Off the Grid reads McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

In the spirit of the book - and of Off the Grid's focus on the disparities between digital and non-digital formats - I'm going to concentrate less on the content of McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, and more on the differences between its web-based and treeware versions. Marshall McLuhan would be proud.

Wark - a writer, scholar, and academic - first published GAM3R 7H30RY in 2006. The text, produced with the Brooklyn-based Institute for the Future of the Book, appeared as a specially-designed, collaborative website. Divided into chapters, with each chapter divided into notecard-like sections, the "book" encouraged its readers to leave comments/criticisms on the material covered. Once moderated, comments would then appear alongside the sections. The site itself is beautifully designed, and allows users easy access to any of the 225 pages of content within three intuitive clicks of the mouse.

After collecting enough comments and feedback, Wark and the IFB closed down the response-system for GAM3R 7H30RY Version 1.1. In mid-April, they introduced Version 2.0, now called Gamer Theory, alongside a non-digital book of the same name, published IRL by Harvard University Press.

In both forms of Gamer Theory, Wark applies the literary process of "close reading" to video games in a series of essays, starting with an eerie, arcade-oriented adaptation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a particular game and overlying theme. The games chosen range from the artistic (Katamari Damacy) to the inane (though to be fair, Wark does focus his State of Emergency chapter on the concept of "boredom").

Gamer Theory's chapters shouldn't be approached as light reading. Complicated charts accompany heady statements regarding Katamari as an anti-analog, topological response to the Mith of Sisyphus. But Wark isn't trying to walk on water; there's a playful, exploratory tone present throughout the book that suggests a certain camaraderie with the reader. He might be be the one typing, but Wark also makes it clear that nothing is for certain.

Both versions of the text present the same content; it's the form that differs. Version 2.0 of the digital iteration compiles the comments and footnotes from the first version of GAM3R 7H30RY, and makes them available via pop-up windows for each section of the chapters. What's interesting is Wark's blending of his own citations and his reader's commentary, as though both were reactions to text and should be treated the same way.

Given the playful nature of Gamer Theory's digital version, I was disappointed to find the non-digital iteration to be so rigid in its conforming to the standards of its medium. The print version still includes the citations and comments from GAM3R 7H30RY, but unlike the website, it collects them all in a special endnotes appendix titled "Cuts." If a particular section has an asterisk in it, that means one or more footnotes for that section appear in "Cuts." This format is surprisingly counter-intuitive, and contrary to the nature of hypertext to which the digital version so strongly adheres. Still, the non-digital version does eschew standard pagination, relying solely on the numbered sections taken from the website's notecard format. But why not take this a step further? Could the book have had one notecard per page, with all that notecard's requisite citations and comments printed alongside? Even standard footnotes would have felt more hypertextual than relegating all ancillary material to "the back of the book."

Then again, perhaps Wark intended for this divide between the iterations. Ultimately, the two versions read very different. The website constantly encourages readers/users to respond; even in Version 2.0, an entry field for comments accompanies every notecard. In the printed copy of the book, however, the closest you can come to impacting the text is scribbling in the margins. It makes for a vastly different experience... but at least you can take it to the beach.

Scott Jon Siegel is a fledgling game designer, and fancies himself a bit of a writer on the topic as well. His words and games can be found at numberless, which is almost always a work in progress.