ABSTRACT
The PlayStation Network, or PSN, had been offline since April 20th, and gamers everywhere were making their distress known all over the Internet. The intruders had extracted the personal information, passwords, and possibly the credit card numbers of registered PlayStation Network users – upward of seventy-seven million people. In many ways, the PSN came to life as an object and a site of technogenesis retrospectively, reborn at the moment of its disappearance. Some gamers would later remember the network outage as a 'birthday', a genetic moment when the gaming community coalesced under conditions of shared risk and heightened emotion. The language of technological vitalism permeates the PlayStation world. Imagining themselves as zombies, internalizing the resurrected PlayStation Network as a way of conceptualizing the undead self, these gamers crafted an ironic narrative framework for living with the instabilities of digital culture, the risks of life with PlayStation.
