On Numbers & the Gamification of Media
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In our contemporary culture, media of all kinds resort to numbers as the authoritative language to create data sets, analyse information and measure progress. The pursuit of measurable success is emphasised, with hard work being touted as the only path to achieving it. We can understand this through societal standards of success, which try to ensure that happiness is an objective measure and it exists someplace far in the future, promised only to those who work hard enough to achieve it.
While this culture of control persists, the world of chance and luck also thrives as casinos and online gambling platforms entice us with the allure of being able to strike it rich by getting lucky, even if the odds are often stacked against us.
These two dichotomous worlds are happening in parallel: the culture of control and the culture of chance. The former emphasizes the power of luck, fortune, and grace, while the latter emphasizes rationality and predictability. Numbers of the medium which mediates them both.
The allure of gambling and the culture of chance is rooted in human fascination with the apparent randomness and unpredictability of the universe. Gambling, in some ways, represents an attempt to impose order and predictability onto a chaotic system, by calculating odds and tracking wins and losses. The ability to predict and control the outcome of chance events, no matter how small, provides a sense of mastery and control in a world that often feels uncertain. In this sense, gambling could be considered the gamification of the universe itself. What humans perceive as randomness in the universe is turned into a structured event where we can measure the odds of a dice roll, roulette ball rolling into place or the odds of getting dealt the perfect poker hand.
Through the lens, we can see how all media has been gamified. The gamification of media and obsession with numbers as a tool to quantify the qualitative comes when value structures are determined through binary systems. For example, the ranking of films through a 1-10 number system, or the number of likes determining what content is perceived as “good” which gets better placement in the algorithm.
By examining the interplay between these two worlds through the lens of playing cards, we can uncover deeper truths about the nature of meaning and value. As McLuhan writes, the content of mediums always contains within them other mediums. As the content of writing is speech, the content of the games are the number. Playing cards naturally arise as being a good medium to convey these ideas, as cards are already symbols of games, gambling and the culture of chance and intrinsically use numbers within their function and structure.
Playing with a deck of cards is an inherently aesthetic experience because any card can essentially hold any possible value, depending on the rules of the game being played. As a player of the game, you lose sight of the virtually infinite different meanings the cards are able to hold simultaneously. This property of the medium of cards can bring truth to the ways these premises work in the external world with other objects or immaterial structures humans create through media.
The medium of cards is interesting to look at in this sense, as it opens a realm to understand the interplay of numbers, chance, and how strategy mirrors these dynamics. The medium of cards can bring truth to the ways these premises work, mediated through numbers, in the external world with other objects or immaterial structures humans create. We often forget about the background rules and regulations that are imposed on the world that create instantaneous affect: whether it be a physical reaction or immaterial phenomenon such as thoughts themselves. For example, the colours of traffic lights that regulate the road or even language itself. However, these value structures can be more nefarious, such as points or “like” systems of approval. They are imposed externally but alter our behaviour deeply. These types of value structures based on relationships and adjacencies rather than universal truths are very relevant to the ways ideologies function rhetorically in quotidian life.
The “Letters from Bookmakers” by James Peel (below) shows us the obvious absurdity that lies in the action of trying to quantify…
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Read more on some of these ideas, such as the relation of playing cards to life here.
All images taken from Cabinet Magazine issue #19.