By Modknight, Former President of The Vault

November 26, 2023

Original video: 

A Theory of How Reality is a Game, a video essay released in May of 2021 by The Game Overanalyzer, aims to introduce and expound upon the ideas of gamer theory, a thesis developed by McKenzie Wark in his eponymously titled book. One of the central concepts of gamer theory that this video centers on is that of gamespace, the notion that games represent a distilled and idealized experience of reality within a world which is increasingly outside of our control. According to the gamespace hypothesis, the world around us has become increasingly subsumed into the logic of games as corporations endlessly quantize our lives, speculators gamble with the livelihood of millions, and victory is pedestaled as a virtue for its own sake (though no one can really explain why). Within this uneasy context, games have arisen as a dominant form of media because they make this anxiety legible, offering a sort of pseudo-utopian space which seeks to make sense and re-imagine the harsh realities we are confronted with. Games are the vision of our society’s “perverse machinery,” made tangible through art. The only difference between these two worlds, at least according to the video, is that within the video game we are given actualized agency, whereas in the gamespace there’s “no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation.”

Gamespace challenges us to question and investigate the totalizing implications of a digitized society. It sketches out a small part of the monstrous Deleuzian machine we are all caught up in, casting a critical eye on pointless and inescapable games which dictate our day to day behaviors, while using video games as a point of antithesis. Within the context of a spatial analysis, it asks us to consider what authentic experience looks like in a world where screens take up the majority of our waking hours, raising issues about whether a ‘material reality’ exists at all in such a world —the reversal of Plato’s cave analogy at the beginning of the video makes this much clear. Yet, the essay also challenges these assumptions, forgoing any easy answers. As the essayist mentions, it is a vulgar interpretation of the work to simply conclude that an awareness of the issue is the same as escape. Games bear an internal contradiction in that they at once make gamespace visible yet are perhaps the crystallization of its tendencies. Just as gamespace seeks to quantify all that exists, the game dev draws boundaries around the real to establish the player within their own constructed domain. In the same way, no game can escape the impulse to simplify irreducibly complex systems into understandable rules. In the act of making gamespace legible, the game reinforces its hold. We are left to wrestle with whether an exit to the Matrix we find ourselves in is even possible. Are these trends in gamespace contingent on the current socio-technical dynamic and thus reversible? Or is gamification, the compartmentalization of an irreducible whole into a knowable ruleset, simply an unavoidable consequence of the limited scope of human perception? These questions are left unanswered, a call to thought for prospective viewers. 

One of the comments found below the essay can probably sum up many of my thoughts on this video rather succinctly. As user @wallacyryan8211 posted over two years ago: “The problem is capitalism.” I’m sure this isn’t a particularly mind-blowing insight, but many of the central issues the video brings up with relation to gamespace really seem to boil down to an analysis of a society defined by an unlimited assertion of the neoliberal framework. This is seen in a few ways throughout the video. For instance, the physics envy of economics echoes the enlightenment demand to render all things measurable, a vain assertion which traces back to the classical liberal framework of thinkers like Locke. Perhaps more important are the social consequences. One of the elements of orthodox marxist theory which hold true to today’s context is the idea that the capitalist mode of production alienates people from their labour, from their communities, and ultimately from themselves. This is reflected in the gamespace concept in the continuous abstraction of materially-grounded economic systems into a game. This is the conceit upon which capitalism is built. A festering narcissism, self-assuredness that the booms and bust cycles of capital are harmless and manageable, so long as we can reassure ourselves by abstracting the images of abject poverty and imperialist war into a blinking stock graph. It follows from these truths that frameworks must be invented to soften the angst of our paralysis; this also applies to our cultivation of pastimes which offer a facade of control. Perhaps this is the greatest revelation of gamespace, that games express the condition of our society’s “perverse machinery,” but in doing so, also reveal our perverse desire to remain complicit. 

Of course, it’s a trope to just say “capitalism is at fault.” As user @Stockbrot rebuts to the comment I listed originally: “It’s a bit more complex than that.” The current economic system has indeed yielded our contemporary conception of gamespace, but in many ways this is not a new framework. Philosophers, tyrants, and revolutionaries alike have wrestled with these questions long before the current order. Sun Tzu’s Art of War was written millenia ago (hundreds of years before the invention of chess, let alone Tetris), yet at its core the text can be read as a translation of the realm of warfare, the violent and messy assertion of power, into something gamelike —a codified ruleset. As The Game Overanalyzer pointed out, the need to seek rules which frame our realities could arguably be seen as innate to the human experience, a product of  evolutionary history in the grand context of competition for survival between species. It’s reductive to simply attribute these tendencies to the current regime, and the video does a good job of clarifying this. Video games act more like a metaphor for the current mask of a very old problem. As a popular media format they have arisen from gamespace, historical processes which have produced the anxiety we experience in our lack of agency and hence the conditions for the popularity of gaming. In this light, gamepace is more than a breakdown of our current condition, it is a framework which in fact describes the dialectical form of power, and its self-reproducing logic.

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution once said: “Everything is illusory except power.” These words were declared in response to the tsarist dictatorship’s false promises of civil liberties as a concession to prevent revolution. The later ironies of Soviet imperialism and state repression aside, this context demonstrates the quote to be an unveiling of gamespace. The promise of abstract rights in exchange for compliance is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is always easier to offer the idea of justice rather than its actualization. Gamespace, with its premise of victory as its own end, reflects the mechanics of power. Power maintains itself for its own sake; the powerful cannot allow their own disempowerment  —that would mean oblivion. However, power equally cannot justify itself through its rotten fruits. Thus, power cannot help but further extract itself from the lived reality of its subjects. It is not surprising that we emerge at the other end within a society of abstraction and spectacle, less so that both the rulers and the ruled buy into the games which they’ve been taught to play. A Marxist framework might call this a false consciousness, but the question is larger than class. The Nietzschean slave morality is one such example with regards to the games taught in the domain of religion and Butler’s performativity is another in the domain of gender. Unique methods of social control have developed throughout history and across many different spheres of life. But the basic premise, that we must be convinced that the conditions of our livelihood are external to our autonomy, remains the same. 

So, what can we make of these implications on a personal level? Typing this article, my life exists in place, the world seems to careen around this tiny desk. I find myself untethered, any fundamental axioms defeated by postmodern epiphany; land, language, and heritage lost in the neoliberal haze. I write these lines with my eyes glued to a stationary screen; I peruse a playlist populated with the least challenging music possible to prevent my mind from melting away from the page. To you, this article may as well have manifested from the aether —a whole manuscript transmitted across kilometers of space instantaneously— an accomplishment that might have been considered magic a century ago. Humanity has accomplished so much in the push to digitize society, realizing new realms of creative expression, lightspeed communication, and technologies which have the potential to make intensive labour a thing of the past. Yet here we are, the two of us are still chained to the ceaseless cycle of productivity which contextualizes these developments. We’re both playing games, and in gamespace, there’s no button you can push to quit.