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.

“Calling pro wrestling ‘fake’ is neither accurate nor informed. The term is ‘kayfabe.’

Kayfabe isn’t a euphemism for false. Kayfabe is specific to pro wrestling, and it means everyone – athletes and fans – getting the story straight without saying so. It’s a conspired narrative that you can’t acknowledge is unreal, like a hilarious family secret whose official version changes when your drunk uncle shows up sober.”

I’d never encountered this term before, but I can’t help but feel there is a lot to consider here: Immersive, collective, self-consciously pretensive agon, at once methetic and kathartic. I’d say it out-Antigones Antigone. Deeply interesting. (Wikipedia, predictably, is useful, but the OED is clearly immune to the considerable charms of Rowdy Roddy Piper et al.)

Nichols liked the game so much that she got in touch with the manufacturer, PopCap Games. The inventors of the game were surprised to hear about its possible mental health benefits, and the company decided to study Bejeweled’s untapped potential systematically. In a preliminary study that PopCap commissioned and funded, researchers found that volunteers who played Bejeweled displayed improved mood and heart rhythms compared with volunteers who weren’t playing. The preliminary study was published this year in the Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine. Now, the company is about to launch a second phase of testing to see if the video games can have measurable effects on clinical markers of depression.

For the study and related material, see Chapter 44 (pp 189–191) in the Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine (2009).

In a happy echo of Anne Munster’s vocabulary, he calls theater “an assemblage.”

He writes: “It is an assemblage of extremely disparate components, both material and ideal, whose only existence lies in the performance, in the act of theatrical presentation.” The components are gathered together repeatedly, “each and every time time, the performance is evental, that is, singular.” This event, “an event of thought,” produces “theater ideas,” unique and unprecedented. “The idea arises in and by the performance… The idea is irreducibily theatrical and does not preexist before its arrival ‘on stage’” (72).

Of course, Frasca (and after him, Bogost) has already made use of a linkage between theater and games, via the work of Boal.

Indeed, Badiou’s observations about the nature of theatre call Bogost’s characterization of simulation to mind: “Theater is an experiment,” writes Badiou, “—simultaneously textual and material—in simplification” (emphasis mine). He even goes so far as to point out that simplification, for mathematicians, at least, is not always simple. Tout court, Simplification is all.

In Badiou’s further consideration of theater, I see parallels with Munster and Levi. “The theater-idea comes forth,” he writes, “in the (brief) time of its performance, its presentation.” But this presentation is not an interpretation: It is a complementation (and herein lies the parallel with Munster’s discussion of virtuality). “Every performance or representation is thus a possible completion of [the theater idea].”

Finally, a propos lengthy discourse on the artful nature of games, Badiou has this to say about theater: It does not serve to cultivate, but to provoke. “The public…comes to the theater to be struck. Struck by theater-ideas. It does not leave the theater cultivated, but stunned, fatigued (thought is tiring), pensive… It has encountered ideas whose existence it hitherto did not suspect” (77).

I can imagine elegant M. Badiou listening quietly to these parallels and then letting out a polite, but dismissive, laugh. But it is on the back of his weightier theses that I intend to investigate the dimensions of “game thought.”