The Game: A Digital Turning Point

by Alessandro Baricco, Clarissa Botsford (Translator)

Overview

Fourteen years after the publication of his cult classic I Barbari, Baricco returns in The Game to the topic of change, in a journey that maps out the transformations that the digital revolution has wrought upon the landscape of human experience. From Space Invaders to the PlayStation, from Windows 95 to the conundrum of artificial intelligence, Baricco traces the trajectory of a revolution in the way we think, feel, and communicate - and seeks to discover what it might actually mean for our future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952119125
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Alessandro Baricco is one of Italy's most versatile contemporary writers and public intellectuals. Known first for his bestselling novels Land of Glass (1991 Italy's Prix Medicis and Campiello Prize winner), Ocean Sea (1993) and Silk (1996, translated into 16 languages), Baricco has also had a prolific career as television host of cultural programs, as a playwright, and essayist. His fourth non-fiction book The Barbarians (2006) tackled the relationship between writing and the digital cultural revolution. In his latest book The Game (2018), Baricco has returned to this topic enlarging his perspective to the impact of the digital revolution on humanist thought and culture at large. The book represents an intellectual preface to the principles that Baricco has applied to the Academy program of the Holden School of Contemporary Humanities that he founded in 1994 in Turin (Italy).

Editorial Reviews

A prolific European master.”
—Publishers Weekly

“With The Game Baricco is betting on the success of the human being in the 21st century. His theses are brilliant and very daring. They deserve an open discussion.”
—Nicola Lagioia, la Repubblica


“Baricco plays the role of historiographer, anthropologist and even cartographer embarking on a work of reconstruction and research with truly exhausting dimensions and insights of rare brilliance.”
—Wired, Italy

“Are our Big Tech overlords rewiring our brains? Do they know precisely how, or what the end result will be? Who can guide us through this territory with the appropriate mixture of slyness and sure-footedness, delight and terror, with subtle and jarring insights arriving at the rate of at least one per paragraph? The answers, respectively, are absolutely, absolutely not, and Alessandro Barrico.”
—Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker

From the Publisher