Unforgettable...

[LordIllidan]

I've been giving Gamer Theory another readthrough (I thought I swore off of that pretentious and depressing philosophy stuff? Ah, well), and the first few chapters (Agony [on The Cave] and Allegory [on The Sims]) really struck a chord with me, making me realize what exactly about VMK was so different.

For those that don't know, Gamer Theory is a book by McKenzie Wark describing the ways in which the "Real world" (Or "Gamespace," the space in which we play games, as he calls it) is becoming more like video games. "Work is a rat race. Politics is a horse race. The economy is a casino. Even the utopian justice to come in the afterlife is foreclosed: He who dies with the most toys wins."

So, if the world is becoming more like a game, why was VMK so different? Well... "Here is the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: 'To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities.' In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a placeless, senseless realm, where quite a different maxim rules: 'From each according to their abilities — to each a rank and score.' Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire; they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony. The gamer as theorist at first sight seems to have acquired an ability that counts for nothing in gamespace. The gamer as theorist might begin with an indifference to distinction, to all that the gamespace prizes. You does not play the game to win (or not just to win). You trifle with it — playing with style to understand the game as a form. You trifle with the game to understand the nature of gamespace as a world — as the world. You trifle with the game to discover in what way gamespace falls short of its self-proclaimed perfection. The digital game plays up everything that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level playing field, free competition."

VMK was just that, the "Level playing field" that the world has always failed to be. Everyone starts the same: A stranger in a foreign land, with not a credit to his name, and with no clear objective. But, the difference between VMK and other games was just that: There was no clear objective other than what you set for yourself. Once again, desire has once entered the utopia. Wark often mentions the concept of "Agon" in his book: The spirit of competition, and the idea that "Everything only has value when ranked against something else, everyone only has value when ranked against something else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win -- A situation where players are free to collaborate only because the seek prizes in different games." However, VMK somehow managed to avoid placing agon in the center of it's al(le)gorithm without forsaking it entirely: Sure, you needed to fight pirates to get credits to buy items to make rooms to get that "Best Gust Room" award you've always wanted, but this agon was always self-inflicted, never something forced upon you by the game. For once, the score really was an arbitrary number, and rank was a self-assigned value based upon how good you were feeling that day. In a way, VMK wasn't an escape from the neverending algorithms and agon of both gamespace and other games, but instead a place in which you had control over it.

"In The Sims, things proliferate. Or rather, the skins of things. You can have many different kinds of sofa, or coffee table, or lamp shade, but the meter is running, so to speak. You have to make more money to buy more things. But some gamers who play The Sims trifle with the game rather than play it. These gamers are not interested in ‘winning’ the game, they are interested in details, in furniture, or telling stories, or creating interesting worlds. If a cheat is someone who ignores the space of a game to cut straight to its objective, then the trifler is someone who ignores the objective to linger within its space. Bernard Suits: “Triflers recognize rules but not goals, cheats recognize goals but not rules.” The Sims lends itself to play that transforms it from a world of number back to a world of meaning. Algorithm becomes a more stable platform than the vicissitudes of gamespace for creating a suburban world of pretty things. But in trifling with the game, the gamer struggles to escape boredom and produce difference — and finds that this too has limits." If this is true, then VMK became the perfect world for the trifler: A place in which there was no goal, no constant struggle against the flow of the river nor incessant pushing towards some eventual endgame, a type of freedom even sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto does not accomplish in attaining.. Yes, there were rules, but they only added to keep the cheats from rampaging in a world without a goal in which to move towards.

But the one thing that made VMK a "sealed deal," as it were, was the community. Agon is not only a struggle against obstacles that stand in the way of your goal, but a struggle against people trying to get there first. In VMK, however, this world where agon sits idly on the sidelines, a mere spectator to this sport, the other players no longer became hostiles. People no longer collaborated for the sake of attaining goals, but for the sake of collaboration. There was no such thing as a "stranger" in this world, much less an "opponent." Everyone was, at worst, a teammate, and at best, a close friend. The al(le)gorithm of the game no longer became the Lord of this Kingdom, always pushing you to put in an input so that it may fire back another output, there was no meter constantly running, keeping track of your stamina, your strength, your current state of mind, there was no timer quickly ticking down to your inevitable game over. The game was perfectly fine with you idling about, shooting the metaphorical bull with other teammates in a game in which everyone collaborated towards some mythical undefined goal. One could hardly say it was a game at all, rather, it was an incarnation of the topological itself, a world in which distance between two people were obsolete, a flat world on a level plane where all were equal.

A utopia, if you will.