#prototypesituatefabricate

Agony (The Cave) Playstation 2 Ad Campaign, circa 2005Gamer Theory's introduction, “Agony (on The Cave)” offers not a take on any particular game, but rather the first phase in Wark's configuration of gamespace: a much broader and more holistic understanding of the way that gaming and ubiquitous digital environments precede the gamer. Unlike Plato's Cave, which supposes a more real and legitimate world outside our basic understanding, Wark's notion of gamespace presupposes no “outside” of true forms. Instead, “the game,” Wark argues, “has colonized its rivals in the cultural realm,” both fueling and fueled by an equally ubiquitous (and distinctly American, he argues later) ideology that “imagines the world as a level playing field, upon which all folks are equal” (8). Echoing Guy Debord, as he does repeatedly throughout the book, “life appears as a vast accumulation of commodities and spectacles, of things wrapped in images and images sold as things,” but in a digital gamespace, even life outside the game takes on those same features (6). The digital, in that sense, precedes us and overwrites any more organic understanding of the world. In this sense, this opening chapter initiates a tension sustained throughout Gamer Theory: between ideology and the possibility of meaningful resistance. The digital isn't something to be refused, Wark argues, but rather to be engaged affirmatively: “The gamer arrives at the beginning of a reflective life, a gamer theory, by stepping out of The Cave – and returning to it” (19). In the chapters that follow, Wark turns to individual games as case studies for engaging gamespace in its own terms – that is, through the games themselves. Collapsing the distinction between gamer and critic, Wark issues the central challenge of his book: "Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid." (19)