"Sure, reality TV doesn't look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games." So says McKenzie Wark in the book Gamer Theory. The idea is that play was once radical, an option outside of mundane daily work and routines. Today something very different has happened: "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," Wark says.
Within this game, different rules apply than the rules within the world previous to its transformation into gamespace. Here we have "latent destiny - the virtue of right through rule." Likewise, Wark says, "all that is righteous wins; all that wins is righteous." In this context, play is no longer play. Playing is simply a method used to win the game - "it is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity."
So - what's left to do? Take play back. Wark writes that "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." While the military entertainment complex - which took part in constituting this gamespace as reality - would like us to think that gamespace is just as clean and well-ruled as games themselves, this is just a means of control. The way out, as Wark points out, is to "take the blue pill." In other words, "Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid."
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this is good--next step: explain what it means to play with the game. or, figure out what it means to play the game against gamespace? a critique of Wark here would say that he's just giving another version of a critique of the real from the perspective of the ideal; his ideal, though, is in games (which is just like economic theory or rat choice theory)
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