ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the findings of an investigation into /r/patientgamers, a forum for those who play video games well after their initial release. In theory, the community’s protracted approach to media consumption seems to resist the neoliberal, late capitalist instrumentalization of leisure time. However, upon closer inspection, I found that many patientgamers experience stresses caused by a framing of play as transactional. Users’ nostalgia for their childhoods and the exhaustion caused by their gaming backlogs are shown to be emblematic of how play is ensnared by capitalist logics. However, the patientgamer philosophy still suggests that play may radically slow present modes of media consumption with a view to imagining and even enacting more socially and ecologically sustainable futures.
