The Game of the World: A Timely Topic
The Game of the World conceives of the dawn of the twenty-first century, in which technological transformations generate a world of playable worlds. Forced by a pandemic, we invest in ways to play a part in the world without leaving our homes.
We can observe that playing games is not only for leisure any more. It is also for work, health and wealth. Even war and love become played online through games in cyberspace. The play of who wins and who loses becomes widely played among the competitors contesting polemical elections, court cases, gambling casinos, beauty pageants, school assignments, television shows, research grant applications, performance reviews, stock market exchanges, and awards of noble and desired prizes. Radio, television, film, games; it all plays. Playful users play their audio, video and multimedia players. All our games are globally played on the World Wide Web and streamed on our displays ready to play. As if in generalised indifference, all becomes virtually and actually playable via Google Play, YouTube’s play button, and other global players. When we play our games in the metaverse, what becomes of the universe? Where are we moving to when we are scrolling and clicking? Are we continually falling when we are continually swiping? Are we homeless on our homepages and playless at our PlayStations when moving backwards, forwards, upwards, downwards, inwards, outwards, in all directions? Aren’t we erring as through an endless playground? Isn’t the illuminated display breathing at us, chilling us? In our erring, in our playing, we are searching for the worldwide game, but are we finding the unfindable play? What holy games did we invent for ourselves and do those games obscure from us our play? Is worldwide gamification played by the play of the world? Is the display of the worldwide worldlessness a play? While the gamer thinks to play worlds, it is the play of the world that games the gamer. Does the worldwide unification that fragmentises the world into the play of bits and bytes demand a worldwide thinking of fragmentary wholeness? Can this way of play place its focus on the play of plays? Humans, global players and worldwide gamers of planetary and virtual worlds in the metaverse - playing with as they are played by the post-human and the inhuman from which they cannot ever be fully distinguished - have yet to mature in the game of the world.This English translation of Le jeu du monde seeks to contribute to the current research in games and play by rendering Axelos’s thought more accessible for an English audience in an age where games of all kinds dominate the structuring of experience at every scale from the pre-personal to the super-planetary.
Through an active thinking of the becoming-planetary of the world as the fragmentary totality of being-in-becoming that deploys itself as play, and tracing such thought from the Presocratics through Socrates and Plato to contemporary philosophy, Axelos offers a unique perspective on the vicissitudes of our life and times. If habent sua fata libelli, perhaps ours is a moment in and for which Axelos’s unique book might enable us to play differently, to reconsider our fates as fetes.As Axelos may have said: we are all planetary thought now.
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