The precise character of this cut is what is at stake in the difference between videogame and metagame. Numbers level the playing field and, in the process, reduce play to what can be measured, what can be cut. Videogames are not simply equipment for sequencing, serializing, and scoring the performance of various actors (both human and nonhuman alike), but in the process of measuring analog play in terms of digital rules they also enact a necessary comparison or competition. The cut of competition, which sociologist and game theorist Roger Caillois (2001, 12) calls “ agon, ” also makes games possible.
If exchange is contingent on comparison and comparison requires the individuation of otherwise undifferentiated matter-the cut that differentiates quantitative measure from qualitative movement-then cutting characterizes capital. Whereas the topographies of trade and travel mapped the movements of Empire on a continental territory, the smooth surface of the sea was also dissected and differentiated by capital. Earth is not a desert planet, but a water world whose surface is traced by trade winds and shipping lanes-ecological phenomena labeled according to their geopolitical role, rather than the relation of atmosphere to lithosphere. According to the logic of combat and capital in the sixteenth century, current and currency have been wed to each other for hundreds of years. Since the Age of Sail, the Earth’s oceans have operated as a technology for trade. The infrastructure and ideology supporting these kinds of bit torrents is not new. Even a hundred years before the TAT-1 telephone line was engineered in 1956, the first transatlantic telegraph cables were already descending to the depths of the ocean. Well before the TAT-8 fiber optic cable was dragged across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1988, the deep sea had already been bisected by American and British business. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game They’re watching fragments-not the game itself but derivatives of the game-and responding, so far as I can tell, not at all. I’m watching the whole game, and responding the way an ordinary fan responds. . . . I realize I am not only watching the game differently but am watching a different game. . . . Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Waugh, what do both baseball and business need? Someone to keep the books.
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