The Game by Alessandro Baricco
Artwork by Giovanni Pinotti
USERNAME, PASSWORD, PLAY!
"At the end of the '90s, someone pressed Play."
SOCIAL CHECKMATE
"What we ended up expecting from life is what we saw working in the practice of our small daily gestures: to make a phone call all I had to do was to touch a screen with my fingers and quickly choose from a limited number of options where a chaos of possibilities was brought back to a synthetic and even amusing order. [...] So, little by little, we all began [...] to adopt, as useful, the rule that any game could be played as long as we could place the pieces on that illuminated chessboard that is the surface of the world."
APPARENT SIMPLICITY
[Inspiration: "The illusion of the iceberg", F. Majore]
"With the eyes on that screen, and the fingers touching it, the impression was of accessing gestures that had been cleaned of any slag and that were offered, suddenly, in a sort of final, ultimate simplicity: the essential had risen to the surface, and everything else had been swallowed up in some invisible non-place. [...] It is an easy figure to recognise. An iceberg. An enormous complexity disappears under the surface of the water and the tiny useful heart of things floats to the surface."
ZERO-POSTURE
[Inspiration: "The Kiss", Propaganda Design]"The man-keyboard-screen posture [...] turned into a sort of "zero posture" in which the devices ended up becoming almost organic prostheses of the human body. [...] Any heavy boundary between the world and underworld was finally dissolved. [...] The idea of a real life, distinct from the artificial one contained in the devices, dissolved."
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