[iDC] Notes Toward a Theory of Ludocapitalism

[Brad Borevitz]

On 9/28/07 5:00 AM, "idc-request at mailman.thing.net" Ryan Griffis
<ryan.griffis at gmail.com> wrote:

> One thing that i'm wary of however, is the reification of the
> activity of "play" as a non-ideologically defined activity. Sure,
> everyone would probably agree that "play" is channeled through
> ideological forms, but the notion of "play" itself is rarely
> questioned, or its boundaries interrogated.

i think this is a very important point. and the example of the
agora-exchange is interesting. the site stimulates a utopic imaginary and an
extended discussion on alternatives to current social/political
arrangements, but as the discourse centers itself on the simulation of
utopia in a game, the ideological entailments of gaming itself threaten to
overtake the ethical notions and critical insights that motivate and
originate the discussion.

there is the question of goals, which a game is unlikely to escape. how does
a player know if they win or are winning. how in a game which is intended to
run on a computer do we avoid creating player states which don't ultimately
signify a quantification of value that is compared one player against
another to arrive at a judgment of relative worth and therefore of a
conclusion about who is winning or who has won.

there are certainly activities classified in the realm of gaming and play
that don't have a competitive aspect, but these are few and far between.
rudderless games of exhilaration or variation are always subject to
recuperation within the rubrics of competition. to theorize a ludocapitalism
in anything but a dystopian mood seems like an exercise in futility.

the totalizing force of the game in our world seems of piece with the
triumph of neoliberalism and global capital. we must remember that RANDs
post-war game theory involved the application of specific competitive game
models onto political fields which became the cold war, and that
subsequently the continuous extension of those and similar models to
virtually every domain as the hegemony of competition is what we experience
in our contemporary moment as the triumph of global capitalism.

and the question arises how to understand the coincidence of that situation
with the rise of a new computer-based gaming culture and rampant media
fascination with contest as spectacle. is the game a metaphor, an allegory,
representation/simulation, or (as wark suggests) a diagram. can the playing
or the creating of games ever be anything critical. or is being in the game
always a compromised position - and then, is there ever any position outside
the game. wark also asks these questions in his "gamer theory"  -- about
what the significance is of an alternation between the participation in the
game and the existence in "gamespace" ( the space outside of the game
proper, which none the less has has become game or been colonized by the
game). 

where is the critical moment in the game? i think there are potentially
several places to look. the refusal to play. the rules -- issues of their
creation, interpretation, mutability, conventionality, etc. cheating.
spectatorship. 

wark focused on playing. i wonder if that isn't the position of least
resistance to the ideological force of the game.

my own strategy has been focus attention on existing games or to create
games in such a way as to foreground their ideological import and the
relation of gaming behavior to other social and political formations that
are played out in the the mode of full seriousness. i wouldn't invite anyone
to play a game. i suspect that playing tempts the player too easily into
competitive actions.

a couple examples of interesting games:

mao

The game of Mao has many rules, but only one that is spoken: "The only rule
that may be told is this one." This game models a rule set located in the
social in such a way that the articulation of the rules is prohibited while
their obsessive instantiation is required. The splitting between the
utterable and the unutterable cleaves the social into the contradictory
territories of the said and the done. The telling is mere nonsense; it is
truth by a technicality. It performs its vacuity endlessly, yet it
disciplines the receiver to abandon discourse, attend carefully to the
knowing speaker, and follow submissively and ever in fear of unintended
disobedience. The law is given, Pavlov style, by reward and punishment. If
this game sounds fun to you, it is because you have already learned to enjoy
playing it. 

nomic

This game models the self-amending rule set that is the basis of the
American legal system. Suber, a logician, was interested in the paradoxes
that arise in a system where logical contradictions inside of a
self-amending rule set cannot be straightforwardly resolved. The unequal
distribution of the power to change the rule set, and the hierarchy within
the rule set itself, deforms the very democratic structure which it purports
to establish.

The creator of the game Nomic, Peter Suber, describes it this way:

    "Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect
it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is
proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that
way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards,
and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed."

(if anyone is interested, there is more similar material on my website at
<http://onetwothree.net/portfolio/2007/the-rules-of-the-game-the-game-o>)

Brad Borevitz
<http://onetwothree.net>