A critique of leftist gaming

Abstract

This article presents a discussion between Jan De Vos and Alfie Bown on leftist gaming. Bown wrote a well-read and well-referenced book entitled The Playstation Dreamworld (2018a) in which he also advanced the idea of the necessity to develop gaming for the left. In his book The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity (2020), De Vos challenged and critiqued the concept of leftist gaming in a chapter entitled ‘Digital Mass Effects’. In this article, Alfie Bown introduces the discussion after which Jan De Vos rehearses the main arguments of his book, adding a few extra elements to his critique. De Vos’s main question is whether the fact that digital technologies, historically underpinned by mainstream psychological theories, undermine Bown’s psychoanalytic project for leftist gaming. In his response, Bown then pleads to scrutinise not only the pre-digital history of coding but also the future of it, so as to rewrite the history of the digital infrastructure as inherently tied to the history of capitalism. De Vos closes this article with a brief afterthought.