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January 19, 2007
Via this Harvard Press link, I've just come across this Creative Commons interview with McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and the forthcoming Gamer Theory.
The thesis of Gamer Theory is that computer games constitute the dominant cultural form of our time (see the stats). Wark argues that we had better get started developing a critical language we can use to discuss them and their impact on the way we live. Wark says that he is interested in two questions: 'can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?' 'Can there be a critical theory of games?'
A unique feature of Gamer Theory is that it has existed online for some time in draft form, hosted on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Book. They've built a custom interface that allows for commenting, or what Wark calls a sort of "open peer review." So we have an experimental networked book based around an online conversation.
Wark says that:
media corporations refuse to countenance is the fact that communication has always been in part a commodity economy, but in part also a gift economy. They want to use intellectual property law and the technical crippling of media technologies – what I call Digital Restrictions Management – to shut down the gift part of the communication cycle. It’s crippleware for the whole culture.Having written against this in A Hacker Manifesto, I wanted to make damn sure I wasn’t contributing to it. in its own small way, GAM3R 7H30RY was about making it clear that there is also a gift economy side to participatory media. I give my book away, in its not-quite finished state, for free to anyone who wants to read it or share it, as a way of encouraging people to help improve it.
It's an excellent idea, one initially explored by the Situationists. Wark adds:
What the networked book needs, however, is new tools, new conventions, new economies. That’s where GAM3R 7H30RY and experiments like it are interesting. It’s about reinventing the connective tissue between books, across space and time, and between different kinds of reader. It’s about making an end-run around monopolies of knowledge and culture. Creative Commons is a key part of that process. But so too are new media tools, and perhaps even more importantly, new cultural, social, and literary conventions. We need to relearn how to read and write.
That's right. Weblogs merely open the door onto a new way of reading and writing in a digital culture. We are increasingly becoming immersed in a digital culture, its new technologies and ways of being. We tacitly accept a postmodernist sensibility as we learn to cope with working these newly forming chaotic environments.
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Those stats should be regarded a bit skeptically, since they were commissioned by the trade association that represents gamers.
Thanks for the mention.