On GAM3R 7H3ORY: the networked book

I’ve been engaged by the construction of the GAM3R 7H3ORY book, published by the Institute for the Future of the Book and labeled a networked book.

It’s clearly a book, with a strong linear text, though it is divided and displayed paragraph by paragraph rather than page by page.

The paragraphs theoretically could be clicked on out of sequence, but the text would be defeated by that action, I think. One navigation method is to click next and previous arrows (not labeled as such; just left and right). You’ll find a lot of theory, description, linear logic here that seems to require sequential reading. Maybe that’s me. Maybe these are more isolated expressions than I realize. But the text would not seem out of place being published in print or in some journal, I think.

So the novel feature is the book’s appearance as a sort of all-at-once blog, since every part has appeared at once and every numbered chunk has comment capabilities.

This is termed interactivity by some. I don’t know. Still: A serious text, published in a format designed to elicit comments by readers — this is new territory, since every subsequent reader has access to the initial text and to comments, improvements, criticisms, tangents and so on contributed by the body of readers-who-came-before, all incorporated into the, um, corpus.

This is definitely not the same as “I wrote it, they published it, individuals read and reviewed it, readers purchased it and shared their comments (some of them) with others in readers’ circles.” Even a few days after publication, there are plenty of contributions and perhaps those of Ray Cha, Dave Parry and Ben Vershbow* are inseparable now from the initial comments of author McKenzie Wark, since I read them not after the fact but co-terminously (word? not “simultaneously” but “at the same time”). My own perception of the author’s ideas is shaped by the collaborating readers’ ideas even before it has solidified. What the author has to say has broadened almost immediately into what the book has to say.

This is new.

Don’t ask me what it means. A networked book. Obviously, within the blog form we have constructions in which those collaborators shape the author’s expressions, not just follower readers’ perceptions. I haven’t seen such with the heft and sweep of the ideas in GAM3R 7H3ORY, however. I don’t expect a blog, even published as an e-book or print book, would have such a tight construction and as substantial a discussion of the ideas as we see here. We’ll have to see more such networked books to get a real sense of them, I think.

Here’s a reduced-size screen capture of the opening of chapter 2, Allegory.