I finally got to reading Gamer Theory, alas I found no value in reading the whole thing. I read the beginning but towards the middle, found no motivation to read any of the chapters, so I skipped ahead to the end, to see if there was any insight worth leading up to.

That is not to say, that Gamer Theory is a bad book, it just may not be for the gamer/ casual video game academic (such as myself). Wark starts the book off with a brilliant notion: that the gamespace (ie the rules we follow and the “games” we play to get the prize, money, a date, etc.) of contemporary society is an imperfect digital game, which makes a lot of sense. In the beginning of the book, he(?) goes on to say that the digital game is the representative medium of the modern condition, which also makes alot of sense. However, for the rest of the book, he tries to map reality onto digital games. Mostly he tries to elucidate some postmodern cultural theory through digital games (or is it the other way around, it’s hard to tell). He introduces alot of concepts, such as topology versus topography, but doesn’t explain those concepts very well, instead, he jumps into applying them to the case study game. I didn’t find much of what Wark had to say about either postmodern ideas and how it relates to digital games very interesting.
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