Gamer Theory
eBook - ePub

Gamer Theory

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

About this book

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

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

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

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Yes, you can access Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark,McKenzie Wark in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Ciencias sociales & Interacción persona-computadora. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Agony (on The Cave)
  6. Allegory (on The Sims)
  7. America (on Civilization III)
  8. Analog (on Katamari Damacy)
  9. Atopia (on Vice City)
  10. Battle (on Rez)
  11. Boredom (on State of Emergency)
  12. Complex (on Deus Ex)
  13. Conclusions (on SimEarth)
  14. Cuts (Endnotes)
  15. Directory (Index)