Game Over: On Emptying the Public Square

This chapter explores the treatment of public space under the influence of contemporary neoliberalism in Australia. It argues that a hostility to public and social participation, often understood as control over the use of public space and spaces in quite a literal way, is a key feature of a range of significant legislative changes that have taken place in recent years. The chapter then turns from law to the aesthetics which give shape and form to this repressive neoliberalism as the common sense of the 21st century, taking as its case study a recent video game, Push’em All. The video game is the genre par excellence of the present moment, at least in countries like Australia. Neoliberalism, as is well known, replaces social goods with purely individual interests, understood in wholly instrumental terms. Political discourse and social interactions are reduced to nothing but a game, in the pursuit of which no holds are barred. Push’em All captures this ideology exactly, providing an entertainment in which the violent repression of public space is the name of the game.