The pitch of the book
A playful method to radically transform our old world that he judges out of breath: it is the proposal of Playtime – How play changes the world*.
And the author to take innovative paths in the criticism of our societies Western as well as Eastern. It’s both fundamentally ambitious, utterly revolutionary and utterly bonkers in the eccentric sense. Aurélien Fouillet advises a “Journey through the playful mutations of our time” with three major findings.
Hang on:
- First, the game will replace “work as a social and cultural dynamic”.
- He is then a “symptom of the end of modern societies”.
- Finally, this game aims, in its many forms and expressions, to forge “the worlds to come (…), to experience other lives and other worlds”.
This is, for the author, what the game allows and “this is what the game has already changed in our lives”.
Some 200 pages follow where the author demonstrates that the revolution can (must!) pass through play, the only instrument capable of deconstructing our self-destructing world.
Brandishing the banner of revolt, Fouillet goes around what his generation (he was born in 1982 and is a pure representative of generation Z) and the others are undergoing and considers to be in “failure of stories and imaginations” who would tell us “the hows and whys” and would tell us “what is the real”.
“Playtime. How the game transforms the world”, by Aurélien Fouillet, Les Pérégrines editions, October 2022, 200 pages, 19 euros.
Board games, video games, cosplay, zombie walks, superhero films, social networks, metaverse, or even telecommuting, playful seminars, or phenomena of effervescence such as conspiracy, or fake news, are all signs of what gambling does to our lives.
1/ A plea to place the game at the center of the system
Aurélien Fouillet is the advocate of a cause: to change our old world, our old ways of doing things, work, our habits. He recalls that the latter have the major disadvantage of destroying the habitat in which we live. It will not be a question here of the end of the Earth but of the destruction of its human inhabitants and a few others.
Faced with these major challenges, gambling is a solution. His “Pervasiveness in our daily practices is the manifestation of a transformation. What structured our lives (family, work, ideology, religion.) is heckled, deconstructed, questioned and is, most of the time, not yet replaced”.
It could be through play and “new contemporary playful practices”. For Fouillet, “all this is proof that a model of society is dying and that an infinity of others are being tested” with the game whose vocation is “to demonstrate that other worlds exist. It is the end of the universal and the beginning of the plural – plural loves, gender fluidity, diverse worlds, alternative zones”.
Labor no longer works and is no longer worthy. The game offers an escape, a set of worlds where everything becomes possible. And in which we reweave what makes a common work.
To support his demonstration, Fouillet offers a series of “levels” to reach, video game style.
2/ What the game has transformed in our lives
The first level proposed by Fouillet explains how the game has slowly infiltrated the interstices of our lives to become an important element. “The difference between work and leisure seems to be blurring”, he says. It is then necessary to mention a “society at stake”.
Neither work nor simple leisure, “the game is a subversion and an overcoming”. Because in “rationalizing the world, our societies have demagnified it, disenchanted it “.
Insulating us from each other, our system “has standardized our experience to the world. The game then allows you to romanticize your life, to define a world to live. The game is therefore a story that makes the world”.
The game is also a “response to boredom, social anxiety, consequence of rationalization which produces individualism and disenchantment”. The contemporary game then makes it possible to build “a fiction factory, a manufacture of fictions” to “shaping new worlds”.
3/ What gambling affects in our daily lives
Fouillet warns us against entertainment technologies that are too invasive. Because this has the effect that the object takes “a certain power over us”thus bringing us closer to the forecasts of a certain George Orwell and his 1984.
This is the case with ready-to-use technologies such as plug and play. “The tool has become a toy”. It’s no more “a technical mastery but a technical future” with “invisibilization of technology” who we “deprives of the understanding of objects”.
Fouillet offers many examples of dangers that await us, each more chilling than the other. It goes from “ads targeted by algorithms that serially read our conversations” to “Chinese social credit which grants companies, residents and citizens of the country a capital of points that can be amended according to their compliance or not with the laws…”. A danger staged in the Nosedive episode of the series black-mirror.
The Big Brothers are in place: “overwhelmed with algorithms and tweets, unable to understand or explain how things work, we are at the stage of bullshit jobs and bullshit lives”.
What to do then? “It is not irreversible”answers Fouillet… For him, it is necessary “romance our techniques, develop slow life and low tech”. In a formula that could not be more romantic, Fouillet exclaims: “the algorithm destroys the beautiful and the autonomous because it standardizes. It is bound to produce repetition and limit our choices..
In short, we must “reinjecting beauty into industry…”, produce common narratives, spaces for translation and get us out of this dangerous playful technology.
4/ What must be invented to change the world
At the end of this quest, Aurélien Fouillet proposes a methodology for “inventing other worlds and other stories”. We stop everything and think. The idea is to develop, through play, subversive alternatives.
“The game can herald the era of uprisings” to fight against “predator fever”of our modern economies and societies which are developing a “destructive comfort: pollution, overpopulation, pandemics, industrial incidents”…
“The idea that imaginaries structure the world and our behavior has become mainstream”. We must now ensure that the game becomes “a tool of protest”… In this end of a world, the author calls for the recreation of other worlds via play.
It’s the sign that we need to tell stories to make worlds livable, desirable, pleasant, playable.
PODCAST The author interviewed at Zoom-zoom-zen
To listen again, an interview with Aurélien Fouillet on France Inter from October 14, 2022 where he details in particular the notion of enromancement, at the heart of the spirit of the game.