Algorithmic Play in Georges Perec's Ludic Narratives

Georges Perec's novels W, or the Memory of Childhood (1988) and Life A User's Manual (2008) are presented here as a productive resource for thinking about play in an algorithmic culture, with particular relevance to digital game studies. The central argument is that Perec's treatment of play offers a critical vantage point on the computational logic that increasingly governs social life. In W, play is depicted as corrupted by absolute adherence to rules, tracing a link between competition, control, and fascism, while Life A User's Manual reframes play and chance as techniques for creative action within rule-based systems. The latter novel is read as celebrating error and glitch as sources of contingency that can push a project beyond the limits of systemic logic.

The analysis situates Perec among French contemporaries concerned with the transformation of everyday life in the postwar period, including Lefebvre, Touraine, and Debord, and notes that the spread of information technologies intensified these concerns as they became more pervasive. Drawing on Alexander Galloway's account of Sid Meier's Civilization III, the paper argues that digital games expose a gap between ideological readings of play and critique of the algorithmic processes beneath the software, in which player choices are reduced to mathematically recognized data and play loses its position outside the system.

The discussion draws mainly on literary and theoretical scholarship, including work by McKenzie Wark, Gascoigne, and Bohman-Kalaja, rather than empirical data. Its primary contribution is conceptual: contingency is proposed as a reservoir of creativity for game players within constrained systems.