I would like to discuss Wark’s interpretation of the Cave. The Cave follows the concept of a dark room in which you play and are fully immersed in games. The Cave is completely separate form the outside world. If the player ventures out into the real world it is too blinding for him so he returns the solace of the Cave where he is surrounded by the familiar images and controls.
“Stories no longer opiate us with the imaginary reconciliations of real problems. The story just recounts the steps by which someone beat someone else—a real victory for imaginary stakes. Nothing in games is real or representative of anything real” (Wark, pg 7).
Often you play games and don’t remember the rules or goals (Wark pg 1)
Images are just shadows, sounds are just echoes, the real world is out there somewhere. PlayStation: “Live in your world, play in ours” (Wark, pg 2) implies the existence of separate worlds.
A passage from Gamer Theory:
Suppose the luminous pixels (in Cave) are not real then neither is your world.
The Cave seems to be where the forms, the ideas, the abstractions behind the mere appearance of things in the outside world can be found.
Whether game space is more real or not than some other world is not the question: Rather that even in its unreality it may have real effects on other worlds is.
**Games are not representations of this world. They are morel like allegories of a world made over as game space.
They encode the abstract principles upon which decisions about the realness of this or that world are now decided.
The Cave presents games in a pure state as a realm where justice – of a sort – reigns.
Gamer theory – Games are not accountable as failed representations of the world, but quite the reverse.
The world outside is a game space that appears as an
imperfect form of the computer game.
The computer games that the gamer finds in the Cave are the ruins not of a lost past but of an impossible future. (The gamer is an archaeologist of the Cave).
Game space is built on the ruins of a future it proclaims in theory yet disavows in practice.
Game Studies 