About a year and a half ago, McKenzie Wark, together with the Institute for the Future of the Book, set out to explore the possibility of a new textual form in social web media: a middle space, somewhere between the sprawling public discourse arena of the blogosphere and the collaborative knowledge factory of Wikipedia. A framework for extended, critical inquiry around a central idea or itch. Something, well, book-sized.
We hoped to find out whether opening up the process midstream — throwing author and reader into dialog while the work was still in progress — might reveal a valuable new way of writing, and get people thinking more expansively about the future of the book in the digital age. And so we published GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1: a first stab at a new sort of “networked book,” a book that actually contains the conversation it engenders, and which, in turn, engenders it.
Together with the Institute for the Future of the Book, I created this website as a way to think to about games. Games, as in computer games, are the subject of my next book, GAM3R 7H30RY. I am interested in two questions.
- can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
- can there be a critical theory of games?