Our Present Misfortune: Games and the Post-bureaucratic Colonization of Contingency

Resumo

Anthropology is turning toward a new engagement with a
central question of Weber: how do people come to understand the distribution
of fortune in the world? Our discipline’s recent examination of
the uses of the past prompts us to ask how stances toward the future are
both the product of cultural logics and the target of institutional interests.
In this article, I trace the engagement with contingency in anthropology
and social thought, and then compare the nonchalant stance toward the
future found in Greek society with the different disposition of individual
gaming mastery in the digital domain, such as in Second Life, but also
in the longest-running Greek state-sponsored game: Pro-Po. These examples
illustrate how games are increasingly the sites for institutional efforts
both to appropriate creativity and to generate distinctive subjectivities.