Vague Terrain

[McKenzie Wark / Gamer Theory 2.0 - screen capture / 2007

McKenzie Wark is a theorist and educator with an active interest in technology and critical theory. Wark's most well known works are A Hacker's Manifesto and Gamer Theory, both of which are engaging texts and explorations in the process of writing. Gamer Theory (2006-2007) is a compelling reading of contemporary culture in light of the ludic and narrative structure of recent gaming titles such as The Sims, Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Vague Terrain editor Greg J. Smith recently had a conversation with McKenzie about his work.

Vague Terrain: A Hacker's Manifesto was dedicated to the memory of Kathy Acker. Since appropriation and emulation figured prominently into her writing and your project reconsidered Marx's Communist Manifesto against a dot-com backdrop, could you discuss the connection between her writing and your text?

McKenzie Wark: It was largely personal. I knew Kathy and wanted to commemorate our encounter. It was also a joke: Acker = hacker. She was also one of the first people I read who had written, albeit in passing, against copyright and the property system in writing. She arrived largely by her own roads at what the Situationists called détournement, which I would describe as an active plagiarism, which treats all of culture as common property.

VT: The Gamer Theory project utilized a lot of online conventions (BBS functionality, threaded comments, etc.) to build a discourse around a text "midstream" through its production. What are your thoughts on this experiment now that it is complete? Do you have plans to work in a similar manner in the future?

MW: Some of my earlier stuff had been developed through listserver discussions, so part of the question was about how that kind of experience could be developed and presented in a more effective way. I took the blog as the negative example, of how not to orchestrate a conversation, and looked for ways to tweak it. The interface was built in Wordpress, so it was a détournement of Wordpress, pressed into the service of a slightly different practice. The The Institute for the Future of the Book went on to build Commentpress, which allows the parallel comments function we created for Gamer Theory to be used more broadly. I'm working with Chris France on an environment for a work called Totality for Kids that will be built using Mephisto. I'm interested in creating reading and writing tools specific to each project's needs.

VT: In Gamer Theory you introduced the notion of an allegorithm. This paradigm combines the allegory with pattern recognition and you use this to describe how gamers become immersed in and manipulate gamespace. Were there any key moments in your history of gaming that you helped contribute to your development of this idea?

MW: Allegorithm was coined by Alex Galloway, not me. I acknowledge this in the text but somehow people miss it. It was Eric Zimmerman who got me interested in writing about games. He invited me to New York for an event called Re:Play. This was years ago, in the late nineties I think. It was more through Eric's serious intellectual enthusiasm for games that I pursued it. The games through which I developed the ideas are the ones in the book. Gamers often complain that they are not ‘canonic' games, but they were games that gave me ideas, but it's like that with everything. Beckett might be a canonic writer and I understand why, but I never had one single new idea reading Beckett, and hence there's no Beckett (yet) in my writings. That's I'm writing about Sims, Civilization III, the second Deus X (rather than the well-regarded first one), and so on.

VT: Within Gamer Theory, you used the narrative or ludic space of several games as scaffolding to construct a larger discourse. Beyond the games referenced in the text, what games have most influenced your thinking and perception?

MW: MUDs and MOOs (even if not strictly games) text-based adventure style games, and arcade games like Frogger, Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Games were replacing pinball at about the time I was old enough to pretend to be old enough to drink in pubs. From 16 on it was about hanging out in bars, drinking and playing pool or pinball or games. I sucked at pool and pinball, so I played games. We played for drinks, so being bad at it got expensive! I was never a big console game player and I still mentally associate games with public places. I approached console (and PC) games with a certain amount of indifference. Duchamp chose his readymades on the basis of ‘visual indifference', and that's my policy with writing about cultural artifacts. I don't approach things as a fan or as an enemy. Eric Zimmerman had persuaded me that games were a vital cultural form for decoding our times, and that motivated me to play a lot of console/PC games to figure out why, but my personal relation to game culture was very much in arcade style games.

VT: In regards to Bradford Paley's visualization of Gamer Theory, you stated that "I see it more as a creative process than as an instrumental one. The ‘result' it would give you is more of the order of the new writing you can already find in your existing writing." Can you expand upon this statement and share your thoughts about the burgeoning world of infographics?

MW: Brad was very concerned about whether his visualization was yielding the sort of result that would interest someone doing a close textual study of a text. He has a great visualization of Alice in Wonderland that shows you immediately how Carroll paced the narrative. The visualization of Gamer Theory didn't yield any such result when we had our workshop on it with Bob Stein and the crew at IFBook. So what I told Brad was really that I didn't care. I'm a writer, not a professor of literature. I was interested in seeing my book in a different way, so I could see relationships in the text that I might want to pull out and examine, and maybe rewrite, or write some more on. I see visualization more as part of a composition process. That's what I think is really lacking. Most of the folks designing tools in this area are not really hardcore writers so they're not getting the subtleties of process and how new tools might enable new kinds of process. I think my encounter with Brad was good for both of us in seeing new possibilities. The hard part is not inventing new tools, but new processes that tools could be used for.

VT: What writing projects are you currently working on?

MW: I was asked to do the Buell lecture in architecture at Columbia University, so I used that to test-drive some new ways of thinking about the Situationist International and its recuperation. That's coming out as a book next year from the Buell Center and Princeton Architectural Press. Meanwhile I'm designing a website with Chris France that will be quite different from Gamer Theory. At the moment, we're working on the structural relation between the sections of the text. It's really designing the architecture of the book in code, in advance. I'm also working with an illustrator, Kevin C. Pyle, making comic strip images using détourned Situationist texts. The Situationists ripped off existing cartoons and put their own texts in them. We're doing the reverse, ripping off their texts and making new art. The idea in part is to make copyleft artwork that has a really robust status in terms of so-called "intellectual property" law then make it available for free, for everyone. It seems that anything you do with Situationist material is a recuperation, but at least this is one we'll give away according to their own copyleft principles of détournement. Ironically, that one is funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. I was thinking of Guy Debord as Warhol's evil twin, although I now realize that Warhol and Debord are each other's evil twin. So it kinda makes perfect sense – at least to me!

Please visit ludiccrew.org/wark for more information on McKenzie Wark's work.