Gamer Theory Quotes

“Boredom isn’t a longing, a lengthening of time. It is a spacey feeling, of being spaced out. What is boring is a space in which either one cannot act, or one’s actions amount to nothing. [...] What displaces boredom is the capacity to act in a way that transforms a situation.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Even critical theory, which once took its distance from damaged life, becomes another game. Apply to top-ranked schools. Find a good coach. Pick a rising subfield. Prove your abilities. Get yourself published. Get some grants. Get a job. Get another job offer to establish your level in bargaining with your boss. Keep your nose clean and get tenure. You won! Now you can play! Now you can do what you secretly wanted to do all those years ago... Only now you can’t remember.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a necessary externality to the game.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Everything is digital and yet the digital is as nothing.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many
and varied games.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory