Gamer Theory (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

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 )

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 )

Product Description

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

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

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674025199
• ISBN-13: 978-0674025196
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #218,944 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	S. Dowdle "terracamp" (Lindon, UT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gamer Theory, June 18, 2008

By	James Donohue - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

It was very good book that kept me reading through every chapter with every intent being to finish it. It's a quick read and I loved not only it's game references but also the other pop culture references that it brings up with simplicity. It had simplicity in it's complexity. The only bad thing I can think of is that it's hard to truly understand unless if you have read it at least twice.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gamer Theory Class, June 27, 2008

By	Andres Jaquez Garcia "Driusha" (Mexico) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am working on a gamer theory class at the university i work for and this book is simple awesome, funny, insightful and very educative. I think this book is one of the most imppresive philosphical analysis of games. I luv it!