Cover Page

Theory Redux

Series editor: Laurent de Sutter

Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld

Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things

Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory

Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love

Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism

The Playstation Dreamworld

Alfie Bown











polity

Acknowledgments and Note on the Games

Acknowledgments

First I want to thank my wife Kim for all the hours of co-playing and co-analysis. Second, thanks are due to some brilliant editors, Rob Horning at The New Inquiry, Julian Feeld at Outermode, Aaron Schuster at Cabinet, and Jerome Roos at ROAR. These people provided me with platforms for discussions of politics and technology and allowed me to trial some of the ideas found in this book. Thanks also to Srećko Horvat for giving me a concrete theory of subversion, and to Laurent de Sutter for his help and support with the book. Special thanks are due to Mark Fisher, who passed away during the production of the manuscript, for inspiration. Finally, thanks to my dad for my Sega Game Gear in 1994.

Note on the Games

For philosophers, texts are referenced in the endnotes academically. For gamers, titles are referenced by the console I considered most relevant to the discussion and by the year of initial release, not by the original platform on which they appeared.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (1926)