Quotations from “Gamer Theory” by McKenzie Wark

The world as a gamespace:

• “There is no idle time in The Sims”.
• “Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
• “The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.

Algorithms:

• “What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.
• “The game is true in that its algorithm is consistent, but this very consistency negates a world that is not”.
• “Gamespace turns descriptions into a database and storyline into navigation”.

Boredom:

• “Boredom is something a body does when space will not let the body enter it in a way that transforms the body into something else, so that the body can forget itself”.
• “The time and space of the topological world [gamespace] is organized around the maintenance of boredom, nurturing it yet distracting it just enough to prevent its implosion, from which alone might arise the counter power to the game”.

Read more in the book: Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark