mckenzie wark was at brown this morning, talking about his recent gamer theory project. for those who haven’t read it, gamer theory is a rather indirect assessment of what we might call the gamic experience. i mean this in the sense that whatever pauline kael was to cinema, mckenzie wark might be to game studies. his work is both personable and rigorous, palatable and highly critical.

which frankly, makes it a bit difficult.

wark talked a lot about different styles of players, and different ways of assessing what video games mean to modern culture. he opined that the video game might be the most significant mass medium of our (digital) age, as the novel was to the 19th century, and cinema was to the 20th, but he was unwilling to say that it was the dominant form of culture, because he contended that the idea of cultural hegemony is not really possible in our hyper-mediated age.

i would put mckenzie wark alongside ian bogost, and alex galloway as part of ‘the big three of (video) game theory.’ each has their own approach and methodological structures, and each represents a different type of what we might call the gamer-scholar. galloway is the critical gamer, looking at how games might be played and read as critical cultural texts. bogost is the gamer-auteur, the type of player who also is engaged in making games (which rather radically shifts how one approaches games critically. wark, a bit more radical than his peers, is the philosopher-gamer, who is seeking a worldview and an ontology in games, and is willing to take the games as a his primary world, not as a fiction to be intrepreted, nor a product to be made and remade.

as i endeavor to ride the nerd card into the cool camp, purchases like this loyal army joystick hoodie (warm gray) are inevitable.

but for real yo, its a warm, well-fitted hoodie with some excellent game controllers drawn hipster-style on it. and i think that’s cool. and i think that makes it a worthwhile purchase on the road to defining my own “look.”

plus, my brother maintains that these type of heavily patterned hoodies are all the rAgE on the west coast. so maybe i am ahead of the curve, provided it moves like the jet stream.