Play

Well, I originally intended to write about "The Death of LambdaMOO" and "Signs/Links," but my post ended up very long and showed no signs of ending any time soon. So, rather than presenting an incomplete text, I'd rather write some notes on Wark's "Gamer Theory."

I take issue with Wark's notion that "Games are places where Ideological promises are kept" and that "the gamer accepts a system as given and attempts to score within it." This is because Wark defines Play as play within the rules of the system. However, this Play is impossible without playing with the rules themselves. This means that games are in a constant state of flux, equally defined by the coder and the gamer; the coder creates the rules and the gamer plays with them, finding stress points and pressing them in order to open up the original intent to new possibilities. Take, for example, Donkey Kong; Gamers analysed the rules of the game, figured out ways to use them, get around them, and otherwise manipulate them, and proceeded to set scores thought impossible by creators, as evidenced by the "death screen" found at the end of the game, which simply kills off your character and ends the game. To pull a quote from http://www.scifi.com/sfw/screen/sfw16918.html:
One prominent story element involves a bit of video-game lore previously unknown to this reviewer. It turns out that Mario's quest to save his girlfriend from the rampaging gorilla is not merely eternal, as it seems to casual players, but by design doomed to failure, as there is, well past the point where anybody but a total obsessive could ever play the game, a feature called "The Death Screen," where the game software hits total overload and Mario himself dies for no reason, the in-game explanation, I guess, being that he's suffered a massive coronary from vaulting all of those barrels the gorilla has been raining down upon him. Mario's girlfriend is, by default, doomed to remain in the gorilla's clutches, suffering the fate King Kong's Ann Darrow so narrowly avoided. I consider this a major bummer, in context, but the gamers don't feel that way; to them, it's a substantial achievement just to last the more than two hours it takes for Mario to keel over and die. —Adam-Troy

Gamers have pushed the system so far that it eventually collapses. While current games seem to be aware of this, providing ways for the true gamers to express this desire to play with rules without fundamentally breaking the system, but this means that the "system" itself is subject to continual change as the gamer plays, discovering new tricks unintentionally hidden within the code.

To conclude, let me say this: I really enjoyed this section, and the discussions held within. Thank you all for the excellent exchanges of ideas and concepts, and thank you Jeremy for directing our conversation, for providing context in many cases where a knowledgeable interpretation was impossible without which (especially concerning Freudian analysis).