“Social Games”: Playing Our Part in the Systems Epoch
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Published:April 2016
This chapter focuses on modern games and the game-like order of things in the systems epoch. The chapter centers on form games, war games, and social games. It shows how games have a central place in modern social systems, what they look like, and how they work. Game theory is examined as a way of modeling modernity and as one of its symptoms. The relays between game and world in the official world is examined in several different scenes, including Patricia Highsmith’s suspense novel Ripley’s Game, anime-based film, and a range of realist fiction (William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser) and recent artwork. These scenes provide a way to map these games, their rules and their media--and the social field they at once model and realize
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