The Control Allegory

In Galloway's "Allegories of Control," a shift occurs between non-computerized culture and computerized society. This shift, highlighted by Deleuze, is "characterize by a movement away from central bureaucracies and vertical heirarchies toward a broad network of autonomous social actors" (88). We study this as a move from a disciplinary society to a control society. We are not forced to live within one system, but instead we are controlled within a vast set of systems.

Games contain a form of control known as informatic control. Instead of imposing a single ideology on the player, they impose a total system of control that the player must live within. Interpretation of video games involves canning a game for large patterns instead of recognizing a dominant ideology. Games "flaunt informatic control" therefore we must "Interpretive patterns".

Specificities, such as the racist use of nationalities in Civilization, give way to the variableness that can just as easily swap the inferior Iroquoi nation for the Soviet Union or the Babylonian empire. Yes, while a game can still have a racist undertone, the actual material history that formed that racist undertone is swept away since "informantic organization... recolonized the function of identity" (102). We play according to the "synchronic" or multiple mathematical equations/controlling code of the software system, not the "diachronic" or single/static point of the Iriqoi game character icon.

This variableness highlights flexibility within informatics and late-capitalism. Just changing the variables of the system does not change the control system of the game: "To be entirely clear: mine is an argument about informatic control, not about ideology; a politcally progressive 'People's Civilization' game, a la Howard Zinn, would beg the same critique" (103).

If the individual variables do not matter, how do we interpret or scan the text?

First, we must understand that playing a game involves understanding the system of control. Galloway states that our desire to win the game leads to our desire to master knowledge of the game algorithm. The only way to win a game is to live perfectly within its system of control. "The digital can't exert control with architecture, so it does so with information.... I see this fetishization of the "knowledge triumph" as a sort of informatization of the conspiracy film" (94). Playing a game in any manner (such as a suicide player, a PKer, an explorer, etc.) forces one to learn the rules of the system.

From there, if we understand that a game is an allegory, we can interpret these processes correctly. By constantly following these rules and acting within them, we can try to understand the larger system working behind the game: "When one plays civilization, there is action taking place, but there is more than one significant action taking place" (105). We constantly do this while playing a game- we do not always fixate on the racist Iriqoi icon but the implications of starting off the game as any "nation" throughout history. "There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later" (103).

Questions:
When a game designer creates a game, is a system of control always implicit? Is it even possible to make a game that does not have a system of control? In what ways can this control system prove beneficial? If Zinn's Civilization game just changes variables, what are some examples of game changes that would alter the system of Civilization?

If we focus on informatics as opposed to ideologies, does it even matter how "racist" a game is? Commercial game makers built Colonization, but there was a much larger public outcry against that game than Civilization. While I do not think Galloway dismisses the analysis of individual ideologies within a game entirely, it seems like the public still analyzes ideology within games with much greater scrutiny than Galloway proposes we should.

Galloway critiques informatic control as creating false realities and ignoring actual material conditions. Because of the computer age, he says, Bangalore has a booming economy but also a giant economic gap. He then goes on to say "the claims I make here about the relationship between video games and the contemporary poltical sitatuions 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" (89).

How might one take apart the imaginary wired world (e.g., Bangalore as an outsourced workers' paradise) and rewrite the grammar video games (i.e., alter the political context of video game)? Is the McDonald's game an example of this rewriting in action? Or is the McDonald's game just another imaginary construct of the digital world?

Galloway says games "solve the problem of politcal control, not by submiating it as it does the cinemea, but by making it conterminous with the entire game?" (92).

What is Galloway's "problem of political control here"? Is political control the same as informatic control? Does Galloway see political control as completely negative?