(ESSAY) 'Dead Meadow Dreamz /////Reclaiming Gaming' by Amy Grandvoinet

As we navigate the aching twilight of our neoliberal, highly digitised age, Amy Grandvoinet offers the meadow as a hypothetical environment for exploring more abundant modes of being and relating. Musing on the game-like environs of meadow destruction in her childhood dreams, Grandvoinet charts desire paths through Situationism, gamer theory, meadowing, spectacle and psychedelic rock to consider mystery, communication and play. Read on dreamers -- the clocks went back -- British Summer Time is officially over. Part of our Digital Dreamland series.

Before you is a hill of flowers. It is a sunny day; the breeze is warm. Grasses sway softly, quietly at your feet and in gentle incline ahead they are fawn, chartreuse, siskin, peridot. Between them are all kinds of flora > buttercup, daisies, poppy, cowslips, camomile, scabious, verbena, fireweed, thistle, oxalis, orchids, foxgloves, mallow, clover, toadflax, harebell, lupins, milkweed, et cetera. Everything’s good. And yet s u d d e n l y you detach from this location, taking a disembodied view from above against your volition. The peak of the hill calibrates in the centre (a ‘+’, a target) of your vision, a now two-dimensional space from this strange new vantage-point. Slowly, you see a machine-like entity spiralling square’dly from the plane’s edges to middle, crushing as it goes until all colour is gone and there’s only gris. Your initial feeling of freedom becomes claustrophobé, increasing as the process completes. You wake up extremely tense. It happens again and again.

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From five or younger, for maybe ten année, a dream recurred to me in which I stood at the foot of a mounded wildflower meadow then witnessed its steady destruction by a demonic omnipotent robot. It was incredibly video-game-like, although I don’t think I’d had a go on TurboGrafx-16 or Atari 7800 or Sega Saturn or PlayStation or Nintendo 64 yet (1993 is my birthday). I’ll therefore conjecture these violent eco-themed gaming somno-aesthetics resulted from a semi-conscious registering of mid-nineties and ancestral capitalist cultural complexities pre and post-amniotic.

I believe in wildflower conservation across our entire planet, obviously, but this essay does not focus on that. It focuses on navigating agency at and in the wake of our neoliberal fin-de-siècle. 

In my dead meadow dreamz, the initial scene (meadow) felt infinitely preferable to a sinister denouement (no meadow). Basic equations were obvious: meadow = good, no meadow = bad. But meadow’s continuation was out-of-the-question, and no meadow inevitable. In spite of their game-ish semblance, suggesting participation and effective engagement, my dead meadow dreamz dramatised disempowerment. Over and over, this parasomnia presented me with a scenario I could never act within to secure my own or others’ benefit or safety or happiness.

McKenzie Wark opens Gamer Theory (2007) with two quotes. One is from Henri Lefebvre. He says ‘There is an absolute in the moment of the game; and this absolute, like every reality or moment taken to the absolute, represents a specific form of alienation’. Games can be alienating and often are. The other is from Theodor Adorno. He says ‘The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life’. Games are limiting, but offer a chance to consider what else it is we want. My dead meadow dreamz relate to both of these statements in that (re: Lefebvre) the dreamer awakes knowing the game was fixed and heinous, and (re: Adorno) the dreamer realises playing such a corrupted game is totally undesirable and unpleasant. 

Really, I think my dead meadow dreamz were allegories of what McKenzie Wark calls ‘gamespace’, i.e. our everyday life under a neoliberalist order:

Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there’s no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be? Ever get mad over the obvious fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table rigged and the fix-in? Welcome to gamespace. It’s everywhere, this atopian arena, this speculation sport. 

Growing up in the Home Counties UK, particular grotesquenesses of the free-market Thatcherite / Blairite economics – very few gaining at the unspeakably harsh expense of the many – were glaring. As an infant and teenager however, as painful as nearby micro-concentrated pockets of wealth amid broader deprivation appeared, alternatives seemed devastatingly elusive. What do you want to be when you grow up? That question landed like a cruel goad: yes, I might dare to want to be Lennon-esque-ly ‘myself’, or even ‘an artist’, or ‘a writer’, or ‘a thinker’, but wasn’t the only available future reality for everyone highly-compromising labour in corporate hospitality or marketing? Gamespace. Moreover, ambition and aspiration were notions heavily steeped in meritocratic toxicity. Trying to succeed in a mono-geography of toil-based misery would be mass class traitorship, right? To avoid disappointment and self-loathing, I set to sabotaging my actual wishes so as to save myself from Mags’s and Tony’s predictable clutches and exercise damage limitation.

I now understand this a stunted solution. Gamespace (coterminous perhaps with Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ (see Capitalist Realism (2009)) is not the only way to play (or not play) at living. Other games, and other worlds, are indeed possible. McKenzie Wark is into the Situationist International, and in Gamer Theory she quotes them also. They say ‘The destruction of the spectacle becomes the spectacle of destruction’ as only ‘imaginary games’ (the Spectacle might also be thought of as capitalist realism or gamespace). We reach a point of resignation where the dominant base-superstructure remains a closed loop we only accept or reject. In this dynamic, we are still locked into the spectacular / capitalist realist / gamespace system. Repurposing Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938), Situationists strove for a kind of playfulness smashing this loop to serve and improve physical and psychological quality of life instead of denying and diminishing it.

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Wow, you can win at games where everyone’s winning and that you do want to play! Winning needn’t mean annihilation, though it so often does under current regimes (see Amber Husain’s Replace Me (2021) blurbed by Chris Kraus as ‘One of the most sweeping assessments to date of neoliberalism’s psychic toll’). Maria Sledmere’s concept of ‘meadowing’ (2022) poses a potent antidote. Stressing Silvia Federici’s rally-cry for our ‘recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neoliberal era’ (see Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018)), in Maria Sledmere’s theoretical meadow a collective of beings (beyond just humans) are together in media res immersed and grounded in abundance. The verb to meadow is to work postcapitalistically towards this possible situation. Nobody will be forced to leave the meadow it will not be erased and demolished: ‘the time of the meadow is one of ceaseless return’ where ‘the “so much”’ and ‘the “more than”’ are celebrated, unlike Capital’s matrix against efficiency market logic (see Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2019)). Play in the meadow is endlessly generous; ‘To stay with the meadow is not to be in stasis’.❀❀❀

I wholly agree and surely McKenzie Wark you do too? These conclusions vibe so pleasingly with my dead meadow dream, helping me read it. A five-year-old self is joyful (I am too in 2025). Meadow.

Some time ago a v. special friend recommended the psychedelic rock band Dead Meadow to me, who I listened to recently off a saved Fairphone web-tab. My favourite album is Force Form Free (2022). Dead Meadow’s band name imagines a meadow that’s dead. But I’m sure they want meadow not no-meadow as well! Their lyrics are not on Genius.com but I think the final track sings ‘directionless bliss’, ‘love’, ‘can’t resist’, ‘heat of the sun’, and something about ‘again’. I searched meadow on nts.live to expand this terrain (Orbe x Meadow – various, Dora Jar – Digital Meadow (2021), Least Carpet’s music – described as like ‘sitting on a hill top in the fresh blooming meadow’, Dreamcastmoe’s – ‘Recorded in the meadows’, Luca – Bouquet of the Meadow (2020)).

My dead meadow dreamz are part of a general ground-swell to playfully seek potentialities instead of shut-down, toward mystery against mastery. My dead meadow dreamz were not nightmares, but protective messages addressing deep structural problems in favour of love and also patience. Boo to the outlandish absurdities of R. Sunak’s and M. Gove’s lingering Level Up Tory Government Policy; a more recent dream I’m fond of involves waking up lucidly on a floor of damp soil and seeing wildflowers grow up at ground / eye level. Dowwwn. Relax.

I always wear forget-me-not earrings 24/7, also, which are a connective portal between the meadows of dreams and the meadows of real life, which are here for us all.❀❀❀❀

❀This Creative Commons image is AI-generated, which saddens me and yet it was the closest to a visualisation of my dead meadow dreamz I could get. In attempt to counter AI-hype I have crowd-sourced a number of snaps of irl meadow-flowers from friends & family via social media platforms Instagram and Facebook (blessings to Dave Fox {Rest in Sweet Peace}, Jane Vaughan, Nick Grandvoinet, Gary Raymond, Kait Leonard, Kim Williams, Florence Simmons, Eluned Gramich): 

❀❀I choose gold for this gamer typeface in ode to Ralph Rumney, one of two Anglophone founding members (next to Alexander Trocchi) of the Situationist International. Ralph Rumney was fascinated by the history and ongoing use of gold-leaf fonts throughout his artistic life. And see also Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).

❀❀❀Maria Sledmere also remarks underwater meadow; plîs find info about artist Lily Tiger’s work on North Wales seagrass in collaboration with Natur am Byth here. We are currently making a ‘map’ based on group-walking records of the Porthdinllaen coastline with think.material Press.

❀❀❀❀Copy ‘n’ paste the following faux-quadrant into this box and follow instructions to muse upon the limitations of pixelated meadow:

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🍄‍🟫 🌼 🌹 🌷 🌻 🪻 🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸

🌼 🌹 🌷 🌻 🪻 🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸 🍄‍🟫

🪻 🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸 🍄‍🟫🌼 🌹 🌷 🌻

🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸 🍄‍🟫🌼 🌹 🌷 🌻 🪻

🌼 🌹 🌷 🌻 🪻 🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸 🍄‍🟫

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🌻 🪻 🌾 🍀 🌿 🌸 🍄‍🟫🌼 🌹 🌷

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Text & images: Amy Grandvoinet

Published: 26/10/25