Pavlo Khailo

Revision of Rules is a game model for a quintessential game, a pattern for gaming a game, so to speak. Its participants (white-collar workers) dictate the rules of economic games to the viewers, and invite the viewers to discuss the rules without changing them. At the same time, their actions in space are defined by the rules they have established for one another.

Agreement to follow the rules is the basic precondition of any game’s success. In point of fact, the option of discussing the rules is the basic difference between the game space and the quotidian space, where the rules are intuitively understood and dispersed in all processes to the point of being bracketed out of the space of discussion. Besides, game-like interactions provide key algorithms of engagement and motivation in the present-day economic and political reality. Gamification blurs the line between games and not-games, transforming playing from a liberating practice into yet another instrument of economic subjugation.

These instruments are created by white-collar workers (advertisers, communication specialists, IT workers, etc.), or, to resort to the term coined by Franco Bifo Berardi, “the cognitariat.” Contemporary economics demand creative output of them, and yet their output is not supposed to undermine the status quo. The conditions that resist problematization remain invisible. As the result, the energy and intellectual potential of the cognitariat are redirected towards creating new elements within the set parameters, defusing their knowledge as a potential agent of radical change.

In Reviewing the Rules, the participants engage in a daring experiment: they play themselves, albeit alienated by the exhibition space. The very term “performance” here gains an economic dimension, referring to productivity and efficiency rather than spectacle. For the participants, it is both a game (a possibility of new experience that allows to shed the routine) and work (an element of their day-to-day work schedule and a source of income).