interactivity = shopping?: March 2006 Archives

Right now, I'm participating in the Breaking the Game symposium, in the Overclocking the City track. Here's a (slightly revised) version of my proposal:

"Overclocking is the practice of making a component run at a higher clock speed than the manufacturer's specification. The idea is to increase performance for free or to exceed current performance limits, but this may come at the cost of stability." {Wikibooks}

As a sociotechnical practice, overclocking emerges from a desire for success by the terms of technology marketing: the newest, the cheapest, the fastest. On the one hand, overclocking emerges from an obsession with speed and a desire to stress a system to its limits. Overclocking is an ambivalent act, bringing instability along with speed. On the other hand, overclockers deny the authority of the manufacturer to control the use of the hardware. Overclocking can be seen as creative misuse, voiding the warranty in an excess of imagination (which can include submerging computers in liquid nitrogen or heating oil). What would an overclocked public look like? A sped-up, fast-forward version of the present, with social connections made and dropped at ever higher rates? Ever more noise and ever less silence? Play not as pleasure but as highstakes test?

In game culture, overclockers are not necessarily the best players. Instead, they delve into the infrastructure that makes play possible. Overclockers are the plumbers of the infrastructure, tinkering with the cooling and heating mechanisms of a little city called the CPU. And as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation reminds us, "architecture is policy." And policy regulates action.

Looking at games and public spaces, overclocking appears as both a warning and an inspiration. Online games cannot be "public" in the old civic sense of public - they run on servers owned by individual or companies, using software licensed or bought. There is always a gateway to their entry. In Second Life, an online virtual world, inhabitants forced change on Second Life's owners by "publicly" protesting - setting their avatars on fire in locations frequented by newbies. They were able to do so because Second Life built that freedom to act into the architecture of their code. When we discuss the policies and actions in spaces that extend from the digital to the physical and back again, overclocking reminds us to look more closely at the infrastructures underlying play spaces, and question more closely the freedoms granted within their architectures.

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