Play (for) Time

Abstract

Through their deployment of interactivity, virtualisation and simulation, videogames are prime examples of the contemporary form of what philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, has termed the industrial temporal object. The experiences produced by these media are constituted in the course of the flux of the interior consciousness of the individuals engaged in following—and in the interactive era, in co-producing—the flux of their unfolding. Consequently they are at the very crux both of the individual’s own development in relation to the exterior milieu and in the mutual dynamic of individual and collective becoming that is mediated by shared experience. This paper proceeds from the conviction that a principal tendency of this crucial influence is readable in the preemptive, anticipatory temporalisation constituted in the play-time associated with mainstream videogames in their conventional, designed adoption. I offer some reflections on the challenge to individual and cultural becoming associated with this tendency toward a preemptive comportment to time. I will argue that the ludic industrial temporal object exemplifies a wider tendency toward the radical destabilization of the dynamic of individuation happening at the always technical and prosthetic nexus of the “and” between individual and collective.