Gamer Theory [Hardcover]

McKenzie Wark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0674025199 | ISBN-13: 978-0674025196

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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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the more astute media theorists currently at work, Wark is going for major bonus points with Gamer Theory, and he indeed racks them up. Gamer Theory opens a new level for media studies, offering a successor paradigm to the culture industry thesis..l and the spectacle society critique of the Situationists.

-- Vince Carducci (Popmatters)

This is only a book about video games in the way that the story of Noah's Ark is about the weather.

-- Laura Stokes (Brooklyn Rail)

Wark goes deep into many subtle mechanisms... Results are controversial as any Wark effort, but they are provocative and sometimes really inspiring, so often opening new possible paths for interpreting games and even different other digital environments.

-- Alessandro Ludovico (Neural Magazine)

Not since Steal This Book has a book's radical packaging so threatened to upstage its radical content.

-- Julian Dibbell (Village Voice)

Like all great works, Gamer Theory is formed out of a necessity 'to describe what being now is.' In a playful, edgy, and remixological style, Wark opens a new direction in game studies.
--Mark Amerika, author of META/DATA: A Digital Poetics

Gamer Theory is an amazing book, rich and pointed and powerful, and deserving of multiple rereadings. I cannot recommend Gamer Theory too highly.
--Steven Shaviro

In Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark brings his relentlessly playful mind to the undeniably important medium of the videogame. Like a Mario of media studies, Wark powers up his own in-the-trenches videogaming experiences with secret combos from the big guns of critical theory to arrive at a player-centric and culturally savvy understanding of gaming. An idiosyncratic outflanking of current game studies, Gamer Theory takes scholarship of videogames to a brave new level.
--Eric Zimmerman, Co-founder & CEO of Gamelab, and co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play and The Game Design Reader

The release of media theorist McKenzie Wark's new book Gamer Theory is many things at once. If you're interested in the growth of a new medium, it's a media academic's major guide to the key issues. If you're games-savvy, you are just as likely to recoil in horror at Wark's analyses. To proclaim that he has simply expanded on his previous work, a hacker manifesto, ignores what gamer theory is--a study in the catastrophe of reading culture. It's an intensely difficult-to-navigate work but ultimately rewarding for those up to the challenge of the game before them.
--Christian Mccrae (Realtime )

Innovative, though-provoking.
--J. A. Saklofske (Choice 20071101)

A crucial addition to a long history of discussion on gaming and play...This is philosophy constructed as and while the author plays the game (which also might include the academic game). This idea is actualised by Wark’s layered breakdown of Gamer Theory into meditations on various digital games like Vice City and SimEarth...It is a distinctive work in that it synthesises aspects from a range of critical discourses that might otherwise have no interest in gaming and play, largely because, as Wark writes: “Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through.”
--Terrence Maybury (Media International Australia 20080201)

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674025199
• ISBN-13: 978-0674025196
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #433,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

McKenzie Wark is originally from Newcastle, Australia, but moved to New York City in 2000.

He is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College the New School for the Liberal Arts and Professor of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Abstract, meandering, out of touch January 7, 2011

By kyle karthauser

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is light on both theory and gaming. There are plenty of references TO theory, and Wark has the nebulously elliptical "the-form-is-the-content" style down pretty pat, but being an avid gamer of 20+ years and a working background in English theory did not prepare me for this book. I'm not sure what would, really. It's not really worth anyone's time to go into the book in-depth, but here are the most puzzling/frustrating aspects of the book:

Wark speaks of a "military entertainment complex" behind the ever expanding reach of video gaming in mainstream culture. He either actually believes this, or uses this phrase in the casually aloof post-structuralist fashion of (I assume) his idols. While the US Army has put out a few games in the last decade, conflating the "military industrial complex" with the video game industry (and its concurrent effect on pop culture) is laziness bordering on absurdity.

Sentences such as: "If history is an endless list of things that should not have happened, boredom is what refuses not to happen," "What the game highlights is a logistics of targeting, an economy of order against time--the battle of alternating between merger with, and separation from, the other," and "The realm of the not-game is the domain in which the gamer cannot act as a gamer."

There are plenty of charts and "illustrations" Wark cobbles together to make his point clearer. These aren't to be missed.

If you're interested in theory and how it can appear to sound as though it applies to a topic, read this book. If you're interested in video games and/or constructive uses of theory, don't.

10 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ludic and Lucid March 29, 2009

By S. Dowdle

Format:Hardcover

I picked this book up through a series of highly fortunate events, and have not regretted in the least the purchase. I agree in part with another reviewer who said that you have to read the book at least twice to understand it: That is not a down side to the book at all.

Wark's understanding of what gaming can and should be is wonderfully expressed. The ideas are complex, accessible, and continuously thought-provoking. I shared excerpts and themes from it to my high school video game class, and though they didn't catch everything, they understood a lot. I wish there were more than just five stars I could give to this book.

It should be noted, however, that there is definitely a lot of theory in this book (which makes sense, given the title). It requires thought to go along with it--just like any good game.

4 of 12 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Philosophical wanking October 16, 2011

By Don

Format:Hardcover

I had high hopes for this book the subject matter looked so promising. Even the first chapter appealed to me but after reading the whole book a few things occurred to me:
1. This book could have been written in 30 pages or less as opposed to 240 pages.
2. The author misses the most obvious thing about video games: that they are games! Or at the very least a form of escapism.
3. The author has never actually played a video game in his life.

I mean this book just screams "Look how smart I think I am!", the points are muddled and eventually lead to nowhere. Overall skip this book it's a waste of your time.