Alfie Bown (HSMC, Hong Kong) The PlayStation Dreamworld: Automatism and Videogames I am currently working on a book on the psychoanalysis of videogames and this paper will be the first presentation of one of the book’s main ideas: an analysis of the ‘repetitious automatism’ found in the enjoyment of videogaming. Three contemporary philosophers stand out for me as proving that technology and consciousness can no longer be discussed separately and that the resonances of not recognizing this could be politically disastrous. These writers are Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Srećko Horvat and Steven Shaviro. All three have tried to show that what we think of as the virtual world – computers, simulated AI, VR, the internet, etc – have not just successfully copied, emulated and replaced ‘real’ humans but that human consciousness, identity and subjectivity is ‘mutating’ (Bifo) ‘evolving’ (Horvat) and being ‘disrupted’ (Shaviro) by technological advances. In short, this paper argues that the repetitious patterns found in videogames disrupt, mutate and evolve consciousness. Gaming, no longer the realm of youth and alternative cultures, is now part of the formation of consciousness. The number of users of PC, console and mobile games combined is expected to reach 1.65 billion worldwide by 2020, which is considerably more than 20% of the global population. This data is very conservative, and it is probably reasonable to estimate that over half of the world’s population is already gaming in some form. Of course, the rates are even higher among the next generation – a generation who will have a consciousness very much constructed by videogames. This paper explores this political re-structuring of consciousness via Lacanian discussions of repetition, showing how it is that videogames, a unique form of art and performance, affect the future of cognition. Alfie Bown is assistant professor of literature at HSMC, Hong Kong. He is the author of Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism and his PhD was on laughter and was examined by Mladen Dolar. He is the editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books and the series editor of the Everyday Analysis book series.
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