of more and less. The ball gets bigger, or smaller. The digital is divided by a line, a distinction between either/or. Either the ball is big enough to be a star or it isn't. The analog may vary along more than one line at once, producing the appearance of a qualitative difference. The digital introduces a code, which may produce complex relations among its terms, but all the terms are separated by the same line of absolute distinction. All the Katamari balls that are big enough become stars, each with its own name and location, but all are points in the same heavens.


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086. The analog may move backwards or forwards along a line, or even track movement across three or more dimensions, but only with the imposition of the digital code is it possible to cut the terms bounded by the digital line and rearrange them. Rather than an analog movement through space and time, the digital opens the possibility of a three dimensional space in which terms are arrayed along different axes and are drawn together via the code. Rather than a continuous line moving out from a point into a three dimensional space, one imagines rather a three dimensional space of fixed points, which can be called upon by the code to make up a straight line of distinct units. Because it is digital, the game can be 'saved'. You can return to a point within the space the code describes, and start rolling your Katamari ball all over again.

087. The analog line connects topic to topic; the digital line divides topic from topic, unifying what it encloses in its difference from what it excludes. The topical is a continuum of analog relations – the ball rolling and gathering things in its path. The topographic imposes distinctions dividing one network of topics from another – the discrete stars in the sky. The topological subordinates connection to division across all scales of space and time. The transformation of topical to topographic and then topological space is the progressive subordination of the analog to the digital, achieved by the imposition of the lines of telesthesia, first in its analog and then in its digital form. (See Fig. 4) Thus the digital remakes the world of objects in its image.

088. The digital does not merely transform the world of objects. It transforms the world of subjects. The digital is what makes the distinction between object and subject. The subject emerges out of undifferentiated being, as something separate from the objects of nature. Martin Heidegger: "What was decisive, what actually happened, is that a projection was made which delineated in advance what was henceforth to be understood as nature and natural process: a spatio-temporally determined totality of movement of masspoints." The primary divisions of topography, of the partial digitalization of the world, pass over into the intricate and intimate coding of subjective as well as objective being. The subject too becomes a calculus of masspoints. The Prince is what the Prince has achieved – a level, a number.

089. Digital object, digital subject – these are byproducts of a boredom that, seeking respite from nothingness, projects its lines across all space and time, turning it into commodity space and military space. This is the reckless act of creation with which Katamari Damarcy begins – the King's destruction of the mythic heaven of the old Gods, and the project of replacing it by commanding the transformation of a human, analog movement into an airless matrix of machine code. This is the new labor of Sisyphus. Gamespace is always and everywhere the imposition of the digital as a way of laying an invisible hand on the world – or an all too visible fist. Where the invisible hand opens its digits to calculate what it may gain, the invisible fist closes them to calculate what it may claim.

090. The military industrial complex develops analog telesthesia as a means of measuring and controlling its forces, but this development reaches a limit, and its forces exceed its capacity to manage them. Digital telesthesia emerges as the means of command, control and communication, a "nested set of increasingly comprehensive military enclosures for global oversight and control." The theory of the digital, and of its difference from the analog, emerges as a byproduct of this attempt at self-control by the military industrial complex but transforms it beyond itself. The expansive movement of the military machine calls into being a code that can monitor and manage it. The analog begets the digital, but only produces the concept of the analog after the fact. Anthony Wilden: "Obviously, without the digital, we could not speak of the analog." Without the recognition of the ball as a putative star, it cannot be named. The military entertainment complex emerges out of the control of the analog by the digital, of the military and industrial production lines by the digital lines of command, and by the extension of the digital to all aspects of everyday life.


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091. Without the analog, play leaves no trace. Without the digital, the analog yields no score. Neither analog nor digital is play itself. The analog flattens play out into a single line, so that its movement may continue, in reduced form, into another space. The analog enables a movement to communicate from topos to topos. The digital codifies movement, translating it onto the very different space of number. The military entertainment complex reverses the procedure. It starts with number, and translates the digital into the analog, and the analog into movement. Rather than find topos in the world, it installs the world into topos, remaking the world as a gamespace.

092. The digital perceives its own achievement as bringing precision and controlled mutability to an otherwise wildly fluctuating world. From the point of view of the digital, the line of either/or, the abstract boundary, is what produces the distinction. For the digital, difference is distinction. Considered from the point of view of the analog, it is movement itself which is difference, and the digital merely marks points where there is a phase change from one qualitative state to another, but which is pure product of difference producing itself out of itself. For the analog, topos is a discourse, an account, a gathering of the world. For the digital, topos becomes a reckoning, a measuring. In the province of the analog, the sticky ball accumulates through movement; in the heavens of the digital, everything has a size and a name.

093. The military entertainment complex discovers experimentally that if the relation between the analog and the digital is digital, an absolute boundary, then the domain of the digital can be perfected as one of purely relative, numerical value – a gamespace. All the ambiguities, the slippage, the differences of the analog can be set aside. This digital realm can then become the locus for command and control of the analog remainder, which it treats as a mere residue. The lines of the digital can be inscribed ever more extensively and intensively on the world, to the point where a digital heaven is realized, and the analog in and of itself vanishes, and movement becomes an effect of the digital. The Analog Prince only rolls the ball, steering this way and that, because King Digital commands it. And why does he command it? To make the universe over, to recreate being itself, as an effect of the digital as a command.

094. The digital, once installed in the world, defeats the logic of storyline, within which the digital serves to make the analog manifest, but does not control it. The novel, which from James Fenimore Cooper to William Gibson narrates the rise and fall of the military industrial complex, uses the codes of language to follow a series of movements beyond language's ken. The digital produces, not just new kinds of media, but a whole new topos, in which the role and rule of the line is reversed. One no longer follows a line to find where it divides, one divides a line to make it amenable to distinction. Storyline becomes gamespace. The storyline that inaugurates the world of Katamari Damarcy is not a creation myth but a destruction myth. The storyline's last task is to erase itself and initiate the new conditions of difference for gamespace.

095. The digital, once installed in the world, accelerates the potential for change, but for change always of the same type. The Analog Prince can roll up many things to make his Katamari balls, but the differences among these objects is pure skin. All that matters is their aggregation, glommed together as more and more of the same. Likewise, the military entertainment complex grids the earth, making it over in the image of its digital representation, making it amenable to the imposition of the code, its unambiguous stratifications. Differences proliferate wildly, beyond the simple dichotomies of the topographic. But these differences are always and everywhere distinctions, exchangeable equivalents within the logistics of commodity space and military space. Roll up more and more balls, populate the heavens with a veritable milky way, but each is different from the other always in the same way.


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096. The digital emerges as military, but achieves acceptance as entertainment. The military versions of digital telesthesia make the world over as a military space, but the digital does not yet become a culture other than for a small band of specialists tied to the military industrial complex. The coming together of the digital and the entertainment commodity inscribes the digital not just in space and time, but in cultural perceptions of space and time.

097. The digital game is a very particular commodity. It is not just the usual store of entertaining representations transferred from analog and mechanical reproduction to a digital platform. Rather, it makes the digital itself into entertainment. The digital object always addresses its subject as a player, as a calculator and competitor. The digital inscribes topology within the subject itself. It makes the uploading of the world into topology seem natural and inevitable. And it offers the digital in its purest form, where the transformation of analog into digital is always consistent, repeatable, in a word – fair.

098. The digital makes the analog appear as something distinct. The digital rules a line between analog and digital, making their difference into a distinction. But perhaps, having made the distinction appear, the perspective can be reversed, and the digital can be perceived from the point of view of the analog. What might emerge is rather the play between the analog and the digital. The digital might become again the threshold that turns a movement into a break, rather than imposing the break on movement.

099. "I don't play games", says Keita Takahashi, designer of Katamari Damarcy. He is a sculptor. "I am happy going through this game phase of my life, where I can get paid and eat." As the digital subsumes the analog so too the designer subsumes the artist. The longing to return to art as an analog pursuit may be in vain. But the artist within the designer may still inscribe the analog in the heart of the digital as something irreducible.

100. King Digital may rule in Katamari Damarcy, but it is his subordinate, the Prince, upon whose labors this digital topology is built. Not the least of the charms of Takahashi's work is this foregrounding of the labor the gamer performs. It is no longer labor as punishment for defying the Gods. It is no longer absurd labor, performed consciously and joyously in spite of the absence of the Gods. Topology installs, in place of the absent Gods, King Digital, and his demand that, while labor is punishingly hard and absurdly pointless, it nevertheless has its measure. Sisyphus, the Analog Prince, labors to roll up everything in this world make over under the mark of the digital and offer it up for appraisal. What the digital has always wanted – to be the form of all forms – has come to pass. Our punishment for attempting to steal those forms for our own purposes is to labor endlessly to repeat them. Katamari Damarcy merely extends the atopia of the digital to the heavens themselves.


All contents by McKenzie Wark. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Produced by The Institute for the Future of the Book.