Gaming

Essays on Algorithmic Culture

Alexander R. Galloway

Electronic Mediations, Volume 18

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Chapter 3 was originally published as “Social Realism in Gaming,” Game
Studies 4, no. 1 (November 2004). Chapter 4 was originally published as
“Playing the Code: Allegories of Control in Civilization,” Radical Philosophy
128 (November–December 2004). Reprinted with permission.

Copyright 2006 by Alexander R. Galloway

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
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Galloway, Alexander R., 1974–
Gaming : essays on algorithmic culture / Alexander R. Galloway.
p. cm. — (Electronic mediations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4850-4 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4850-6 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4851-1 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4851-4 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Video games—Social aspects. 2. Video games—Philosophy.
I. Title. II. Series.
GV1469.34.S63G35 2006
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 4
Allegories of Control

Playing the Algorithm

With the progressive arrival of new forms of media over the last cen-
tury or so and perhaps earlier there appears a sort of lag time, call it
the “thirty-year rule,” starting from the invention of a medium and
ending at its ascent to proper and widespread functioning in culture
at large. This can be said of film, from its birth at the end of the
nineteenth century up to the blossoming of classical film form in the
1930s, or of the Internet with its long period of relatively hidden for-
mation during the 1970s and 1980s only to erupt on the popular
stage in the mid-1900s. And we can certainly say the same thing today
about video games: what started as a primitive pastime in the 1960s
has through the present day experienced its own evolution from a
simple to a more sophisticated aesthetic logic, such that one might
predict a coming golden age for video games into the next decade
not unlike what film experienced in the late 1930s and 1940s.1 Games
like Final Fantasy X or Grand Theft Auto III signal the beginning of
this new golden age. Still, video games reside today in a distinctly
lowbrow corner of contemporary society and thus have yet to be held
aloft as an art form on par with those of the highest cultural production.

85
86 Allegories of Control

This strikes me as particularly attractive, for one may approach video

games today as a type of beautifully undisturbed processing of con-
temporary life, as yet unmarred by bourgeois exegeses of the format.
But how may one critically approach these video games, these
uniquely algorithmic cultural objects? Certainly they would have some-
thing revealing to say about life inside today’s global informatic net-
works. They might even suggest a new approach to critical interpre-
tation itself, one that is as computercentric as its object of study.
Philippe Sollers wrote in 1967 that interpretation concerns “The
punctuation, the scanning, the spatialization of texts”; a year later
Roland Barthes put it like this: “the space of writing is to be scanned,
not pierced.”2 And a few years later, Jameson adopted a similar vo-
cabulary: “Allegorical interpretation is a type of scanning that, moving
back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modifi-
cation of a type quite different from our stereotypes of some static or
medieval or biblical decoding.”3 Not coincidentally, these three bor-
row vocabulary from the realm of electronic machines—the “scan-
ning” of electrons inside a television’s screen, or even the scanner/
parser modules of a computer compiler—to describe a more contem-
porary, informatic mode of cultural analysis and interpretation.
Indeed, this same “digitization” of allegorical interpretation, if one
may call it that, is evident in film criticism of the 1970s and 1980s,
concurrent with the emergence of consumer video machines and the
first personal computers. This discourse was inaugurated by the 1970
analysis of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln written by the editors of
Cahiers du cinéma. Their reading is aimed at classical Hollywood films,
so it has a certain critical relationship to ideology and formal hege-
mony. Yet they clearly state that their technique is neither an inter-
pretation (getting out something already in the film) nor a demystifi-
cation (digging through manifest meaning to get at latent meaning).

We refuse to look for “depth,” to go from the “literal meaning” to

some “secret meaning”; we are not content with what it says (what
it intends to say). . . . What will be attempted here through a re-
scansion of these films in a process of active reading, is to make them
say what they have to say within what they leave unsaid, to reveal
their constituent lacks; these are neither faults in the work . . . nor a
deception on the part of the author. . . . They are structuring absences.4
 Allegories of Control 87

The influence of computers and informatic networks, of what Gene

Youngblood in the same year called the “intermedia network,” on the
Cahiers mentality is unmistakable. Their approach is not a commen-
tary on the inner workings of the cinematic text—as an earlier mode
of allegorical interpretation would have required—but a rereading, a
rescanning, and ultimately a word processing of the film itself. The
Cahiers style of analysis is what one might term a “horizontal” allegory.
It scans the surfaces of texts looking for new interpretive patterns.
These patterns are, in essence, allegorical, but they no longer observe
the division between what Jameson called the negative hermeneutic
of ideology critique on the one hand and the positive hermeneutic of
utopian collectivism on the other.5 This is the crucial point: scanning
is wholly different from demystifying. And as two different techniques
for interpretation, they are indicative of two very different political
and social realities: computerized versus noncomputerized.
Some of Deleuze’s later writings are helpful in understanding the
division between these two realities. In his “Postscript on Control
Societies,” a short work from 1990, Deleuze defines two historical
periods: first, the “disciplinary societies” of modernity, growing out
of the rule of the sovereign, into the “vast spaces of enclosure,” the
social castings and bodily molds that Michel Foucault has described
so well; and second, what Deleuze terms the “societies of control”
that inhabit the late twentieth century—these are based around what
he calls logics of “modulation” and the “ultrarapid forms of free-
floating control.”6 While the disciplinary societies of high modernity
were characterized by more physical semiotic constructs such as the
signature and the document, today’s societies of control are charac-
terized by immaterial ones such as the password and the computer.
These control societies are characterized by the networks of genetic
science and computers, but also by much more conventional net-
work forms. In each case, though, Deleuze points out how the prin-
ciple of organization in computer networks has shifted away from
confinement and enclosure toward a seemingly infinite extension of
controlled mobility:
A control is not a discipline. In making freeways, for example, you
don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am
not saying that this is the freeway’s exclusive purpose, but that people
88 Allegories of Control

can drive infinitely and “freely” without being at all confined yet
while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future.7

Whether it is an information superhighway or a plain old freeway,

what Deleuze defines as control is key to understanding how comput-
erized information societies function. It is part of a larger shift in social
life, characterized by a movement away from central bureaucracies and
vertical hierarchies toward a broad network of autonomous social
actors. As the architect Branden Hookway writes:
The shift is occurring across the spectrum of information technolo-
gies as we move from models of the global application of intelligence,
with their universality and frictionless dispersal, to one of local
applications, where intelligence is site-specific and fluid.8

This shift toward a control society has also been documented in such
varied texts as those of sociologist Manuel Castells, Hakim Bey, and
the Italian autonomist political movement of the 1970s. Even harsh
critics of this shift, such as Nick Dyer-Witheford (author of Cyber-
Marx), surely admit that the shift is taking place. It is part of a larger
process of postmodernization that is happening the world over.
What are the symptoms of this social transformation? They are
seen whenever a company like Microsoft outsources a call center from
Redmond to Bangalore, or in the new medical surveillance networks
scanning global health databases for the next outbreak of SARS.
Even today’s military has redefined itself around network- and com-
putercentric modes of operation: pilot interfaces for remotely oper-
ated Predator aircraft mimic computer game interfaces; captains in the
U.S. Army learn wartime tactics through video games like Full Spec-
trum Command, a training tool jointly developed by the American
and Singaporean militaries; in the military’s Future Combat Systems
initiative, computer networks themselves are classified as weapons
systems.
But these symptoms are mere indices for deeper social maladies,
many of which fall outside the realm of the machine altogether—
even if they are ultimately exacerbated by it. For while Bangalore may
be booming, it is an island of exception inside a country still strug-
gling with the challenges of postcolonialism and unequal moderniza-
tion. Computers have a knack for accentuating social injustice, for
 Allegories of Control 89

widening the gap between the rich and the poor (as the economists
have well documented). Thus the claims I make here about the rela-
tionship between video games and the contemporary political situa-
tion refer specifically to the social imaginary of the wired world and
how the various structures of organization and regulation within it
are repurposed into the formal grammar of the medium.
As Jameson illustrates in Signatures of the Visible, the translation of
political realities into film has a somewhat complicated track record,
for mainstream cinema generally deals with the problem of politics
not in fact by solving it but by sublimating it. Fifty years ago, Hitch-
cock showed the plodding, unfeeling machinations of the criminal
justice system in his film The Wrong Man. Today the police are not
removed from the crime film genre, far from it, but their micromove-
ments of bureaucratic command and control are gone. The political
sleight of hand of mainstream cinema is that the audience is rarely
shown the boring minutiae of discipline and confinement that con-
stitute the various apparatuses of control in contemporary societies.
This is precisely why Jameson’s interpretive method is so successful.
Another example: in John Woo’s The Killer, not only is the killer
above the law (or, more precisely, outside it), but so is the cop, both
literally in his final bloody act of extrajudicial vengeance and also
figuratively in that one never sees the cuffings, the bookings, the in-
dictments, the court appearances, and all the other details of modern
criminality and confinement depicted in The Wrong Man. Films like
Bad Boys 2 or Heat do the same thing. In fact, most cop flicks eschew
this type of representation, rising above the profession, as it were, to
convey other things (justice, friendship, honor, or what have you). In
other words, discipline and confinement, as a modern control appara-
tus, are rarely represented today, except when, in singular instances
like the Rodney King tape, they erupt onto the screen in gory detail
(having first erupted from the bounds of film itself and penetrated the
altogether different medium of video). Instead, discipline and con-
finement are upstaged by other matters, sublimated into other repre-
sentational forms. The accurate representation of political control is
thus eclipsed in much of the cinema (requiring, Jameson teaches us,
allegorical interpretation to bring it back to the fore), which is un-
fortunate, because despite its unsexy screen presence, informatic
90 Allegories of Control

Civilization III, Firaxis Games, 2001

control is precisely the most important thing to show on the screen if

one wishes to allegorize political power today.
Now, what is so interesting about video games is that they essen-
tially invert film’s political conundrum, leading to almost exactly the
opposite scenario. Video games don’t attempt to hide informatic con-
trol; they flaunt it. Look to the auteur work of game designers like
Hideo Kojima, Yu Suzuki, or Sid Meier. In the work of Meier, the
gamer is not simply playing this or that historical simulation. The
gamer is instead learning, internalizing, and becoming intimate with
a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play
 Allegories of Control 91

the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to
interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its par-
allel “allegorithm”).
So today there is a twin transformation: from the modern cinema
to the contemporary video game, but also from traditional allegory to
what I am calling horizontal or “control” allegory. I suggest that video
games are, at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the
political realities of the informatic age. If Meier’s work is about any-
thing, it is about information society itself. It is about knowing systems
and knowing code, or, I should say, knowing the system and knowing
the code. “The way computer games teach structures of thought,”
92 Allegories of Control

writes Ted Friedman on Meier’s game series Civilization, “is by getting

you to internalize the logic of the program. To win, you can’t just do
whatever you want. You have to figure out what will work within the
rules of the game. You must learn to predict the consequences of each
move, and anticipate the computer’s response. Eventually, your deci-
sions become intuitive, as smooth and rapid-fire as the computer’s
own machinations.”9 Meier makes no effort to hide this essential char-
acteristic behind a veil, either, as would popular cinema. The massive
electronic network of command and control that I have elsewhere
called “protocol” is precisely the visible, active, essential, and core
ingredient of Meier’s work in particular and video games in general.
You can’t miss it. Lev Manovich agrees with Friedman: “[Games] de-
mand that a player can execute an algorithm in order to win. As the
player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules
that operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its
hidden logic—in short, its algorithm.”10 So while games have linear
narratives that may appear in broad arcs from beginning to end, or
may appear in cinematic segues and interludes, they also have nonlin-
ear narratives that must unfold in algorithmic form during gameplay.
In this sense, video games deliver to the player the power relation-
ships of informatic media firsthand, choreographed into a multivalent
cluster of play activities. In fact, in their very core, video games do
nothing but present contemporary political realities in relatively un-
mediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by
sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with
the entire game, and in this way video games achieve a unique type of
political transparency.
Buckminster Fuller articulated the systemic, geopolitical charac-
teristics of gaming decades before in his “World Game” and World
Design Initiative of the 1960s. The World Game was to be played on
a massive “stretched out football field sized world map.” The game
map was “wired throughout so that mini-bulbs, installed all over its
surface, could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show
various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world con-
ditions, events, and resources.” Fuller’s game was a global resource
management simulation, not unlike Meier’s Civilization. But the
object of Fuller’s game was “to explore for ways to make it possible for
 Allegories of Control 93

“City View,” Civilization III

anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total earth
without any human interfering with any other human and without
any human gaining advantage at the expense of another.” While
Fuller’s game follows the same logic of Civilization or other global algo-
rithm games, his political goals were decidedly more progressive, as
he showed in a jab at the American mathematician John von Neu-
mann: “In playing the game I propose that we set up a different sys-
tem of games from that of Dr. John Von Neumann whose ‘Theory of
Games’ was always predicated upon one side losing 100 percent. His
game theory is called ‘Drop Dead.’ In our World Game we propose to
explore and test by assimilated adoption various schemes of ‘How to
Make the World Work.’ To win the World Game everybody must be
made physically successful. Everybody must win.”11
So, broadly speaking, there is an extramedium shift in which films
about the absence of control have been replaced by games that fetishize
control. But there is simultaneously an intermedium shift, happening
predominantly within the cinema. What Jameson called the conspiracy
film of the 1970s (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View) became
no longer emblematic at the start of the new millennium. Instead,
94 Allegories of Control

films of epistemological reversal have become prominent, mutating

out of the old whodunit genre. David Fincher is the contemporary
counterpart to Alan Pakula in this regard, with The Game and Fight
Club as masterpieces of epistemological reversal, but one need only
point to the preponderance of other films grounded in mind-bending
trickery of reality and illusion (Jagged Edge, The Usual Suspects, The
Matrix, The Cell, eXistenZ, The Sixth Sense, Wild Things, and so on, or
even with games like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series) to see how
the cinema has been delivered from the oppression of unlocatable cap-
italism (as in Jameson’s view) only to be sentenced to a new oppres-
sion of disingenuous informatics. For every moment that the con-
spiracy film rehashes the traumas of capitalism in the other-form of
monumental modern architecture, as with the Space Needle at the
start of The Parallax View, the knowledge-reversal film aims at doling
out data to the audience, but only to show at the last minute how
everything was otherwise. The digital can’t exert control with archi-
tecture, so it does it with information. The genre offers a type of epis-
temological challenge to the audience: follow a roller coaster of rever-
sals and revelations, and the viewer will eventually achieve informatic
truth in the end. I see this fetishization of the “knowledge triumph”
as a sort of informatization of the conspiracy film described by Jameson.
But back to video games and how exactly the operator “plays the
algorithm.” This happens most vividly in many console games, in
which intricate combinations of buttons must be executed with pre-
cise timing to accomplish something in the game. Indeed, games like

Tekken Tag Tournament, Namco, 1994

 Allegories of Control 95

Tekken or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater hinge on the operator’s ability to

motor-memorize button combinations for specific moves. The algo-
rithms for such moves are usually documented in the game sleeve by
using a coded notation similar to tablature for music (“Up ⫹ X-X-O”
on a PlayStation controller, for example). Newcomers to such games
are often derided as mere “button mashers.” But in a broader sense,
let us return to Sid Meier and see what it means to play the algorithm
at the macro level.

Ideological Critique
After the initial experience of playing Civilization there are perhaps
three successive phases that one passes through on the road to cri-
tiquing this particularly loaded cultural artifact. The first phase is
often an immense chasm of pessimism arising from the fear that
Civilization in particular and video games in general are somehow im-
mune to meaningful interpretation, that they are somehow outside
criticism. Yes, games are about algorithms, but what exactly does that
matter when it comes to cultural critique? Perhaps video games have
no politics? This was, most likely, the same sensation faced by others
attempting to critique hitherto mystified artifacts of popular culture—
Janice Radway with the romance novel, Dick Hebdige with punk style,
or Roland Barthes with the striptease. Often it is precisely those places
in culture that appear politically innocent that are at the end of the
day the most politically charged. Step two, then, consists of the slow
process of ideological critique using the telltale clues contained in
the game to connect it with larger social processes. (Here is where
Caillois, presented in chapter 1 as essentially apolitical, returns with
a penetrative observation about the inherent political potential of
games, vis-à-vis the question of demystification and institutional
critique. Reacting to Huizinga, Caillois writes that “without doubt,
secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activ-
ity, but it must be immediately pointed out that this transformation is
necessarily to the detriment of the secret and mysterious, which play
exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. In a word, play tends to
remove the very nature of the mysterious. On the other hand, when
the secret, the mask, or the costume fulfills a sacramental function
96 Allegories of Control

one can be sure that not play, but an institution is involved.”)12 Cri-
tiquing the ideological content of video games is what Katie Salen
and Eric Zimmerman, following Brian Sutton-Smith on play, refer to
as the “cultural rhetoric” of games.13 For Civilization, the political his-
tories of state and national powers coupled with the rise of the infor-
mation society seem particularly apropos. One might then construct
a vast ideological critique of the game, focusing on its explicit logo-
centrism, its nationalism and imperialism, its expansionist logic, as
well as its implicit racism and classism.
Just as medieval scholars used the existence of contradiction in a
text as indication of the existence of allegory, so Civilization has within
it many contradictions that suggest such an allegorical interpretation.
One example is the explicit mixing of ahistorical logic, such as the
founding of a market economy in a place called “London” in 4000
BC, with the historical logic of scientific knowledge accumulation or
cultural development. Another is the strange mixing of isometric
perspective for the foreground and traditional perspective for the
background in the “City View.”
The expansionist logic of the game is signified both visually and
spatially. “At the beginning of the game,” Friedman writes, “almost
all of the map is black; you don’t get to learn what’s out there until
one of your units has explored the area. Gradually, as you expand
your empire and send out scouting parties, the landscape is revealed.”14
These specific conventions within both the narrative and the visual
signification of the game therefore reward expansionism, even require
it. Meier’s Alpha Centauri mimics these semiotic conventions but ups
the ante by positioning the player in the ultimate expansionist haven,
outer space. This has the added bonus of eliminating concerns about
the politics of expansionist narratives, for, one assumes, it is easier to
rationalize killing anonymous alien life-forms in Alpha Centauri than
it is killing Zulus in Civilization III. Expansionism has, historically,
always had close links with racism; the expansionism of the colonial
period of modernity, for example, was rooted in a specific philosophy
about the superiority of European culture, religion, and so on, over
that of the Asiatic, African, and American native peoples. Again we
turn to Meier, who further developed his expansionist vision in 1994
with Colonization, a politically dubious game modeled on the software
 Allegories of Control 97

Colonization, Micro Prose, 1995

engine used in Civilization and set in the period between the discov-
ery of the New World and the American Revolution. The American
Indians in this game follow a less-than-flattering historical stereo-
type, both in their onscreen depiction and in terms of the character-
istics and abilities they are granted as part of the algorithm. Later, in
Civilization III, Meier expanded his stereotyping to include sixteen
historical identities, from the Aztecs and the Babylonians to the
French and the Russians. In this game, one learns that the Aztecs are
“religious” but not “industrious,” characteristics that affect their var-
ious proclivities in the gamic algorithm, while the Romans are “mili-
taristic” but, most curiously, not “expansionist.” Of course, this sort
of typing is but a few keystrokes away from a world in which blacks
are “athletic” and women are “emotional.” That the game tactfully
avoids these more blatant offenses does not exempt it from endorsing
a logic that prizes the classification of humans into types and the
normative labeling of those types.
Worse than attributing a specific characteristic to a specific racial or
national group is the fact that ideological models such as these ignore
the complexity, variation, and rich diversity of human life at many
98 Allegories of Control

Civilization III

levels: the Civilization III algorithm ignores change over time (Tsarist
Russia versus Soviet Russia); it erases any number of other peoples
existing throughout history the Inuit, the Irish, and on and on; it
conflates a civilization with a specific national or tribal identity and
ignores questions of hybridity and diaspora such as those of African
Americans or Jews. In short, it transposes the many-layered quality of
social life to an inflexible, reductive algorithm for “civilization” —a
process not dissimilar to what Marxists call reification, only updated
for the digital age. (The reason for doing this is, of course, a practical
one: to create balanced gameplay, game designers require an array of
variables that can be tweaked and tuned across the various environ-
ments and characters.) And while one needs no further proof of the
game’s dubious political assumptions, I might point out that the game
is also a folly of logocentrism; it is structured around a quest for knowl-
edge, with all human thought broken down into neatly packaged dis-
coveries that are arranged in a branching time line where one dis-
covery is a precondition for the next. But so much for ideological
scrutiny.
 Allegories of Control 99

Expansionist
Commercial

Militaristic
Industrious

Scientific
Religious
Civilization
Americans X X
Aztecs X X
Babylonians X X
Chinese X X
Egyptians X X
English X X
French X X
Germans X X
Greeks X X
Indians X X
Iroquois X X
Japanese X X
Persians X X
Romans X X
Russians X X
Zulus X X

“Civilization Characteristics,” Civilization III

Informatic Critique
In conjunction with these manifest political investigations, the third
step is to elaborate a formal critique rooted in the core principles of
informatics that serve as the foundation of the gaming format. The
principles adopted by Manovich in The Language of New Media might
be a good place to begin: numerical representation, modularity, auto-
mation, variability, and transcoding. But to state this would simply
be to state the obvious, that Civilization is new media. The claim that
Civilization is a control allegory is to say something different: that
the game plays the very codes of informatic control today. So what
are the core principles of informatic control? Beyond Manovich, I
would supplement the discussion with an analysis of what are called
the protocols of digital technology. The Internet protocols, for ex-
ample, consist of approximately three thousand technical documents
100 Allegories of Control

published to date outlining the necessary design specifications for spe-

cific technologies like the Internet Protocol (IP) or Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML). These documents are called RFCs (Request for
Comments). The expression “request for comments” derives from a
memorandum titled “Host Software” sent by Steve Crocker on April
7, 1969 (which is known today as RFC number 1) and is indicative
of the collaborative, open nature of protocol authorship (one is re-
minded of Deleuze’s “freeways”). Called “the primary documentation
of the Internet,”15 these technical memorandums detail the vast
majority of standards and protocols used today on game consoles like
the Xbox as well as other types of networked computers.16
Flexibility is one of the core political principles of informatic con-
trol, described both by Deleuze in his theorization of “control society”
and by computer scientists like Crocker. The principle derives from
the scientist Paul Baran’s pioneering work on distributed networks,
which prizes flexibility as a strategy for avoiding technical failure at
the system level. Flexibility is still one of the core principles of Internet
protocol design, perhaps best illustrated by the routing functionality
of IP, which is able to move information through networks in an ad
hoc, adaptable manner. The concept of flexibility is also central to the
new information economies, powering innovations in fulfillment, cus-
tomization, and other aspects of what is known as “flexible accumu-
lation.” While it might appear liberating or utopian, don’t be fooled;
flexibility is one of the founding principles of global informatic con-
trol. It is to the control society what discipline was to a previous one.
Flexibility is allegorically repurposed in Civilization via the use of
various sliders and parameters to regulate flow and create systemic
equilibrium. All elements in the game are put in quantitative, dy-
namic relationships with each other, such that a “Cultural Victory”
conclusion of the game is differentiated from a “Conquest Victory”
conclusion only through slight differences in the two algorithms for
winning. The game is able to adjust and compensate for whatever
outcome the operator pursues. Various coefficients and formulas (the
delightfully named “Governor governor,” for example) are tweaked
to achieve balance in gameplay.
What flexibility allows for is universal standardization (another
crucial principle of informatic control). If diverse technical systems
 Allegories of Control 101

Civilization III

are flexible enough to accommodate massive contingency, then the

result is a more robust system that can subsume all comers under the
larger mantle of continuity and universalism. The Internet protocol
white papers say it all: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in
what you accept from others.”17 The goal of total subsumption goes
hand in hand with informatic control. The massive “making equiva-
lent” in Civilization—the making equivalent of different government
types (the most delicious detail in early versions of Meier’s game is
the pull-down menu option for starting a revolution), of different
victory options, of formulaically equating n number of happy citizens
with the availability of luxuries, and so on—is, in this sense, an alle-
gorical reprocessing of the universal standardizations that go into the
creation of informatic networks today. In Meier, game studies looks
more like game theory.
In contrast to my previous ideological concerns, the point now is
not whether the Civilization algorithm embodies a specific ideology of
“soft” racism, or even whether it embodies the core principles of new
media adopted from Manovich, but whether it embodies the logic of
informatic control itself. Other simulations let the gamer play the
102 Allegories of Control

logic of a plane (Flight Simulator, or Meier’s own flying games from the
1980s), the logic of a car (Gran Turismo), or what have you. But with
Civilization, Meier has simulated the total logic of informatics itself.
But now we are at an impasse, for the more one allegorizes infor-
matic control in Civilization, the more my previous comments about
ideology start to unravel. And the more one tries to pin down the
ideological critique, the more one sees that such a critique is under-
mined by the existence of something altogether different from ideol-
ogy: informatic code. So where the ideological critique succeeds, it
fails. Instead of offering better clues, the ideological critique (tradi-
tional allegory) is undermined by its own revelation of the protoco-
logical critique (control allegory). In video games, at least, one trumps
the other. Consider my previous claims about Meier’s construction of
racial and national identity: the more one examines the actual con-
struction of racial and national identity in the game, the more one
sees that identity itself is an entirely codified affair within the logic of
the software. Identity is a data type, a mathematical variable. The
construction of identity in Civilization gains momentum from offline
racial typing, to be sure, but then moves further to a specifically infor-
matic mode of cybernetic typing: capture, transcoding, statistical analy-
sis, quantitative profiling (behavioral or biological), keying attributes
to specific numeric variables, and so on. This is similar to what Mano-
vich calls the logic of selection—or what Lisa Nakamura calls “menu-
driven identities”—only now Manovich’s pick-and-choose, window-
shopper logic of graphical interfaces governs a rather distinct set of
human identity attributes. As Nakamura laments, “Who can — or
wants to —claim a perfectly pure, legible identity that can be fully
expressed by a decision tree designed by a corporation?”18 So the skin
tone parameters for player character construction in everything from
Sissyfight to World of Warcraft are not an index for older, offline con-
structions of race and identity, although they are a direct extension
of this larger social history, but instead an index for the very domi-
nance of informatic organization and how it has entirely overhauled,
revolutionized, and recolonized the function of identity. In Civiliza-
tion, identity is modular, instrumental, typed, numerical, algorith-
mic. To use history as another example: the more one begins to think
that Civilization is about a certain ideological interpretation of his-
 Allegories of Control 103

tory (neoconservative, reactionary, or what have you), or even that it

creates a computer-generated “history effect,” the more one realizes
that it is about the absence of history altogether, or rather, the
transcoding of history into specific mathematical models. History is
what hurts, wrote Jameson—history is the slow, negotiated struggle
of individuals together with others in their material reality. The mod-
eling of history in computer code, even using Meier’s sophisticated
algorithms, can only ever be a reductive exercise of capture and trans-
coding. So “history” in Civilization is precisely the opposite of history,
not because the game fetishizes the imperial perspective, but because
the diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the synchronic
homogeneity of code pure and simple. It is a new sort of fetish alto-
gether. (To be entirely clear: mine is an argument about informatic
control, not about ideology; a politically progressive “People’s Civi-
lization” game, à la Howard Zinn, would beg the same critique.) Thus
the logic of informatics and horizontality is privileged over the logic
of ideology and verticality in this game, as it mostly likely is in all
video games in varying degrees.
So this is not unique to Civilization. The other great simulation
game that has risen above the limitations of the genre is The Sims,
but instead of seizing on the totality of informatic control as a theme,
this game does the reverse, diving down into the banality of technol-
ogy, the muted horrors of a life lived as an algorithm. As I have alluded
to in Jameson, the depth model in traditional allegorical interpreta-
tion is a sublimation of the separation felt by the viewer between his
or her experience of consuming the media and the potentially liber-
ating political value of that media. But video games abandon this
dissatisfying model of deferral, epitomizing instead the flatness of
control allegory by unifying the act of playing the game with an imme-
diate political experience. In other words, The Sims is a game that
delivers its own political critique up front as part of the gameplay. There
is no need for the critic to unpack the game later. The boredom, the
sterility, the uselessness, and the futility of contemporary life appear
precisely through those things that represent them best: a middle-
class suburban house, an Ikea catalog of personal possessions, crappy
food and even less appetizing music, the same dozen mindless tasks
over and over—how can one craft a better critique of contemporary
104 Allegories of Control

life? This is the politically dubious, but nonetheless revealing, quality

of play identified by Adorno in the supplement to his Aesthetic Theory:
“Playful forms are without exception forms of repetition”; “In art,
play is from the outset disciplinary.”19
As an entire genre, the first-person shooter also illustrates this
type of allegorical interpretation of info-politics. Dash the naysayers,
the shooter is an allegory of liberation pure and simple. This compli-
cated genre is uncomplicated. There can be no better format for en-
coding and reprocessing the unvarnished exertion of affective force. I
think of Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike as the final realization
of André Breton’s dream of the purest surrealist act: the desire to burst
into the street with a pistol, firing quickly and blindly at anyone com-
plicit with what he called “the petty system of debasement and cre-
tinization.” The shooter as genre and the shooter as act are bound to-
gether in an intimate unity. The shooter is not a stand-in for activity.
It is activity. (Just as the game is not a stand-in for informatics but is
informatics.) The experience of the shooter is a “smooth” experience,
to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, whereby its various components
have yet to be stratified and differentiated, as text on one side and
reading or looking on the other. In this sense, the aesthetics of gam-
ing often lack any sort of deep representation (to the extent that
representation requires both meaning and the encoding of meaning
in material form). Allegory has collapsed back to a singularity in gam-
ing. In fact, the redundancy in the vocabulary says it all: “the cultural
logic of informatics.” The activity of gaming, which, as I’ve stressed
over and over, only ever comes into being when the game is actually
played, is an undivided act wherein meaning and doing transpire in
the same gamic gesture.

A Theory of Pretending
This last point may be recontextualized through a fundamental obser-
vation about video games made at the outset of this book, that games
let one act. In fact, they require it; video games are actions. Now,
following the definition of literary allegory as “other-speak,”20 I must
define the gamic allegory: it is “other-act.” The interpretation of gamic
acts, then, should be thought of as the creation of a secondary discourse
 Allegories of Control 105

narrating a series of “other-acts.” A century ago, Maurice Blondel

suggested the word “allergy,” following his theory of “coaction” or
“another’s action.”21 Blondel’s use of the term assumes the existence
of more than one individual, yet it is still an interesting influence be-
cause of his focus on parallel actions. Coaction proper in the context
of video gaming would mean something like multiplayer action, which
itself would need to be supplemented with a reading of the allegorical
multiact. Either way, the interpretation of gamic acts is the process of
understanding what it means to do something and mean something
else. It is a science of the “as if.” The customary definition of allegory
as “extended metaphor” should, for games, be changed to “enacted
metaphor.” (In fact, for their active duality, zeugma or syllepsis are
even more evocative figures of speech.) When one plays Civilization,
there is one action taking place, but there is more than one significant
action taking place. This is the parallelism necessitated by allegory.
The first half of the parallelism is the actual playing of the game, but
the other is the playing of informatics. For video games, one needs a
theory of pretending, but only in the most positive sense of the term,
as a theory of actions that have multiple meanings.
Again, Bateson: “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not
denote what would be denoted by the bite.”22 So the roll of control
allegory is—methodologically but not structurally—to see the nip
and process neither the nip nor the bite, but instead what the bite
denotes. I say methodologically but not structurally because there is
no camouflage here: the playful video game may metacommunicate
“this is play,” but it can never avoid also being informatic control.
In this sense, I suggest that the game critic should be concerned not
only with the interpretation of linguistic signs, as in literary studies
or film theory, but also with the interpretation of polyvalent doing.
This has always been an exciting terrain for hermeneutics, albeit less
well traveled, and in it one must interpret material action instead of
keeping to the relatively safe haven of textual analysis.
The critical terrain has likewise shrunk in the age of interactive
media from a two-way relationship involving the text and the reader-
as-critic to a singular moment involving the gamer (the doer) in the
act of gameplay. The game-as-text is now wholly subsumed within the
category of the gamer, for he or she creates the gamic text by doing.
106 Allegories of Control

This explains the tendency toward control allegory in informatic cul-

ture. The primary authors are missing from this formula not because I
wish to debase the growing auteur status of game designers, nothing
of the sort, but simply because they are no longer directly involved in
the moment of interpretation—but this has been the case in inter-
pretive studies for many decades now.
Here, then, are the two allegorical modes compared side by side.
Traditional or “deep” allegory seems to have its center of gravity in
the early to mid-twentieth century and particularly in the cinematic
form (à la Jameson), while control allegory finds its proper consum-
mation in new media in general and video games in particular.

Deep allegory Control allegory

Emblematic medium Cinema Video games
Political expression Class struggle Informatic control
Hermeneutic Reading Processing
Parallelism Other-speak Other-act

Video games are allegories for our contemporary life under the
protocological network of continuous informatic control. In fact, the
more emancipating games seem to be as a medium, substituting activ-
ity for passivity or a branching narrative for a linear one, the more
they are in fact hiding the fundamental social transformation into
informatics that has affected the globe during recent decades. In moder-
nity, ideology was an instrument of power, but in postmodernity ide-
ology is a decoy, as I hope to have shown with the game Civilization.
So a game’s revealing is also a rewriting (a lateral step, not a forward
one). A game’s celebration of the end of ideological manipulation is
also a new manipulation, only this time using wholly different dia-
grams of command and control.
In sum, with the appearance of informatic reprocessing as text—
in the style of Sid Meier, but also in everything from turntablism to
net.art—allegory no longer consists of a text and another text, but of
an enacted text and another enacted text, such that we must now
say: to do allegory means to playact, not, as Frye wrote, to allegorize
means to write commentary. And hence Deleuze: “The philosopher
creates. He doesn’t reflect.”
134 Notes to Chapter 4

Contemplation amid Wars of Push-Button Glare,” Game Studies 3, no. 2

(December 2003).
10. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge,
1991), 161.
11. For more on Toywar, see Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler, Leaving
Reality Behind: Etoy vs EToys.com and Other Battles to Control Cyberspace
(New York: Ecco, 2003). The global nature of Toywar is interesting to com-
pare to Buckmister Fuller’s “World Game,” mentioned in chapter 4. Fuller’s
game is a very early example of a global asset management simulation game.
12. I first learned of Special Force through a March 2003 e-mail post to
Rhizome Raw from Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. Under Ash is being followed
by another, similar game called Under Siege.

4. Allegories of Control

1. On this point, Markku Eskelinen writes: “Historically speaking this is

a bit like the 1910s in film studies; there were attractions, practices and very
little understanding of what was actually going on, not to mention lots of
money to be made and lost.” See Eskelinen, “The Gaming Situation,” Game
Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001).
2. See Philippe Sollers, “Programme,” Tel Quel, no. 31 (Fall 1967): 3–7,
(italics mine); and Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Le bruissement
de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 66 (italics mine).
3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 168 (italics mine).
4. The editors of Cahiers du cinéma, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” in
Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), 496.
5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1982), 291–92.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), 178.
7. Gilles Deleuze, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” in Deleuze and Guattari:
New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and
Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 18
(translation modified by the author).
8. Branden Hookway, Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the
Postwar World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 23–24.
9. Ted Friedman, “Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjec-
tivity, and Space,” http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ.htm (accessed August 14,
2003). I will use Civilization to refer to the entire game series. When talking
about a particular installment in the series, I will specify, as in Civilization III.
 Notes to Chapter 5 135

10. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 222.

11. R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science
(Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999), 473, 479. For more on the
globalistic and synergistic philosophy of the World Design Initiative, see also
Fuller, Your Private Sky: Discourse (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publish-
ers, 2001), 247–78.
12. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 4.
13. See Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 515–34; and Brian Sutton-
Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
14. Friedman, “Civilization and Its Discontents.”
15. Pete Loshin, Big Book of FYI RFCs (San Francisco: Morgan Kauf-
mann, 2000), xiv.
16. For a technical overview of network protocols, see Eric Hall, Internet
Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2000); or
for a more interpretive approach, see my book Protocol: How Control Exists
after Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
17. Jonathan Postel, “Transmission Control Protocol,” RFC 793 (Septem-
ber 1981), http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc793.html (accessed April 15, 2005).
18. Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Inter-
net (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114.
19. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1998), 317. See also Stallabrass’s essay “Just Gaming,” a bril-
liant critique of play no doubt inspired by Adorno’s commentary on Schiller
and Huizinga.
20. Fletcher gives a succinct etymology of the term: “Allegory from allos ⫹
agoreuein (other ⫹ speak openly, speak in the assembly or market). Agoreuein
connotes public, open, declarative speech. This sense is inverted by the
prefix allos. Thus allegory is often called ‘inversion.’” See Angus Fletcher,
Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1964), 2.
21. Blondel, Action (1893), 207.
22. Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” 180.

5. Countergaming

1. Game mods have been exhibited in a fine art context for several
years. See particularly “Cracking the Maze” (online, 1999); “Game Show” at
MASS MoCA (2002); “Killer Instinct” at the New Museum of Contempo-
rary Art in New York (2003); and “Games: Computergames by Artists” in
Dortmund, Germany (2003).
2. Katie Salen, personal correspondence, September 27, 2004.