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A 'Pataphysics Engine

Technology, Play, and Realities

University of the West of England, Bristol

This article plays a game with Jean Baudrillard's thought and the intellectual traditions on which it draws. Or rather, it plays Baudrillard's game but with a cheat code. The game or program here is the hyperreality of the contemporary world—Baudrillard's integral or virtual reality characterized by the dominance of things—of objects over subjects. The cheat code identifies and accentuates the development, application, and interconnection of theories of play, waste, technology, and multiple realities in aspects of 20th-century French avant-garde and social scientific thought and practice. It suggests ways in which everyday technoculture, not least videogame culture, can be addressed as at once playful and simulacral.

Key Words: play • technology • Baudrillard • Bataille • surrealism • Situationist International • ethnography • waste • videogames • realities • simulation • simulacra

Games and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 4, 392-404 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1555412007309534


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