Games and video games in two recent publications

It is finally published “Places”the unfinished book of Georges Perec where the literature of the self reinvents and advances the narrative and the form of video games, those that an outstanding lithuanobritanic researcher argues that the world is changing

Games

About fifty -first years ago, when video games did not yet exist, the French writer Georges Perec I worked in “Places”a book, novel, autobiography, tourist trip by Paris that today, among other things, can become a kind of video game.

He “Places” that is found in bookstores, offers twelve places where he passed, lived, PEREin two absolutely different versions: that of memories and that of the real concrete with photos, film programs, posters and other elements that give visual testimony of both the place and the time pass. Perec evidence how the site, the neighborhood, relations, the writing itself.

It is not allowed in your search for lost time, unlike Proustthe most admired model, the place is mixed with what happened and the fantasy. In this way, the traditional, conventional, autobiography formula, and recreates the literature of the self. That project, which unites the extraordinary with the “infraordinary”, was unfinished by the multiple activities of Perec, and his death at 46. It is usually argued that, as in the case of Chilean Roberto Bolaño, of having lived a few more years, the Nobel Prize for Literature would have been his. After chapters of “places” had been published in various ways, finally the set of the work appears.

Jointly now there is an increased and free digital version, with photos and maps, so that the reader (as in “Hopscotch” of Cortázar) You can schedule your own career, which can arrive by the combinatorial to “a route by one hundred thousand billion places.” Not long ago Dan Pinchabeck, creator of the video game “Dear Esther”, said that “only today you can enter a world so that no other means so far allowed to do it.” That Perec with “places” was already trying from literature, and today it would undoubtedly be a pioneer Gamer.

The thing is PERE He was a remarkable player in the most diverse leagues: novelist, storyteller, playwright, essayist, poet, screenwriter, filmmaker, creator of riddles, acrostics, lipograms, linguistic games. Awarded from his first novel “Las things” a sociological experiment (he was a companion of Roland Barthes in sociology) about consumerism and the couple in the sixties. From there he begins to work from formal and literary restrictions. “The Tiggage” (in Spanish “The kidnapping”) is a novel where the letter E is absent, the most use in French, and is a policeman and a complaint of the Holocaust. In the Consecration (Medicis Award) “Life, mode of employment” (in Spanish “Instructions for Use”) describes the ninety -nine departments and its inhabitants of a Paris building on June 23, 1975 shortly before eight o’clock at night. The tour follows the mathematical logical challenge “Horse problem” to pass through all the rooms, those who live there, their relatives and friends.

The use of mathematics in creation (to be able to write “places” dialogues with the mathematician Indra Chakravarti On the use of orthogonal Latin computing squares), of limitations as an impulse to creation, as well as their decision to never write two equal works, they would lead him to be part of the potential literature workshop (Oulipo) founded by Raymond Queneau and François le lionnaisand become its main emblem worldwide.

Georges Perec “Places” (Bs.As., Anagrama, 2025, 814 pages)

Video games

Provocative, controversial, challenging, Lithuanobritanic cultural criticism Marijam Didzgalvytiéargues that we cannot become distracted with video games because they are changing the world, they live in constant evolution and have concrete links with the economy, politics, art and culture, and already actively act in the universe of finance, education and medicine.

Remember that, although she was entertained with video games, her interest took an unexpected turn when in 2016 she read in a newspaper that the video game industry would exceed in revenue of music and cinema together. “I realized its importance, which had become the largest cultural and entertainment environment that exists (it brings together three billion gamers), and therefore we are not paying the attention it deserves from the sociological or anthropological political point of view or in which it concerns artistic and content criticism.”

Video games when demonstrating their potential as a business have transcended the initial stage of youthful infant entertainment, of mere hobby, to transform, on the one hand, into a tool for social interaction, training and even therapy, and on the other, in an instrument of provocation and ideological training, through the cult of sectarian confinement and violence by ultra -right formations. According to the researcher, who was president of communications at Game World International, players communities, video game forums and chat platforms such as Discord, for example, have served in many cases as a recruitment zone for the extreme right, which usually uses emblems that appear in the heroic fantasies of some video games.

In his work, Didzgalvyté It offers a wide panorama that goes from the history of video games, terminology and paradigmatic examples, to a current situation picture. Then go to the usual themes of video games, scripts and their narrative, characters and stereotypes, formulas to cause addiction and achieve both adhesion and maintain in social isolation. Market resistance to innovations does not cease to point out the situation of an industry that in its central domain is of high concentration. Check the political use and the possibilities of a change that drives objectives that affidence creativity and democratic spirit.

Marijam Didzgalvyté “How video games are changing the world” (Bs.As., Godot Editions, 2025, 276 pages.)