However, as her first book, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, published in 1994, shows, she was similarly interested in how globalized media events were experienced on a personal level. From the beginning of her career, Wark was interested in the role that media played in an increasingly globalized world and the path forward for critical theory at the end of the Cold War. In the fifteen years since its publication, the civic, media, and entertainment worlds have gone through enormous changes, from the further mainstreaming of reactionary politics to the near total financialization of culture, making the analysis presented in Gamer Theory even more valuable today than it was at the time of its writing.īorn in Newcastle, Wark studied communications and media theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and received her PhD from Murdoch University in Western Australia. Built on a foundation of digital and networked logistical control, gamespace cannot be escaped, and we all must play by its rules whether we like it or not. 1 In the text, Wark argues that our world, the overdeveloped world, has adopted the language and often the structure of games, and can now be understood as a “gamespace” that stretches its influence across the entire planet. Published in 2007, McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory was one of the first monograph-length critical examinations of how video games have shaped, and been shaped, by contemporary political and economic culture.
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