---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:54:31 -0400
From: McKenzie Wark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: McKenzie Wark @ Labyrinth April 4th @ 7PM
McKenzie Wark ? Gamer Theory
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 7PM ? Labyrinth Books New York (NY)
Join Labyrinth books New York for an evening with McKenzie Wark, author of
Gamer Theory. A reception and book signing will follow.
Labyrinth Books
536 West 112th Street
New York, NY 10025
Take the 1 train to 110th street and walk two blocks North.
***
Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press)
Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides,
one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace
is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance,
the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus
configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent
cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in
games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we
actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only
truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.
Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the
near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday
life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming
an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to
a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all
previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to
offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide
nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a
primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an
imperfect copy of the game.
McKenzie Wark is the author of four books, Virtual Geography, The Virtual
Republic and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace and his latest offering, Gamer
Theory.
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McKenzie Wark http://www.ludiccrew.org
