Play (for) time

Crogan, Patrick

Abstract

Through their deployment of interactivity, virtualisation and simulation, videogames are prime examples of the contemporary form of what philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, has termed the industrial temporal object. The experiences produced by these media are constituted in the course of the flux of the interior consciousness of the individuals engaged in following—and in the interactive era, in co-producing—the flux of their unfolding. Consequently they are at the very crux both of the individual’s own development in relation to the exterior milieu and in the mutual dynamic of individual and collective becoming that is mediated by shared experience. This paper proceeds from the conviction that a principal tendency of this crucial influence is readable in the preemptive, anticipatory temporalisation constituted in the play-time associated with mainstream videogames in their conventional, designed adoption. I offer some reflections on the challenge to individual and cultural becoming associated with this tendency toward a preemptive comportment to time. I will argue that the ludic industrial temporal object exemplifies a wider tendency toward the radical destabilization of the dynamic of individuation happening at the always technical and prosthetic nexus of the “and” between individual and collective.

• Conference Name: Homo Ludens 2.0.
• Start Date: Nov 17, 2010
• End Date: Nov 18, 2010
• Online Publication Date: Feb 18, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 26, 2015
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 22, 2016
• Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 225-244
• Book Title: Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures
• Chapter Number: 12
• ISBN: 9789089646392
• Keywords: videogames, technoculture, Bernard Stiegler, Johann Huizinga
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/804085
• Publisher URL: http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089646392-playful-identities.html
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : Homo Ludens 2.0.
• Contract Date: Feb 22, 2016