::fc-announce:: McKenzie Wark Gamer Theory @ Labyrinth NYC April 4th 7PM

[McKenzie Wark]

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 Virtual Geography, The Virtual Republic and 
Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, A Hacker Manifesto and his latest 
offering, Gamer Theory. He teach culture & media at Eugene Lang College and 
sociology at the New School for Social Research.

***

“An amazing book, rich and pointed, and powerful. I cannot recommend Gamer 
Theory too highly.”
-- Steven Shaviro, author of Connected

“This text by Ken is unprecedented, in its content and construction, its 
movement, what it produces, everything, is a jubilation. It makes me laugh 
and interests me. It interests me completely.”
--Jean Baudrillard, on A Hacker Manifesto

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McKenzie Wark     http://www.ludiccrew.org