Gamers as machines

The passage that confused me was the part on page two when Galloway refers to gamers as machines.  He loses me when he says that he refers to games as the entire apparatus of video games.  Previously in the paragraph he refers to gamers as independent  agents but later implies that they are an integral part of a whole network.  After careful rereading however I understood that he meant that gamers are an independent part of a larger information network.