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7. Burning Chrome
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7 Burning Chrome The paradox of modern knowledge circulates around the incompleteness theorem postulating the paradox that no system is able rigorously to account for itself. There is a blindspot at the very core of clarity. —Gregory Ulmer, Electronic Monuments Why do some people choose not to play games? In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul explores this question. He says, “Many video games ask for a lot in order to be played, so it is not surprising that some people do not play video games. Video games ask for a lot more than other art forms. They ask for more time and they more concretely require the player to understand the conventions on which they build. A game may not fit into a player’s life” (Juul 2010, 10). While Juul’s book is primarily concerned with the concept of time and what the player’s investment thereof means for the renewed interest in casual games, Inter/vention has explored the question, and its inverted counterpart, as it pertains to the conventions on which digital games build. If it is correct that video games do ask for more than other art forms, which is a supposition that hearkens back to Espen Aarseth’s groundbreaking work on cybertext and ergodic literature from the mid-1990s, then we need to account for that in some meaningful way. I have wrestled with this question in many forms and through many games for the better part of a decade. Yet it was not until I started reading Ulmer’s work that it suddenly dawned on me that digital games are uniquely different phenomena that cannot be adequately explained or understood through the conventions and genres we all know from the literate apparatus. So, with this in mind, I would like to respectfully hack Juul’s statement above a little bit and say that one reason that people choose not to play digital games is perhaps because we don’t yet know exactly what they are or what they do for and to us. With this book, I aim to resituate games as electrate expressions, that is to say, artifacts of a new apparatus that is different from that which came 154 Chapter 7 before them. Because the digital game can only be as old as the universal digital computer itself, less than seventy years if we mark it from the introduction of the Von Neumann architecture at the end of World War II, then it should not come as a big surprise that the digital game is a mystery/ mystory that still eludes us. As Ulmer so poignantly reminds us, it has taken more than 2,000 years to develop the literate apparatus and even longer to develop the oral apparatus that came before it, so we are only at the very beginning of an understanding of what electracy and its multitude of expressive forms might be. “Electracy does not already exist as such,” he says, “but names an apparatus that is emerging ‘as we speak,’ rising in many different spheres and areas, and converging in some unforeseeable, yet malleable way” (Ulmer 2003, 7). People who do play digital games, from the hardcore World of Warcraft raider to the casual Farmville player, often tell me that they do it for the entertainment value. They play to relieve stress, to take a break from “work,” to escape the “real-world” problems and complexities of their “first lives,” or for any number of other personal reasons. Interestingly, there is one distinction they all seem to share in common—namely, the distinction that people draw between work and play, between productivity and consumption (entertainment ). Rarely have I heard anyone explicitly state that they play to improve the world. Yet if we try to find some larger purpose in why we play, as I believe we must, then improving the world is precisely what we should aim to do. In this book, I have made a case for the hacker as ludic egent. I purposefully chose to expand the notion of what constitutes a player in order to show how electracy functions as the charge being conducted and invented by people whose ambition it is to effect change, for good or bad. For the hacker, the code itself is a game, the chora, described by Derrida as irreducible to the two positions, the sensible and the intelligible, which have dominated the entire tradition of Western thought, it is irreducible to all the values to which we are accustomed...