Ebook: The Loot Loop: Politics of Psychology in Consumer Society

In modern society, we manage our lives between compulsory loops of production and consumption. Work and school comprise one repeating cycle; the stimulation cocktail we personalize to endure the boredom of repetition constitutes the other. In private moments, we lose ourselves in comforting, entertaining loops. In The Loot Loop, Selimovic presents an analysis of modern leisure practices, why we have incorporated them into our everyday habits, and what made us do it. By directing those questions to metropolitan working class adolescents who find an outlet in video games, Selimovic explores why gaming becomes a site to escape prescribed reality.

This book draws a link between what we are willing to endure and how we satisfy ourselves. It argues that game loops alleviate ideological and psychological frustrations of living in consumer society, and that in its technology, as television made interactive, we are witnessing the emergence of a higher order of technological incorporation. In the spillovers of this psycho-political economy, Selimovic uncovers a latent politics accentuated by questions about the quality of self-consciousness and the politics of generational responsibility—that is, a politics of youth and what it means to grow up to become disposable in consumer society.