Less of a game, then, and more of a gamete - at least for that moment. To think now, that all the genius, all the singular agony of the work, was condensed into just a few million lines of alphanumeric shorthand, is as hard to comprehend as the information required to build a human being archived in the chemical broth at the heart of a cell. Only when this art was sullied with our own digital hands, could it be real. Only when that box was opened, could we know if the cat was Garfield. A sealed box, if you will, containing a cat. 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. 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. Could we call it a text, perhaps? Possibly - but one that can only be considered complete in the act of its being engaged with. It’s heartbreaking, really, to resort to a term so crude as “game” to describe Garfield Kart Furious Racing. And indeed, in writing as a critic, I expand the work yet further. In a sense, then, I am reviewing my own work - for in engaging with GKFR, I became one of its authors.
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 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. I cannot say, in truth, that I played Garfield Kart Furious Racing.
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