Montag, 18. November 2019

Wot I Think: Garfield Kart Furious Racing

I cannot say, in truth, that I played Garfield Kart Furious Racing. In the plainest terms, I would say I participated in it: I offered my own myopic contribution, alongside millions of others, to form the baroque gestalt of the work as a whole. Because GKFR, you see, is a collaborative effort – directed, certainly, by its developers at Artefacts Studio, but only comprehensible as an ever-changing consensus between the game itself, its players, and its critics. In a sense, then, I am reviewing my own work – for in engaging with GKFR, I became one of its authors. And indeed, in writing as a critic, I expand the work yet further.

It’s heartbreaking, really, to resort to a term so crude as “game” to describe Garfield Kart Furious Racing. Could we call it a text, perhaps? Possibly – but one that can only be considered complete in the act of its being engaged with. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, by observing a phenomenon, we cannot help but change it – and never has this been more true than in the case of Garfield Kart Furious Racing. In the early hours of last Tuesday, as I and a thousand others waited for the 3am activation of our review copies, GKFR existed entirely in potentia: a few million lines of code, disembodied on some server in Northern California, waiting to be defined through our shared experience. A sealed box, if you will, containing a cat.

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