The Social Text as Digital Gamespace; or, what I learned from playing Spore

The meaning of video games is in their playing, in
performance, which involves searching for signs
of intelligence—human and machine-mediated—with
which to collaborate or compete in making meanings.
This happens in textual interpretation of all kinds, but the
process is foregrounded and dramatized in video games
in ways that make them useful models for textual scholarship,
editing, and interpretation, considered in terms
of scholarly content management systems or socially
networked knowledge sites. For example: what I learned
from playing Will Wright’s sim-everything game, Spore,
is the importance of building asynchronous “pollination”
systems that encourage complex improvisation by way
of feedback loops, afford the search for and collaboration
with others (via their creations), the continual re-editing
of shared materials, and preserve, track, and allow
for the analysis of multiple individual edits.