Allegorithm Nation

I wondered, first, why Wark ordered his Table of Contents in alphabetical order. (1a. And why, in a book so concerned with the digital, is the ToC so obstinately qualitative, not quantitative?) Second, why are the paragraphs numbered? Third, why are there twenty-five paragraphs per chapter? Then: In making very clear his belief that everyday life has come to resemble a video-gamespace, what kind of game is Wark playing with his readers? For me, the game--struggle, agon--was to rethink my progress through the book in terms of number of paragraphs read rather than in number of pages.

This paragraph-counting mindset isn't a trap Wark set for me; rather, I think it's a habit of I've developed over many years of reading and just as many years of playing video games. It's a habit of tracking how far I've read in a book, sure, but it's an analogue to saving my game, to tracking my score.

Wark sees gamers as constructing or expecting a gamespace as their environment: "Everyday life in gamespace seems an imperfect version of the game. The gamespace of everyday life may be more complex and variegated, but it seems much less consistent, coherent, and fair," (paragraph 32). The examples he gives of gamespaces that seem embedded in Americans' attitudes--The Sims and a bland, unquestioning pursuit for material objects; Civilization and world conquest; and Katamari Damacy, where space and time are collapsed and always automatically rescaled so that no amount of collection-of-stuff is ever big or good enough--are pessimistic, to say the least.

Maybe he's playing a game, but it's not a lighthearted one. Wark asks us to interrogate the foundations and implications of the games we play, from the military-industrial/entertainment complex to wide-eyed, blister-fingered propagation of ideology.

"When playing Civilization III, it doesn't matter if the civilization you choose to play is Babylon or China, Russia or Zululand, France or India. Whoever wins is America, in that the logic of the game itself is America. America unbound," (74).