Escaping from the Twentieth Century: on <em>The Game</em>, the digital revolution, and other catastrophes

Abstract

Librarians and scholars have been among the firsts to reach out and describe the new world of the digital revolution – the Game, as Alessandro Baricco calls it. Reading The game will therefore offer an opportunity to reconsider ourselves as librarians, scholars, citizens. In this docufiction, conte philosophique, tale, autobiography, Baricco describes the age of the game as an anthropological mutation. The new man is a hybrid, a creature-keyboard-screen: half a human being, half a product of contemporary Capitalism. And yet, this word, ‘capitalism’, never appears in The game (as underlined by the authors of the ‘sequel’, The game unplugged). As a matter of fact, ‘capitalism’ is a term strictly connected to the 20th Century, the old world. The inhabitants of the Game are immigrants: they have escaped from the old world, they are looking for new values in the ‘land of opportunities’, in the digital world.