sorry for the late post!

In his chapter on Countergaming, Galloway defines the differences between gaming and countergaming. He identifies 5, to which he adds another, largely unrealized difference: gamic action versus radical action. Through the fulfillment of this, he believes, countergaming will realize its true potential as political. Galloway argues that thus far examples of radical action have been difficult to find. Instead, most avant-garde artists have focused on game mods that focus on other mediums such as painting, video, and animation. Instead, he calls for new grammars of actions and alternative algorithms as opposed to new grammars of visuality. He identifies Jodi’s work as apolitical (juxtaposed with Jean-Luc Godard’s work as “hyperpolitical”) because it seeks only to abstract, not to modify gameplay. He calls for an era in which artists subvert traditional expectations of gameplay itself, as New Wave cinema once did for film—it eventually realized countercinema as cinema. Galloway is also concerned with the productive relationship thus far between fans/artists and corporations, citing appropriation and redistribution of fan game mods by fans. He argues that this is noteworthy because most, if not all other mediums have had a contested battleground between fan and corporation (the Star Wars corporation suing fan fiction writers, etc.). Although I tend to agree with Galloway, that avant garde games have not yet realized their potential for subverting traditional grammars of action, I wonder about his dismissal of subverting visual grammars as categorically apolitical.

One point he makes that I found interesting is his insisting on a different definition for reality for game use. More specifically, he finds that the distinction between reality and fiction itself is not useful so he dismisses it as an unproductive category for gaming/countergaming. Galloway writes that there are numerous examples of games that reject fictional narrative in favor of “real-life scenarios” such as a restaging of 9/11 (122). He argues that the “conceit of real-life simulation” has been a staple of game mods for several decades. Reality is also a staple of traditional games that are based on increasingly more representative “real-world” maps. He defines this as apolitical because, as opposed to cinema, reality is not a political import. He thus dismisses reality versus fiction as a useless classification for gaming. Considering the very political hype around increasingly high verisimilitude violent video games, is this dismissal productive? I am skeptical that a game reconstructing the events of 9/11 is necessarily rejecting the traditional narrative tradition of video games in favor of a “real life scenario.” Where does his term “simulation” fit into the debate between reality/fiction?