I’ve been arguing lately that games and gamic technologies are not sites of emancipation and freedom, as others would have them be, but that they offer, like Deleuze’s highways, only the appearance of freedom.

This terrific clip of a young man playing Joy Ride with his Kinect is a fantastic illustration of this illusory freedom. Watch the young man remain stone still throughout the game, and still come in third place: We are being gamed, my friends. There is no emancipation here, even on the open road: Just the preprogrammed appearance of it.

“Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.”

Blog Kotaku has this recent note about how Vail is gaming the slopes with RFID tags:

“Starting this November five popular ski slopes in Colorado, Utah and California will start tracking powder time to award skiers achievements pins and the ability to level up.

EpicMix goes live on all but one of Vail Resports’ slopes this coming ski season. Keystone, which opens on Nov. 5, will be the first to see the new RF-enabled tech in action. The resorts using the service this year are Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Heavenly.

Starting this season all Vail Resort season passes and PEAKS lift tickets with an RF logo on the back will be equipped with EpicMix. Every time you use your pass or ticket your stats will automatically be captured and uploaded to the EpicMix website. There are also mobile phone apps in the works for the new tech.”

Via Kotaku

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel,” writes Zinn. Liszkiewicz points to Farmville, that scourge of networks, and sees some very successful little cogs.

Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money….”[1] So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of “escape from responsibility and routine.”[2] For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.[3]

While it will not be the sole topic of interest to Arcade Theory in the fall, the politics of the procedural will figure prominently in our conversations. So take a look at Liszkiewicz’s talk, and spend some time lingering over some of his recent digital poetry, Count As One.

And then, if you’re interested, read more about CCTP 628, Arcade Theory. Be sure not to miss the latest addition, a suggested summer reading list of ready-to-print essays and articles (nothing too heavy, I assure you).

CFP: Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice … What STS theories can be used to understand Digital Games as sociotechnical phenomenon? Is the concept of practice and the practice-based approach useful to investigate Digital Games? Is there a relationship between power as inscribed and imposed by artefacts and the technical dimensions of Digital Games? What rules are inscribed into Digital Games technologies and what social worlds do these rules describe? What contribution can the study of Digital Games make to the STS discipline at large? And what contribution can an STS approach make to game studies? Can we foresee an after-method approach for Digital Games?

Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Special Topics in Game Design and Analysis, Spring 2010. Georgia Institute of Technology.

Hacks are works produced by making modifications to existing games by disassembling binaries, analyzing the meaning and purpose of the resulting source code, identifying desirable changes (whether slight or significant) and implementing those changes.

Remakes are recreations of earlier works, irrespective of the hardware platform of original creation or recreation. Remakes have a long history in other media, particularly in film and television, as well as in commercial videogames.

Demakes are retro-inspired reimaginings of modern games, as if they had been created on earlier hardware. Demakes are not necessarily created to run on older machines, but their design and behavior are constrained by the real or perceived constraints of vintage systems.

I adore the emphasis on technological production. Notice that it is not subservient to theory, or even distinct from it: Engagement with the technology is, in itself, an act of theoria, an act of contemplation.

Review the syllabus at Bogost’s website.

via Lori Emerson.