Better Problems Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made doug stark A review of Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Cited in the text as EG. Games saturate our contemporary lifeworld. Entertainment media often center around games of competition and chance: Reality game shows test everything from knowledge, physicality, and romantic compatibility to drag, baking, and topiary in “last one standing” formats; fictional TV series, novels, and films regularly take games as a theme or motif; 1 e-sports mark the expansion of sporting spec- tatorship into virtual worlds. Outside of entertainment, games serve as military training simulations, 2 metaphors in economic theory, and a frame for political “races. ” In our day-to-day lives, applica- tions facilitating exercise, language learning, task management, and even sleeping adopt the ludic. 3 Simultaneously, both so-called analog and digital game industries boom. Video games alone reportedly had 2.7 billion players in 2020. 4 qui parle Vol. 30, No. 2, December 2021 doi 10.1215/10418385-9395334 © 2021 Editorial Board, Qui Parle Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/30/2/399/1456650/399stark.pdf by UNIV NC CHAPEL HILL user on 15 December 2021