ABSTRACT
Iconic events can become abstracted as game play on the digital realm extending its spacio-temporal reach and to mark it as a moment of transgression. The ludic and the aesthetics of transgression bound with the political have extended political engagement, renegotiating our notions of proximity and infusing democratization through gaming logic and cultures. Digital games as liminal spaces between reality and the virtual’s attempt to remediate them represent an aesthetics of resistance bound and unbound with the political as well as the ordinary. Real political events, discourses and political celebrities have inevitably become fodder for the internet. Resurrecting the political through memes, trolls and subversive humour, digital games as intensive realms of game play leverage on the ‘real’, encoding possibilities for the sublime and equally the profane. This chapter examines the incident in December 2008 where an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the then US President George W Bush. This iconic event captured global interest and gave rise to a series of digital mimetics that invited users to partake in shoe-throwing as a means to denigrate the superpower and its personification through the President, imbuing the ludic as mimetics to re-distribute dissent and resistance.
