 In Plato's famous allegory of the cave, people have been chained inside a cave their entire lives and all they can see are shadows cast on the opposite wall, assuming this is all there is to reality. Except, if they venture outside the cave, as the philosopher ought to do, they would realize there is a world of ideal forms and they have been staring at projections all this time. The parable speaks to knowledge, epistemology, ontology and enlightenment, asking us to look past their first appearances to peer more deeply into reality. What if this story gets it backwards though? What if the cave itself is the ideal and the world being represented is flawed? This is what Mackenzie Warke claims in the book Gamer Theory. Not only this, but Warke claims video games illustrates this inversion best. What if the video game is the cave, an ideal world of perfect rules, goals and objectives, and the real world is an imperfect facsimile of the logic of games? Warke states, Ever get the feeling you are playing some vast and useless game whose goals you don't know and whose rules you can't remember. Ever get the fierce desire to quit, resign and forfeit. Only to realize there is no umpire, regulator or referee to announce your resignation. Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can't win it. Can't know the score and know who keeps it. Welcome to Game Space. Game Space is what Warke refers to reality as slowly having become, a world that is functionally like a game without the engagement, precision, fairness or transparency. The game has not just colonized reality, it is the soul remaining ideal. But simply, games are the art form of our time because they represent how the world has been turned into game space. For example, everything in a game is quantified and the same is happening with reality. The topography of the world is now quantified by GPS and Google Earth can venture into every street. All our data is tracked online, our viewing habits, our purchasing proclivities. Games then use this information to frame a version of reality you find appeasing. Statistics. Code. Game Space is the world turning into a digital field of play. Warke continues. Warke is a rat race, politics is a horse race, the economy is a casino. Games have victory as a goal in itself and now this logic has extended to reality. Most politicians no longer care about political ideals or serving the common good. They care about partisanship and winning for its own sake. We are told we need to get an education, to get a job, to have a happy family life, to win at a game whose only victory is death. The economy is an abstraction that stockbrokers play like a game, numbers data and value, becoming further removed from the reality of everyday people. But games have colonized other media forms as well. What is reality TV but the hollowed-out replica of a game, a conflict for its own sake without purpose? Stories now enact conflict as an abstraction, without having anything to say beyond this. Game creation and celebrities and social media influencers are famous for being famous, winning a game that simulates victory without testing anything. Gamers don't win what they desire, they desire what they win. The logic of the game has extended into reality. When victory becomes people's value, Game Space has taken over. Gamers switch roles and allegiances at a whim and the same is true of reality. We are no longer bound to our communities or families, we are atomized units who can choose to be anything we want. Game theory is Warx's solution to this, when the gamer realizes that games are idealized versions of a reality that is imperfect. However, this impulse itself is being colonized. The counter-culture wants play outside the game, the military-industrial complex expanded game to the whole world, containing play forever within it. What does this mean for games though? What are their functions as cultural objects? Do games cause game space? No, under this view, they are representing it. Game theory games don't cause game space as much as they don't cause violence. Games reflect reality, they don't really change it. Are games impotent then? What even is the point of them? What games do is show an ideal version of game space or reveal its perverse machinery. The Sims models human behavior and creates a culture of commodity fetishism, sure, but as Warx states, the game is a knowable algorithm from which you know you can escape. Game space is an unknown algorithm from which there is no escape. We play a personal god who can perform miracles, who can break the rules of his own algorithm. In essence, games give us a sense of control in a world eager to deprive us of it. This is what the book Ludo-Politics argues is the central rhetoric or politics of games. They are the aesthetics of control, but also its subversion. Games play with the boundary between submission and playful rebellion. Others have made similar claims, like reality is broken by Jane McGonagall, where she argues that games show us a version of reality that is more ideal, more just. But this leaves us with a paradox. Are games idealized versions of reality or a force of corruption? Games create quasi-utopian ideals. In fighting games, we try to make sure all characters are balanced, so the best player wins by their own merits. In adventure games, we craft a difficulty progression that makes sure perseverance and dedication will eventually prevail. There are obviously imperfections. Chess is not perfectly balanced. White starts. It is asymmetrical. However, this is notable because it is an anomaly. Chess is a game where the better player almost always wins. Games are meritocratic. And of course, some games are purposefully designed not to be. They have chance. This is a different rhetoric of play, as Brian Sutton Smith argues in his book The Ambiguity of Play. Different cultures emphasize different aspects of play, from power to community to chance. Games of chance tell us that sometimes reality is not controlled, that we might be beholden to the whims of the fates. But here's the paradox. Games create idealized versions of reality. But game space posits that the logic of the game has corrupted reality. We digitize the analog world to bring it under control in games, but when the analog world is then digitized in turn, it all goes to hell. Warwick's thesis is fascinating, but there is no explanatory mechanism. How is the world turned into game space? How do we resolve this paradox? Games reflect a gamified reality, but somehow reality became more game-like before games represented this. Games we follow rules before we are aware of their existence, and other times we abide by rules we can't even quantify. We internalize them because of our evolutionary machinery, but are not explicitly privy to it. So what if when the digitized precise logic of games gets foisted onto reality, it simply reveals how perverse reality was to begin with. It isn't that reality is becoming game space, it always was. But that games are an interface to help us see how broken reality already was. Metal Gear Solid 4 tries to foreground the military-industrial entertainment complex, but also game space. War has changed because it has become a game. Private military corporations fight for profit and not for national pride. Soldiers pledge allegiance to no flag but their own. People send drones and unmanned vehicles to fight proxy wars that are abstracted from any purpose. However, the game also gets this rhetoric backwards. It makes the claim that video games have made people see reality as a game, but game space posits that reality was game space before games came to be. Metal Gear Solid 4 has an economic system. We incapacitated people, pick up their guns and use this as currency to buy even more guns. That's what it represents procedurally. We embody the logic of the military-industrial complex in the way we play. We instrumentalize people for profit and victory, the same way the military-industrial complex has done. Beyond this, the world in implies shows how all soldiers are registered with the system and are hence controlled, but we too are registered. We are registered on the PlayStation Network to play the game. Some choose not to, there are cracks. But most players of the game are data as much as the soldiers they play as. Is this perverse? Is it strange? In his essay, Postcripts on Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze argues that we have moved from a society of discipline to a society of control, where explicit control through punishment is turning into implicit control, where people self-regulate to still have access. Control is exercised by exclusion. We see this in some form on social media, but more papably in authoritarian regimes. We self-regulate behavior to preserve access to networks of information, a world made into a digital ecosystem. This video essay has to omit swear words, and has to meet a list of criteria that deem it suitable for advertisers. The idealization happening in Metal Gear Solid 4 is the argument that a heroic agent can break through the system, that Solid Snake can persevere through hardship and his ailing body. This is gamer theory being represented in a game. It is presenting the gamer in a cave, seeing shadows on a wall, and realizing that there must be more to reality. But this is backwards again. Solid Snake is in the ideal world, and we gamers are trapped in game space. Games are a simulation. They can represent any physics they want, but the real world has no such luxury. The world cannot be packaged into discrete phenomena and be modeled exhaustively, like games. Our representations of reality are game-like, in that they assume things can be quantified. Economics is what some call physics envy. It wants to be able to model all phenomena, except physics itself has moved past this. The whole quantum-mechanical revolution shows how uncertainty reigns in the universe. We can quantify it, but we can only quantify probabilities. What the hell does this have to do with games? Flight Simulator takes the real world and simulates it in incredible detail, but a simulation must omit. There is nothing on the city streets. It is all pageantry. Games reveal how reality cannot be turned into a game, precisely by its omissions and crafting a simulation. Ironically, Flight Simulator used cutting-edge technology to map the entire world. It has used the game-spacification of reality, satellite imagery, to create a game for gamers. Flight Simulator is a model of the real world, just like Modern Economic Theory is a model of the real world, just like Metal Gear Solid 4 is a model of the real world, and models omit. In Jorge Luis Borges' famous short story on exactitude and science, there is an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice, and this is functionally what might have happened with game space. More models of reality may be fake in that they obfuscate, but they are real in that they have an impact on the world. The digitization of the world is a model as such. Of course, economic systems exist before we model them, language exists before linguistics studied it, and this is another paradox. Reality informs theory, but then theory informs reality. Reality might have turned into game space because of the dynamics of markets and systems. It's impossible to tell for sure. Supposedly, we went from an egalitarian species to a hierarchical one, because surplus accumulation of goods led to wealth disparity, the creation of classes, and the politics of distribution. We went from a game of decentralized communitarianism to a zero sum game, one that has existed in different guises for centuries now. We could push further past this, and see the game originated with evolution itself. Survival of the fittest, whether at an individual or population level, is a game with victory conditions, built into the logic that governs life itself. When we model this phenomena, we don't bring it into existence, but we quantify it, abstract it, and inevitably reduce it. We are exercising control over chaos, but this very impulse to quantify it is not the origin of game space, but the origin of our representation of it. Game space is being game spaced. Put simply, reality is a game before we identify it as one, and the way we represent this in aesthetic form, in video games, reflects not just game space, but representation itself. What does this mean for games and play? A vulgar interpretation of work's gamer theory is to see it as a call to become self-aware, to take a red pill and discern reality from fiction. However, work claims our attempts at liberating play from the game have been thwarted by the colonization of reality by the game, there is only game space. Awareness doesn't lead to subversion, it can be entirely vacuous. So the final paradox here is that games both represent how reality has turned into a game, but are also guilty of doing this themselves. They create ideals that are more just, more meritocratic, that give us agency and control, but through this reveal how it is the very impulse to control, to govern, to quantify that is contaminated reality itself. It is the creation of a game that is the final metaphor for game space, the very process by which we fold reality into a game. We created the cave to escape from reality, but reality itself can't escape from the cave. Welcome to game space.