Jusletter IT

British and American secret services infiltrated online role games on a massive scale, or so the Snowden documents indicate. But do we need to be worried about this new field of surveillance, or is it more a concern about the appropriate use of taxpayers money on an obviously frivolous endeavour? Using arguments from psychology, cultural studies and anthropology in addition to legal arguments from UK and German law, we argue that far from being a trivial addition to our lives, playing is a constitutive art of «homo ludens» in modern, capitalist societies. By submitting gaming behaviour to the police officer’s gaze, we get closer than ever to a form of surveillance that threatens to capture us in our entirety – not just what we are, but what we are longing to be.