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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is - to borrow a phrase from Slavoj & #381i& #382ek - the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace - a powerful arena for constructing our desires - or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.
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Seitenzahl: 139
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments and Note on the Games
Acknowledgments
Note on the Games
Dedication
Tutorial: The Pokémon Generation
Credits
Level 1 From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland: Gaming and Capitalism
Work and Play
Cultures of Distraction
Pastoral Dystopia, Apocalyptic Utopia
No Alternative
Credits
Level 2 Dreamwork: Cyborgs on the Analyst’s Couch
Japanese Dreams, American Texts
The Dreamworld
Repetitions and the Dromena
Immersion and Westworld
Credits
Level 3 Retro Gaming: The Politics of Former and Future Pleasures
Rational Gaming in the 1990s
Virtual/Reality
Subject, Object, Enjoyment
Jouissance in the Arcades
Credits
Bonus Features: How To Be a Subversive Gamer
Credits
Game Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Theory Redux
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
The Playstation Dreamworld
Alfie Bown
polity
Copyright © Alfie Bown 2018
The right of Alfie Bown to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station Landing, Suite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1806-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Bown, Alfie, author.Title: The PlayStation dreamworld / Alfie Bown.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Series: Theory redux | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017010123 (print) | LCCN 2017038696 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518050 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509518067 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509518029 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509518036 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Video games--Social aspects. | Virtual reality--Social aspects. | Dream interpretation. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies.Classification: LCC GV1469.34.S52 (ebook) | LCC GV1469.34.S52 B75 2017 (print) | DDC 794.8--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010123
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments and Note on the Games
Acknowledgments
First I want to thank my wife Kim for all the hours of co-playing and co-analysis. Second, thanks are due to some brilliant editors, Rob Horning at The New Inquiry, Julian Feeld at Outermode, Aaron Schuster at Cabinet, and Jerome Roos at ROAR. These people provided me with platforms for discussions of politics and technology and allowed me to trial some of the ideas found in this book. Thanks also to Srećko Horvat for giving me a concrete theory of subversion, and to Laurent de Sutter for his help and support with the book. Special thanks are due to Mark Fisher, who passed away during the production of the manuscript, for inspiration. Finally, thanks to my dad for my Sega Game Gear in 1994.
Note on the Games
For philosophers, texts are referenced in the endnotes academically. For gamers, titles are referenced by the console I considered most relevant to the discussion and by the year of initial release, not by the original platform on which they appeared.
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (1926)
TutorialThe Pokémon Generation
I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.
Groucho Marx
Putting on the VR headset, turning on the Nintendo, or entering the PlayStation Network, even visiting the Google Play Store, is something like how it might have felt to enter a Parisian arcade or a London department store in the mid-nineteenth century. It is an experience of promised wish-fulfillment, of reverie, and of dreamlike hallucination. It is also an experience of shock, a bombardment of images which is thrilling, overwhelming, and intoxicating all at once. When fully immersed in this world of images, the gamer enters a trancelike state, as if half-awake, making decisions and movements that can be described neither as fully conscious nor as properly unconscious. It is the nineteenth century that has often been described as “the age of intoxication,” but it is now, via our phones, consoles, VR headsets, and computers, that life is really more dreamlike than ever.
This book’s title is psychoanalytic, asking for a dream analysis of gaming, but it is also Benjaminian. For Walter Benjamin, the dream was less something imagined when asleep in bed at night or when recounted later (as psychoanalysis would insist), but something experienced when walking in the modern space, when exploring the city and taking in its endless barrages of signs and signifiers. In the age of technological entertainment and infinite distraction, people are in this state many times each day, absorbed in a reverie in front of a screen, but these apparently temporary experiences are usually dismissed as apolitical or supplementary. Instead believing this kind of reverie to be one of the defining characteristics of modern life, this book asks what patterns can be found in this intoxicating cyber dreamworld, and what impressions and what politics we are left with when we re-emerge from it, waking from our reverie and returning to “reality”?
To get straight to the point, there are three arguments that run throughout the book. First, the book argues that the world of videogames can only be fully understood via the analysis of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The reader will probably need a fair bit of convincing of this, and probably of its importance. Second, it argues that any potential attempt at subversion needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful force in constructing our dreams and desires – or else the dreamworld will fall into the hands of the corporations and the state. The discourses of the capitalist corporation are already taking a firm hold in cyberspace (which is increasingly indistinguishable from space itself) and as such this argument is not exclusively for those interested in psychoanalysis, nor only for those who play videogames, but for anyone concerned by the future politics of technology. Finally, the book attempts to show the subversive potential of videogaming by revealing how dialectically ideological and disruptive the enjoyment of videogames can be. With technological entertainment, a revolution of desire is taking place and what Jean-François Lyotard called the “desirevolution” is now in full swing. Who the victors of this revolution will be remains to be decided.
One impeccable example makes visible the obfuscated relationship between technology and politics: Microsoft’s creation of the tweeting AI bot Tay in March 2016. Tay was a prototype robotic human, designed to tweet as a human would. For a short time, Tay appeared to be a great success, responding to people’s questions with reasonable and apparently thoughtful answers, but it was not long before Tay began to tweet racist, overtly sexual, and misogynist replies. Among her tweets was the following advocacy of the Donald Trump campaign:
bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.
Tay consisted of an algorithm using anonymized publicly available data as its primary source, so to a certain extent she can be said to have reflected the kinds of ideas being expressed in the wider internet community (indeed she seems to have prophetically anticipated them). In a more abstract sense, she also showed the political relationship between what could be termed the left, the right, and the corporate center. She was designed by a corporate powerhouse to be a stride forward in the development of AI with human-like subjectivities, which is one of the most well-funded areas of research in the US today. She then turned against her creators and by the end of the day Microsoft made the decision to remove Tay from the internet.
First, this reveals the politics of cyberspace that must be made visible. Far from being an unregulated and democratizing space for the sharing of information (as early proponents of the internet had claimed), state and corporate actors regulate the space very closely. Second, it gives us a glimpse into what can only semi-jokingly be referred to as the ideology of robots, showing that as things stand algorithms are quickly and easily mobilized for political conservatism and ideologies of repression and hatred. Gilles Deleuze wrote that “machines are social before being technical,” and since they are always-already social, they always have their politics.1 When something ruptures at the center, cyberspace is structured in favor of what is currently referred to as the “alt-right,” much as the fractured political center in Europe and the US today has provoked a strong rise of the far-right rather than gains for radical or subversive politics. The right always seems to know how to use new media to its advantage. Hundreds of users “fed” Tay with racist and misogynist insults which she learned and repeated, showing an immediate preparedness to think algorithmically and mobilize the machine. Subversives, on the other hand, find themselves paralyzed by technophilia. If there is any truth in Donna Haraway’s famous claim that “we are cyborgs” and that “the cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics,”2 and if Tay is a glimpse into this cyborgian future, we can add that the politics of the cyborg are in danger.
The videogame world is a space that constructs and transforms our dreams and desires. Similarly, it is one dominated by conformist trends which tend toward conservatism, protectivism, a fear of “crisis,” and either support for the core values of the current capitalist climate or endorsement of a return to the values of the imaginary past (a yearning which serves nationalism and populism). This is especially concerning, given the degree to which the space could influence the consciousness of the next generation. Among others, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Srećko Horvat, and Steven Shaviro have increasingly tried to show how those areas that humans think of as the virtual world – computers, simulated AI, VR, AR, the internet, etc. – have not just successfully copied and replaced real humans but that human consciousness, identity, and subjectivity are “mutating” (Bifo), “evolving” (Horvat), and being “disrupted” (Shaviro) as a result of these technological advances. Ultimately, the experience of gaming can make these mutations and their politics visible.
The repetitious patterns found in videogames and mobile-phone applications gradually disrupt, mutate, and evolve consciousness in significant and usually obscured ways. Gaming, no longer the realm of youth and alternative cultures, affects even those who did not grow up playing Nintendo. Mobile-phone gaming has a 56 percent penetration rate in the US, and there will be over 200 million US mobile-phone gamers by 2018. The number of users of PC, console, and mobile games combined is expected to reach 1.65 billion worldwide by 2020, which is considerably more than 20 percent of the global population. This data is very conservative, given that it includes only paid games and downloads and not the millions of free online forms of gaming available to users, so it is probably reasonable to estimate that over half of the world’s population is already gaming in some form. Far from being the realm of the privileged, mobile gaming has penetrated the entire planet and is rapidly growing on every continent. Of course, the rates are even higher among the next generation.
This book is therefore not about “gamers” but about the effects of new technology on a global population. When the question of whether computers will ever have consciousness arises, it is mistakenly assumed that human consciousness is a constant “original” which computers will either “copy” or fail to “copy.” In fact, the distinction is far less sustainable, and human consciousness is already becoming computerized. This book is concerned with the question of what consciousness to come is shown by virtual reality and by gaming. It is therefore in some ways indebted to McKenzie Wark’s influential idea that it is less a question of games becoming like reality but of reality becoming like games.3 The dialectic interplay between reality and the virtual is a site at which the future can become visible.
Technology moves at a very quick pace. Hundreds of new games appear on our phones, consoles, and computers every week, each of which promises a new experience of enjoyment. Speaking of this appearance of incessant newness, Shaviro writes:
Our society seems to function, as Ernest Bloch once put it, in a state of “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was.”4
In many ways Bloch’s comments ring truer than ever today. Yet, in a society which can be described as characterized by endless changeability, in which it appears that newness is generated every day, it becomes less clear what real concrete structural change looks like. Real fundamental changes to both social and economic relations, when they do occur in a society such as this, can appear to be nothing more significant than yet more of this incessant changeability in which, it seems, everything ultimately remains the same. The technologically new is embraced and accepted unquestionably because of familiarity with this kind of incessant innovation, but this means that actual transformations to the social and economic order can occur under the radar. This is what is happening with entertaining technology today, which enacts a revolution and reorganization of desire, enjoyment, and ultimately consciousness itself, whilst appearing to be nothing other than yet more of the same old newness.
One “videogame” that can hardly be unknown even to the readers who are least prone to gaming, Pokémon GO (iOS and Android, 2016), hints at this book’s three main arguments. Far from being just the latest “fad” of 2016, the game is part of a mutation in contemporary consciousness. Further, it demonstrates the corporate and establishment structures that are served by technological entertainment, and it even suggests how a potentially subversive edge might be found in even the most hegemonic and corporate of gaming experiences.
The development of Pokémon GO
