The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you’ve probably never heard of. While this year’s Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth — The Artist, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo — the most rapidly dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it’s a videogame. Continued →

1. An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian‘s Weekend magazine on March 10, 2012. ↩

At first, it will seem like an ordinary power cut. You look out your window, and see that the whole city is dark. Then you notice the distant rumbling in the sky, and flashes of light beyond the horizon. People in the streets below are climbing out of their immobilized cars, looking upwards. Peering into the night air, you see what seems like a flock of giant birds, which resolves into a geometric fleet of stubby-winged drone aircraft. The top of a distant building explodes into flames. At length you realize the drones are firing down on the city. There is a flash, closer this time, and the crescendo whine of incoming. Before your apartment is incinerated, you have time to think: Who is doing this? Continued →

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.¹ Continued →

1. This is the paper I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, Vienna 2008. It was subsequently published as a chapter in the book of conference proceedings, Edges of Gaming (Vienna, 2010). I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. ↩

For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this? Continued →

One evening, a week into his marriage, Marcel Duchamp stayed up late studying chess problems. The next day, he rose to find that his wife had glued the pieces to the board. From that moment, the marriage was doomed. The young Tolstoy, as a gunnery officer in the Caucasus, deserted his post one night in order to play a game of chess and was arrested; he thus missed out on the St George Cross he was due to be awarded the next day.

The deepest and most inexhaustible of western games has exerted a peculiar fascination for artists. Many of them have designed chess sets; a number of 20th-century examples are now on display in an exhibition at the Gilbert Collection in London’s Somerset House. Continued →

Thomas Pynchon’s career as one of the 20th century’s most elusive celebrities began in 1963. The 26-year-old’s first novel, V, received a rave review in the New York Times, and Time magazine dispatched a photographer to Mexico City, where the author lived. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out of his apartment window to evade the snapper, and took a bus to the mountains. From then on, he systematically evaded the public eye, refusing to talk to journalists or be photographed; he did not even turn up at the ceremony where Gravity’s Rainbow was honoured with the National Book Award in 1974.

And so the literary genius became a near-mythical figure, a counter-cultural shadow who could never be tracked down. Continued →