r-echos

GAM3R 7H30RY

Suppose there is a business in your neighborhood called The Cave™. It offers, for an hourly fee, access to game consoles in a darkened room. Suppose it is part of a chain. The consoles form a local area network, and also link to other such networks elsewhere in the chain. Suppose you are a gamer in The Cave™. You test your skills against other gamers. You have played in The Cave™ since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: “Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere.” The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave™ provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Yours is the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours.

McKenzie Wark
posted: 5/20/2006

You would not believe how many times i rewrote this opening section, but i know from previous experience that there’s probably some really dumb-ass mistakes here still. So feel free to leave comments over here, about form or content!

Comments on Version 1.1 are now closed.
The discussion continues at Version 2.0.

(Via if:books.)

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Categories: electronic culture
Tags: cave, fiction, game, reality, theory, video game

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Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 1:55 am
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R-Echos

Since 2004, R-Echos is an experimental online magazine dedicated to republication; topics vary from biology to graphic design, from ecology to business. It agglomerates anything which is about art, computing, science. His form is made out of collages of texts, links, images, references, videos and sounds - choosen with care to take part to this very personnal publication.

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R-Echos issue 1 An experiment in the economics of production: how can we shift focus from consumption of a finished product to investment in the processes of design, print & production? This is a poster and a text: an analog R-Echos Would you be interested in investing in the tangible production of this work? 1. You can download the digital archive and [...] Continue your reading of R-Echos issue 1 July 23rd, 2008 Categories: Feature, Offline Products, edition, electronic culture, magazines


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