Dal sesso al gioco: Un'ossessione per il XXI° secolo?

This book review, published in the 2013 issue of Critical Notes, examines Peppino Ortoleva's pamphlet "Dal sesso al gioco: Un'ossessione per il XXI° secolo?" as a continuation of his earlier work Il secolo dei media (2008). The book traces a trajectory from the sexual liberation and the spread of pornography in the second half of the twentieth century to what Ortoleva calls the contemporary process of "ludicizzazione del reale," or the ludicization of reality. Its central thesis is that play has succeeded sex as the dominant social obsession of the Western world, marking a shift from the homo eroticus of the twentieth century to the homo ludicus of the twenty-first.

The review explains that Ortoleva begins with Freud's psychoanalytic practice in the early 1900s and moves through the decades to the present, linking past obsessions and contemporary perversions. The pivot between sex and play is found in online dating sites, which the French sociologist Lardellier interprets as spaces of ludic relationships. Ortoleva argues that courtship gradually "deliteralizes" encounters, opening them to metamessages and a wider range of meanings, and that this logic extends to everyday life, transforming the homo ludens into a figure for whom play becomes a general mode of approaching existence.

The second half of the book addresses how ludicization appears in media and society, through social games, the notion of play as metaphor and model, and the widely criticized practice of gamification. The review notes that Ortoleva presents play as a dual phenomenon, both a cultural and evolutionary resource and an anarchic paradox outside ordinary logic, with consequences ranging from gambling addiction to a healthier detachment from life's "serious" matters. The reviewer concludes that the book usefully establishes a framework for studying a phenomenon that has often been treated superficially.