Games are everywhere. And not just on the football field. Workplaces, dating lives, education and even friendships are being packaged as games. Tinder makes love a swiping game of snap, AI claims to have solved long-standing scientific problems by ‘converting them into games’. But critics argue games distort life and empty it of meaning. And games can be dangerous. QAnon was created initially as an alternative reality game, and the world is not made safer by understanding military build up as ‘an arms race’.
Do we need to eradicate the relentless gamification of life? Should we recognise life has no clear goal, no way to win, no measures of success, no extra lives or second chances? Should we see games as furthering inequality – creating winners and losers? Or have games always been with us, from the system of money to the hierarchies of education, and for the very good reason that they are a remarkably powerful motivator for action?
World-leading philosopher Slavoj Žižek, radical internet personality Steven Bonnell, and bestselling author and psychologist Lisa Miller grapple with the gamification of life. Hosted by pioneering journalist Myriam François.
Slavoj Žižek is a Philosopher and Psychoanalytic social theorist. He is Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; Professor at the School of Law and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Distinguished Scholar at the Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and Visiting Professor at the German Department, New York University. His field of work comprises Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, dialectical-materialist metaphysical interpretations of German Idealism and Marxian critique of ideology. His more than sixty books in English have been widely translated. His latest publications include ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’, ‘Sex and the Failed Absolute’, ‘Like A Thief In Broad Daylight’, ‘Reading Marx’, ‘Incontinence of the Void’, ‘The Day After the Revolution’, ‘Heaven in Disorder’, ‘Reading Hegel’, ‘Surplus-Enjoyment’ and ‘Žižek Responds!’.
source