The world has become a huge digital habitat wherein the economy, information and social interactions fluctuate at a dizzying pace. More and more gaming mechanisms and technologies, supposedly designed to make life easier, are also being introduced into our daily lives. But who really wins and who loses in this game? In this session, organized by CCCB, the Italian writer, playwright and essayist Alessandro Baricco will talk with writer Jorge Carrión about how videogames help us to understand the various logics of the digital insurrection that has put an end to twentieth-century society’s traditional paradigms.

Baricco is director of the Scuola Holden writing school in Turin. He is one of the foremost exponents of contemporary Italian fiction and has received many prizes for his novels. Notable among his books published in Spanish, all by Anagrama, are the continuously bestselling Seda (1997; in English, Silk), Sense sang (2003; in English, Without Blood), Aquesta història (2007), the monologue play Novecento (2003), his rewriting of Homer’s Iliad Ilíada (2005; in English, An Iliad), and the essay collections Next: Petit llibre sobre la globalització i el món que es prepara (2002) and Los bárbaros: ensayo sobre la mutación (2008; in English, The Barbarians: An Essay on the Mutation of Culture). He has recently published The Game (2019), an essay that probes technological disruptions through the logic and history of videogames.