Dr. Kemp messed up my head with this book

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more convoluted book in my life. The first two chapters alone took me a couple days to figure out before having to ask Dr. Kemp about some of it. Majority of the difficulty for me is the way he writes but after re-reading chapters a few times and reading more into concepts online I was able to figure it out (but then again I am outside of class for the last day so please correct me if im wrong).

It begins discussing the idea of Caves, and specific to modern day, we live in a system of caves where once people were able to exit and exist in “reality”, we now exist only in other caves by exiting our current cave. The general idea I got from this comes from, “gamespace is where and how we live today”. We live in a very digital world. We learn from games and in turn actualize everything as a game. There is no leaving a game without entering another. And with that Wark aims to look at the world from the game rather than at the game from the world.

Now allegorithm is the first thing that really stumped me. After asking for some help understanding I realized the best way to understand this is with the diagram on page 32. I was first looking at it from top to bottom but it made a lot more sense looking at it from bottom to top. Wark states, “anything can be made to mean anything else”. It takes pieces of the gamer and the algorithm to form the allegorithm, the way we understand the game through play and through projections of our beliefs and taking in the rhetoric of the game. Once that is fully formed you can then perceive an allegory and utilize that “lesson” learned to apply it to the real world AKA outside the cave.

The chapter title discussing Civilization III alone lead me to where he was headed with the third chapter. I believe Wark was utilizing Civilization as a way to explain America and does so by introducing topic, topography, and topology. Again, words I thought I knew, used in ways I didn’t understand. If someone could actually clarify this one for me that would be awesome. From what I understand he uses Civilization to show how in the game your civilization modernizes at some point following the technological advances that came from American that including the form of narrative media. Media is intrinsically American so therefore the story that is told is itself the one of America. Though Im still very confused by topography and topology (specific and non-specific??).

Wark then discusses analog and digital experiences which more or less was straightforward. Analog is defined by that which has no harsh boundaries while digital (quite literally through the algorithmic nature of 1’s and 0’s) has a harsh true/false experience and it is through gaming that we discover and relate these experiences as digital.

Battle was another interesting chapter for me. What I got from it was the idea of agon, or basically competition, and how gamespace not only enables the digital nature of 1 and 0, winners and losers, but that it perpetuates our drive for purpose. The outcome of the game is what pushes us for more, for greatness, for something other than boredom and emptiness.

The complex chapter lost me again but the conclusion chapter caught me back up slightly however id still like for someone to breakdown the complex chapter for me.

All in all I liked the book despite its overly complicated use of regular words without strictly defining how Wark is utilizing them. The way I attempted to understand gamespace is through the concept of structural functionalism and the interconnectivity of everything except it has us analyze the player through the games in which Wark argues we live, breath, and die by.