This is the transcript of the talk I gave at this year’s Theorizing the Web Conference in New York City. I know there is a video recording from teh conference circulating somewhere, but I had to cut out some of the depth to fit the talk into the time permitting. Consider this the directors cut. It’s an attempt at not going to deep into theory while dealing with a very theoretical problem. A more detailed and “academic” version of this will find its way into a journal article in the next year or so. Hope you enjoy!
So last year Eric Zimmerman, a game designer and professor at the NYU Game Center wrote a manifesto for a ludic century. The points he makes lead one towards a conception of the 21th century as the century defined by games at the cultural, communicative and political level. Games become all
This presentation is a gesture towards what a materialist theory of a “ludic century” is. The goal here isn’t so much to debunk such visions as “bourgeois fantasies” or “idealist utopianism” but rather to make sense of the tendencies that Zimmerman has seen in our society and what that might mean for both an analytic understanding of such a system as well as a political one. This is then an entirely a priori materialist theory of a ludic century.