Radical media, politics and culture.

The Gamer-Refugee - searching 'Autonomy' in Gamespace

hydrarchist writes:

The Gamer-Refugee: searching 'Autonomy' in Gamespace(Revised)

[J.J.King / jamie@jamie.com]

In the 1944 text Homo Ludens, the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga argued that Homo Sapiens was no longer an appropriate name for our species: now the playing, rather than thinking, man had become key to a proper understanding of civilisation. 'All play means something,' claimed Huizinga. He attempted to invigorate a philosophical interest not only in the games of children, but also in ‘adult’ games: chess, sport, theatrical plays, plays on words and so on. Games were an acknowledgement of the existence of ‘mind’ in the world, a force that intervened in (what would otherwise be) ‘the absolute determinism of the cosmos’ (1).

Huizinga would presumably be pleased that this interest in games is finally stirring in the world of the academy – and yet, since his text was produced, the idea he advances in his final chapter about the increasing ‘systematization and regimentation’ of play seems increasingly potent (2). How would Huizinga have seen the computer game, for example, one of the most popular forms of play today, and one produced by corporations for the enjoyment of consumers – one, in other words, in which play takes place as a commodity form? And is the philsopher right to suggest, as he does at the end of Homo Ludens, that this form – insofar as it is a ‘profane’ and ‘unholy’ form of play far removed from the original ludic impulse - ‘has no organic connection whatever with the structure of society’ whatsoerver? (3)

Eric Zimmerman, CEO of the New-York based GameLab, and one of the keynote presenters at this year’s Computer Games And Digital Cultures Conference in Tampere, Finland, centered his discussion of gaming on Huizinga’s idea of play as spatially and temporally separate, an irrational, unproductive activity that occurs within a ‘Magic Circle’ in which, it is suggested, ‘things are different.’ Zimmerman framed games as something separate from ordinary life in order focus on their formal aspects: for him, game designers set in place a structure which prohibits efficient ways of reaching a goal in favour of ones less so: this is the basis for gaming, the so-called ‘lusory means’. Using Bernard Suits (4), he discussed the idea of the ‘lusory attitude’, taken by a subject which accepts these constraints willingly, precisely in order to play within the Magic Circle, and – therefore- in a space that is somehow demarcated or extruded from everyday life.

Zimmerman’s is an account of gaming as entertainment and escape, a formulation which contains (as does Homo Ludens) an implicit support for the structuralist idea of sign (game) as different-than territory, different-than real. Whilst he acknowledges that games are part of ‘the fabric of larger cultural and social processes,’ Zimmerman does pose a fundamental distinction between the game and the real, the Batesonian ‘nip and bite’ in which ‘the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant; […and] that which is denoted by these signals is nonexistent’ (5). It does seem important to grant that distinction in the formal sense – to play a game of Doom or Quake is not, whatever the media might want to believe, to instantaneously commit the Columbine massacres; and indeed, the violence of such games is amusing (or ‘fun’) precisely because it merely refers to, and is not identical with, ‘real’ physical violence.

Nonetheless, some of the presentations at the CGDC discussed in this review indicate that the treatment of games as ‘objects apart’ may not in fact be the most productive attitude to adopt. Frans Mäyrä, convener of the CGDC, began his introduction thus: ‘They are suddenly everywhere. Games.‘ This was the computer game as apparation, an uncanny production presenting itself to a cultural studies all too eager to engage it with the tools that discipline has used to treat other ‘equivalent’ productions: texts, films, theatre, fine arts. (A brief survey bears out the suspicion that this is a typical approach. Game researcher and Cartoon Network employee Gonzalo Frasca agrees that research in what he calls ‘ludology’ is to date mainly driven by scholars trying to ‘explain’ computer games through previously existing media: Brenda Laurel through drama, Janet Murray through storytelling, drama and narrative, Lev Manovich through film. (6) ) At the CGDC, there were papers on ‘Gameplay Rhetoric’ (Helene Madsen and Troels Degn Johansson), the problems of applying Aristotelian poetics or post/structuralist theory to gaming (Julian Kücklich), ‘Narrative and Interactive Storytelling’ (Craig A. Lindley), the ‘Pleasure of the Playable Text’ (Georg Lauteren), all of which, in bringing the textual critic’s approach to computer gaming, seemed to speak far more of the tendencies of their critical toolbags than to provide any lucid insight into the games they were applied to. Perhaps, as Warren Spector of game developer Ion Storm suggested in the final roundtable discussion, something productive will eventually emerge from such traditional critical analysis. But what seems more plausible is that the game, constituting itself in and through our engagment with it, requires a substantially different approach to those we have brought to texts, films, music, whose innate ‘interactivity’ – why deny it? – does not detract one iota from the computer game’s inscription of the player into its very working material.

In a sense that unique condition is at the center of the very different and encouraging approach that could already be seen germinating at the CGDC. Julian Holland Oliver, a games designer/artist/player from New Zealand currently resident in Australia, presented a paper, ‘The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG’ whose arguments were pleasantly secondary to his own unmasked obsession with the experience of gaming in so-called ‘massively multiplayer online role playing games’ such as Sony’s EverQuest and (more recently) FunCom’s Anarchy Online [see the images below]. Oliver spends a good deal of his life in what Zimmerman/Huizinga would call ‘the Magic Circle’ but, one suspects, would be radically opposed to the notion that he is in any way ‘outside of the real’ (or, in Batesonian terms, resident in a ‘map’) during the time he spends gaming.

Using Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Oliver prefers to analyse MMORPG-space not as place apart, but as public space proper, looking at the strategies applied to its creation and operation and the tactics used by gamers in creating their own trajectories in and through it. Like Eddo Stern (who presented on the medieval, magic and technology in the MMORPG) Oliver is interested in resistant practices within such spaces, and the zones in which the strategies informing those practices, operating against what Foucault would have probably have called ‘normative procedures’, take place. Where Oliver is more interested in the modes that can establish community-as-potential in the MMORPG (as-against power), Stern concentrates on what might be loosely called ‘gaming the system’, centering his art-practice around playing, exploiting and documenting not the game itself, but its glitches, the places in which its constitutive strategies temporarily fray. It is existence within and opposition to recognizable strategies of production and control that fascinates them both: disruptions of the piecemeal negotiations that occur between the ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of the gamespace.

In the context of such exhilarating work, Huizinga’s relegation of systematized gaming to an abject, socially disconnected subculture seems premature. Is it not, in the contemporary context in which gaming is produced as as commodity, and commodity-exchange takes on the semblance of the game (think of stock market ‘competition’), that we begin to perceive the ways in which the work of game-gamers like Oliver and Stern also speaks volumes about the everyday – in which after all, EverQuest and Anarchy Online are manufactured ? Might we even be tempted to go as far as to ask whether resistance and revolt in game-space, attempts to reformulate its prevailing power relations, might have some kind of knock-on for stalled radical practice in the nation state? (There. I’ve said it. But it seems worth mentioning, by way of avoiding ridicule, that at least one Western philosopher, no less than Ludwig Wittgenstein, took the notion of games and gaming as absolutely constitutive to human life, indeed to meaning itself. For Wittgenstein, it is through engaging in a particular set of games, whose rules we learn in the playing, that our lives have meaning; meaning, that is, in relation to all the other games that go on around us. These constitutive games do not somehow, as in Huizinga, ‘contain’ meaning: they produce and constitute it - in fact, they are meaning; as in Symbolic Exchange and Death-era Baudrillard, Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations theorises nothing outside the set of our language games: this is a symbolic order that creates its own foundation. In this way, we could dispense with the Batesonian ‘territory’ which the (computer) game maps, and instead work on the idea of a constellation of games that constitute themselves with regards to each other, informed by and informing our social structures. It is from that perspective that the figure of the gamer gains great potence, probably more than Huizinga ever had in store for it – and it is from there that we could appraise some of the things that have been going on within MMORPGs – both exertions and disruptions of power – in relation to the current political scene.)

In this respect, perhaps the most suggestive and enticing paper of the CGDC was that of T.L. Taylor (‘"Whose Game Is This Anyway?" Negotating Corporate Ownership in A Virtual World’). Taylor has initiated here an exploration of the commodification of gamespace that reads interestingly against discussions currently running around the idea of what is called the ‘Intellectual’ or ‘Information Commons’. In particular, two key questions seemed to arise from Taylor’s work to date. The first relates to the ownership of ‘avatars’ within the gamespace. Who owns the game body? The player? Or the corporation that architects the social space through which that body must move? What are the rights of the ‘characters’ that animate these bodies? What, therefore, are the rights of the players who produce that character?

The second, related, question is that of the value of symbolic or intellectual labour taking place within MMORPGs. Can that labour be exchanged outside of the game’s constitutive structure? Taylor explored both of these issues through the example of gamers attempting to auction elements of the property they had assembled in EverQuest on boards such as EBay and Yahoo! Auctions. The practice of selling one’s game-equipment (swords, magic spells, teleportation devices and such) or even whole body (‘character’) for substantial sums of money on these sites had, she discovered, been effectively outlawed through an agreement between Sony and the auction houses in question.

Now although this interdiction, very fairly, presents itself to Taylor (another keen gamer, I would bet) as an object for contemplation in and of itself, it does seem immediately to suggest other seductive questions. If we can accept Wittgenstein’s notion of the constitutive role of gaming in every day life, we might want to examine the ways which such privations refer to those taking place in other language-games: how, for instance, the strategies used to control gamers in EverQuest might reflect certain of the strategies being advanced in the contemporary political scene. A quick aside might suffice to throw up some avenues for exploration. Both of the questions posed by Taylor’s paper, without wanting to address them in any great depth here, are coincidentally critical moments in the theorization of resistance in contemporary political philosophy. Giorgio Agamben, in his recent Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, focuses precisely on the relation between the body and political rights that is central in Sony’s claim of ownership of the player-bodies within EverQuest. Pursuing a line originating with Hannah Arendt, Agamben claims that contemporary society’s mass production of the refugee, the human without state or rights except those granted through special ‘humanitarian’ dispensation, is making clear the fact that modern political rights were never actually ‘inalienable’ but in fact absolutely conditional on citizenship in a Nation. In this way, as we have seen amply demonstrated in the figures of the Taliban’s soldiers at Camp X-Ray, and in the case of the ‘Dirty Bomber’ (all reduced to a state of ‘non legitimant combatants’, put outside of any juridical structure, neither protected under UN law, that of their own countries, nor that of the United States), the rights of the human are in fact politically constituted, and so may be politically (and strategically) dismantled. Now that the nation state is widely accepted to be at a point of crisis, the question is simply this: what is the fate of the politically constituted subject in the new spaces opened up by its demise?

In this connection, the figure of the gamer in MMORPG-space as ‘refugee’ seems curiously instructive. MMORPG-space begins, according to Julian Holland-Oliver’s account, with the complete disintegration of the social: in Anarchy Online, paradoxically, society is premised upon the anti-anarchic Hobbesian pact: the polis posed against the violent externality of ‘nature’; but further, the state of subjecthood of the gamer is very like that of the modern refugee – s/he is without ‘natural rights’, has to earn recognition and social status through labour, and is subject at any moment to ban, exclusion from a gamespace that is simply and openly created around the profit motive (profit, that is, for the game’s ‘owners’). Any action detrimental to that motive (such as attempting to sell one’s body or equipment on EBay outside of the game’s semiotic regime) results in exclusion, and not exclusion within the gamespace itself (there are not yet – although one suspects there will be - refugee camps in Anarchy Online), but right outside, back ‘into the world’. Does this not, more closely than some might care to admit, mirror the situation in Europe and the United States? Is it purely coincidental that the experience of the modern refugee mirrors that of the EverQuest gamer, they too are forbidden to trade the vouchers they receive into economies that exist outside camp-space:

the last vestiges of economic decision-making power are taken away: cash
benefits are replaced by vouchers, which may only be spent on government-
approved 'essential' items [...] When a voucher is not used up by the
value of any purchase, supermarkets are forbidden to give change in cash.

Are there also resemblances between game-space and that of the nation state, in which citizenship has either become or is rapidly becoming a revocable right conditional upon subscription to a set of values that are construed as (for example) ‘Being British’ or ‘Being American’ (such ‘values’ actually have to be taught, we are now informed, in ‘Citizenship’ classes!), on one’s political affiliations, or – and this is often baldly stated in the current environment - on the kinds of labour one is able to offer the entrepenurial state (think, for example, of those Indian coders shipped en masse to Silicon Valley during the new economy boom, today languishing without jobs or rights and presumably facing deportation – ban – again, now that their utility is radically diminished.) How does the use of the game-body as a purely productive sign (alive only insofar as it is constitutive of the commodity-game) read against the social status of the ‘legitimate’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seeker? And what does it indicate, this spooky connectedness between the regulation of game-bodies and the regulation of bodies in and across nation states? Do the tendencies seen in the MMORPG gamespace somehow predict, or predicate, those which will be seen in state-space? Does, to put it another way, the absolute negation of the rights of the game-body in the MMORPG demonstrate what Agamben is telling us about the separation of the rights of man from those of the citizen, with ‘right’ now defined as a place within a particular ‘state’ or corporate zone? For if so, a very interesting opposition is set up between camp-space and game-space: the former, a place in which human life is reduced to ‘bare life’, a body-without-rights; the latter, one in which the human is constituted as ‘bare rights’, rights-without-body, defined purely by the forms and potentials lent to it by the game’s owners, revocable at any moment.

The second question raised by Taylor’s paper brings us, as I have mentioned, straight to this very vital notion of the Information Commons. It has been going about a bit, but a quick precee for the uninitiated seems in order.James Boyle, and the many others that have followed him recently, is arguing under the sign of Commons for the maintainance and defence of a common-space of ideas, thoughts, and cultural productions set against capital’s tendency to claim ownership over such – he wants to defend a shared ‘ecology of ideas’ which, like the natural ecology to which it refers, must be ministered-to and cared-for against the immediate motive of profit. Now, does not the picture of life going on within the MMORPG tell us a good deal about what is wrong with Boyle’s idea? What, after all, is the true status of human activity within such a commodified space? A recent piece of writing is instructive. In Wired magazine’s June 2002 issue, J.C. Herz speaks about Lucasfilm’s project of segueing the Star Wars franchise into an MMORPG, Star Wars Galaxies. ‘A radical creative risk,’ she calls this, ‘because it transforms Star Wars – this multibillion dollar brand – into a decentralized phenomenon over which license-holders have little control once the game goes live. What’s authentic and what’s official are no longer strictly synonymous. Not only will the players mint hundreds of thousands of characters exempt from the licensing review, but those characters’ actions will become a de facto part of the Star Wars myth, regardless of whether they are officially folded into the canon […] players who rise to prominence in this world […] will assume moral ownership of their Star Wars identities.’

Let us examine Herz’ claims in the light of the Oliver-Stern-Taylor work presented at the CGDC. Undoubtedly the Lucasfilm executives will struggle with exactly the kinds of issues that Herz points up. But it is instructive that she limits the projected control that gamers will have over their characters to a purely ‘moral’ right (the right, that is, to be attributed as a character). This, of course, is a feeble privilege in the context of personhood (imagine the state agreeing to grant you identity with your body, a function traditionally, and not merely coincidentally, left to crusty positivist philosophers) and its evocation here simply suggests how far in every other respect control over Star Wars Galaxies™ players will go. Really we must look at this question of ‘control’ from the side of the gamer, the side of the human, and do so by performing a superimposition that seems absolutely timely in the discussion of Commons, placing over it Marx’s notion of the ‘General Intellect’ as it appears in the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx points out the rising primacy of abstract knowledge as ‘a direct force of production’. Paolo Virno, in one of his essays in Radical Thought In Italy, A Potential Politics, expands this notion for us:

The ‘general intellect’ includes epistemic models that structure social communication. It incorporates that intellectual activity of mass culture, no longer reducible to ‘simple labor,’ to the pure expenditure of time and energy. There converge in the productive power of the general intellect artificial languages, theorems of formal logic, theories of information and systems, epistemological paradigms, certain segments of the metaphysical tradition, ‘linguistic games’ and images of the world. In contemporary labor processes there are entire conceptual constellations that function by themselves as productive ‘machines’, without ever having to adopt either a mechanical body or an electronic brain. (7)

Will the Star Wars Galaxies™ player be anything other than the first sustained experiment in the running of a discrete productive machine that has as its motor the completely subjected refugee-gamer? And what, honestly, can we do with the spectacle of the body-without-rights/rights-without-body actively enjoying its own exploitation at the tender hands of the Star Wars™ franchise, other than imagine what is even worse: the gamer that not only accepts and enjoys the condition of producing its own consumption, but which no longer needs to be told to do it, or how to do it – no longer needs the law to formulate its creative play because, by Using the Force, it Just Does It. (By the way, as Paolo Virno says, the emancipatory potential of the General Intellect ascribed to it by Marx – not unlike that assigned to the Commons by Boyle et al. – was not in any way realized. Instead it is coming, unfortunately, to constitute ‘the solid foundation on which domination is articulated.’) And what could be a more desirable situation for a franchise that seems, on the evidence of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, to have such difficulties in understanding and ministering to the desires of its own consumers?

Do we not discover then, right here in the strategic creation of the ‘Star Wars Galaxies™’ as ‘Commons’, the real status of Boyle’s Intellectual Commons: that it is quite simply a motor for production, one shunted right down into our basic social activity? For if we cannot imagine that the Star Wars Galaxies™, realistically, will do anything other than immediately capitalize on the commons-labour that takes place under the sign of ‘free play’ within its spaces (and of course it could do nothing else), why would we think any better of that great Commons whose relation to Capital is obviously no less immeditate? Because we fail to perceive sufficiently lucidly the supervening structures that surround us, just as the Star Wars Galaxies™ gamer-body is enclosed by the Star Wars Galaxies™?

No, before it goes on, Boyle and the rest’s Commons must rescue its father, Darth-General Intellect-Vader, from the Dark Side- grapple with these questions that seem so blatantly raised by life inside the MMORPG today, and the life that will go on in MMORPGs still under design. That gamers are more radically oppositional than ‘real’ revolutionaries should strike into us ten bells of terror, since what we see in the MMORPG may well be none other than the spectre of what will be realized, soon, in the the international dimension, not only inside the camp-space, but outside of it too, whilst we reaffirm our committal ‘to a sequence of variations on a theme, performances, improvisations’ in the name of production, ‘the true acme of subjugation.’ (8)

While we wait for that face-off between Commons and General Intellect, we could meantime try out the most important, and unanswered question again in the context of gamespace: what would autonomous activity of a real sort look like here? At the end of his presentation, Eddo Stern showed a brief glimpse of one of his latest projects: what appeared to be (although he was playing it close to his chest) some kind of in-game Clone Army for EverQuest. Could such a force, in destabilizing the EverQuest gamespace, be a truly potent disruptive entity – or would it simply be subject to the same kind of ban that any unruly force faces? Worse, would it perhaps even invigorate the EverQuest franchise in some ghastly way? Could this exploitation of game-glitches, fissures in gamespace as technology of power, ever widen enough to present real zones of potential? It seems it will be down to the gamers to find out, to arm themselves with understandings of how to negotiate post-state territories, and experiment with producing those negotiations as a ‘tactics of the everyday’. What’s most exciting of all here’s that in the MMORPG, code – law - seems again surmountable, gameable, a game. Is this, as Agamben hints in Homo Sacer, because the refugee, in exile, has but one privilege: to regard the code as it were from the outside: is this a formal system that, in systematically producing exclusion, also de-valorises itself through the disenchanted POVs of those it constitutes beyond it? Who knows, but perhaps (and I do feel some optimism is in order for a parting shot) porting the refugee’s ‘lusory attitude’ into our everyday skirmishes with the Law might prove not only potent, but enjoyable. Because once we can see the code as code – well then, why shouldn’t we game it?


1. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 3.

2. Homo Ludens, p.197.

3. Homo Ludens, p. 201. I am indebted to Pauline van Mourik Broekman for alerting me to my earlier misreading of and also my incorrect assertion that he was a German philosopher Huizinga (private email, 20 June 2002). Also see Pauline van Mourik Brokeman, ‘The Ludic Impulse’, in Mute Magazine (www.metamute.com).


4. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978


5.. see Bateson, Gregory. 1972. ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy,’ in Steps To An Ecology Of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books

6. see http://www.ludology.org

7. Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy, A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) , p. 22

8. Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy, A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) , p. 193 (or, in the publishers’ crazy numbering system, p.192.3.)"