Play Matters

Let’s look at Maradona’s historical peak, the second goal against England in the 1986 Soccer World Cup in Mexico.² In what has been described as the goal of the century, Maradona took the ball in the midfield and dashed across the pitch, dribbling half of the English team until he scored. This Argentinian from the slums humiliated England as England had humiliated Argentina in the Falklands.³

I am of course reading politics into a soccer goal. But in our world of global spectacles, play through sports has gained unparalleled political influence. In our modern understanding of play, these activities have defining and identifying roles in society. Even critical thinkers like Adorno thought that sports were a key source of alienation,⁴ granting social and political importance to play.⁵ But why do we correlate play and politics so often?

Let’s start with play itself. Two of the key characteristics of play are its appropriative nature and the creativity that ensues. Play is creative when it is taking over, or occupying, a context. Similarly, the playful attitude takes over an activity in a creative manner, even though its purpose remains unchanged. Appropriation leads to carnivalesque creativity, which might lead to a critical approach to the context, the very act of play, or the activity that is being playfully occupied. It is therefore natural to think that play can be used for political purposes, instrumentalized to become a tool for expressing political ideas.

This understanding of the critical nature of play has been widely explored. The notion of critical politics through play has a long standing in Latin America,⁶ where it has been coupled with a Marxist understanding of the individual and his or her relation to power and the means of production.⁷ For thinkers like Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, play is a critical liberating force that can be used to explore the ultimate possibility of human freedom ⁸. Similarly, Nordic live action role playing games (LARPs)⁹ have played with dystopian scenarios ¹⁰ and more political situations ¹¹ in ways that no other game has explored. From building a makeshift concentration camp to proposing a game about the final hours of civilization in the 1950s, LARPs have dealt with the politics of the state as well as with individual politics, using play to explore political meaning.

In the context of political arts, play has had an immense influence: Guy Debord’s situationism ¹² and its contemporary presence through Adbusters, a Canadian anticonsumerist magazine;¹³ Dada’s anarchism,¹⁴ initially targeted at the art world but soon expanding to society in general; and Fluxus’s humorous and mildly naive ¹⁵ understanding of political expression: all show how aesthetics has approached politics through play thanks to the appropriative nature of play.

In contemporary times, political games seem to signify things other than these creative, communitarian activities of expression. The expression “political computer games” seems to mean single-player computer games developed for the PC using widespread platforms like Flash, in which the topic is political and the game play is a rehash of old and trite gaming common places, from Space Invaders to Tetris mechanics camouflaged under a skin of political themes.¹⁶ The “political” game is just a (single) player game that addresses a political theme of the moment and then rapidly vanishes from the public scene.

In fact, the most important critique that one could leverage against the trend of political game play championed in modern game design concerns the way it ignores that it is in play, and not in games, where politics resides. Like any other object or instrument or technology, games are political, but the true political effect of these objects takes place when we occupy them, that is, when they become instruments for political expression. The game or toy is only a rhetorical argument—political expression at most, if not propaganda. Politics happens when play becomes political action.¹⁷

To play is to exercise our being as expressive creatures, including as political creatures. We express politics in many ways: through voting and love, through writing and labor, through service and values, and also through play.

Games can be political. (Dishwashers can be political too: how much electricity does yours use?) But when play is political, it happens in a critical, personal, creative way. Some modern political games are not played; we perform operations in order to activate and configure their messages. That is hardly a creative, appropriative activity. In fact, it is a guided activity through power structures toward purposes dictated beforehand. Playing these games is not about affirming but about reaffirming.

Political play takes place when a plaything harnesses the expressive, creative, appropriative, and subversive capacities of play and uses them for political expression. Political play is the interplay of form, appropriation, and context, or how politics is expressed and enacted through play in a fluid motion.

To see this theory in practice, consider the popular protests that took over the world between 2009 and 2012, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement. Revolts and demonstrations are political expressions that the established powers often meet with fear, which often leads to police action. In the protests of late 2009 and 2010 that took place across the United Kingdom, a police tactic for containing dissenters became popular: kettling.¹⁸ Kettling consists of surrounding a group of protesters with enough riot police to contain them in an area, either to facilitate their arrest or to break down large demonstrations into more manageable groups. Kettling is not necessarily a violent tactic, but it immediately showcases the force of riot police. Kettling is also the inspiration for one of the most interesting political games ever made: Metakettle.¹⁹

2. Start your own team by shouting an animal name or join an already established team by linking arms with them.

3. Get other people on your team by completely encircling them with members of your team.

It makes sense to play Metakettle only when being kettled. Metakettle is designed to appropriate a particular situation and playfully turn it around. It is carnivalesque play at its best—an appropriation of a situation turned into the absurd through play that shows a political interpretation of the situation in which it is played.

From a formal point of view, we might be tempted to argue that the rules of the game make it political. However, Metakettle is political only if played when kettled. Playing it in other situations is almost identity shopping, because Metakettle requires a context to be a political statement: it is a playful bomb designed to go off through laughter in play. We can appreciate its cleverness and can write about it as a political device, but its political effect, the expression of political action through play, happens only when Metakettle is played while being kettled. Then, and only then, does play become a carnivalesque, disruptive, political mode of being.

Political action through play is also benefiting from the paradoxical nature of play. Since play is autotelic, one could argue that the purpose of playing Metakettle is “to play Metakettle,” which is not a political activity. However, it is precisely the autotelic nature of play that makes it political action. Like carnival, play has a particular status in its relation to reality that allows political action while being relatively immune to the actions of power. Shutting down a game of Metakettle will only reinforce the message of playing it as political action. In this way, once you start playing Metakettle, the police have already lost—the game and their moral ground. Play as political action can either be shut down with extreme force or be ignored, and in both cases the political purpose of play will be made evident.

The humor in Metakettle relates this type of political play to art practices like Fluxus and situationism,²⁰ which made use of humorous play to promote political views and ideas.²¹ Although these movements share the focus on playful humor, they are still focused on an artist-to-audience communication model.²² Performance art is closer to the spirit of political action through play,²³ even though political play is a communitarian activity that is not necessarily guided. Political meaning emerges from the play community and from the ways in which play threads together context, form, and situation.

The hacktivist group Anonymous provides another example of political play; this one is less dependent on games and more focused on rules emerging from the community.²⁴ The history of Anonymous is quite complex.²⁵ It was born on the Internet image board 4chan, a site where all kinds of images, from innocent to borderline illegal, are uploaded by users who remain anonymous.²⁶ The culture of lulz, the surreal, Dada, offensive, and childish humor based on image manipulation and silly captions,²⁷ thrived on these boards. Then it took a political direction. A group of 4chaners took on the challenge of defying the Church of Scientology.²⁸ And from that initial challenge, a worldwide group of protesters took to the streets as an activist group in a wide variety of topics.²⁹

What makes the Anonymous take on the Church of Scientology interesting is the transportation of Internet anonymity and activism to real-life anonymity and activism. The move from the Internet to real life preserved some of the core political values of the Net, like anonymity, making the actual number of activists difficult to quantify. And in a corresponding move, they took to the real-world Internet memes and jokes, occupying the physical world with expression that previously existed only on the Internet. In London, the headquarters of the Church of Scientology was rickrolled—that is, forced to listen for hours to loudspeakers playing Rick Astley’s hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.”³⁰

Anonymous performs political play precisely because the group imported Internet memes to the physical world, creating a carnivalesque protest in between worlds. It performs political action without eliminating its roots on Internet culture and plays because it appropriates the real world through the rhetoric of Internet memes and lulz. The protesters express political ideas, but they are also playing, performing specific actions with specific meanings within their own community. It’s play closer to performance art than to games.³¹ The Internet memes brought to life are negotiable toys that frame and situate play. Without them, Anonymous would not be playing: protesting, yes, but not playing.

An example of the attitude of playfulness is the reappropriation of unpleasant designs, as described by artists Gordan Savicic and Selena Savic.³² “Unpleasant design” describes the use of industrial or interaction design to make certain “undesired” activities, like skating in a public park, difficult or impossible. But these designs can be subverted by playful political appropriation. For instance, Michael Rakowitz’s ParaSITE creates inflatable shelters that reuse the warm air from heat exchangers.³³ This playful political and social statement not only reclaims the public space, but also highlights resource wastefulness and the situation of the homeless in cities.

Not every political action through play, or playfulness, requires this loose approach to rules, this negotiation of frame and context. In fact, it is still possible to find political action through play and playfulness incorporated in the processes of computer systems. There are technologies for play and playfulness that insert themselves in a context to perform political actions.

An approach to the political nature of technologies is critical engineering.³⁴ One of its products, Newstweek, is a paradigmatic example of political playfulness.³⁵ Newstweek is a critical intervention on the digital consumption of news and the nature of networks as carriers of messages and information. It is a small hardware/software combination designed to interfere with open wireless networks (figure 6.1). In these networks, the device modifies the headlines of popular news websites, disfiguring the relative trust we place in the neutrality of networks and network communication.

Figure 6.1

The Newstweek device. (Credit: Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev.)

Newstweek is not a device that creates play or a toy, but its approach to public spaces, networks, and news sites is certainly playful. It literally appropriates a context and situation and makes it playful. That appropriation is a political action that reveals assumptions and beliefs through which we articulate our daily life. Newstweek critiques computer and news networks, their linkage, and the ways we trust them.

Newstweek is also a carnivalesque project, intervening in the public sphere to make arguments through playfulness and technology. It is a public critique of power, a multilayered satire that operates superficially on the rendered website pages, but more deeply on the computer networks that it critiques and mocks (figure 6.2). Newstweek’s open source nature adds to this carnivalesque humor: anybody can build and deploy a Newstweek. It is an open, public, inclusive engagement device through critical technologies that embody the freedom of playfulness.

Figure 6.2

“Promotional” picture for the Newstweek news manipulation device. (Image credit: Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev.)

Newstweek is an act of appropriation of a public context with the intention of promoting political action. This appropriation is playful, demanding from knowledgeable appreciators a certain sense of humor. It playfully forces us to rethink our position as consumers and producers of news through computer networks, and it comments as well on the assumptions on trust and neutrality that we place on wireless connections. Through Newstweek, we appropriate political assumptions and critically reflect on them.

Play is political, then, not because the playthings or the contexts in which we play are openly political, either rhetorically or socially. Neither is play political because it is constituted of actions that can be interpreted as socially conscious or activist. Play is political in the way it critically engages with a context, appropriating it and using the autotelic nature of play to turn actions into double-edged meanings: they are actions both in a play activity and with political meaning and are therefore are heavy with meaning.

Play has the capacity to remain play while giving the actions performed political meaning, from dribbling Englishmen in a football pitch to metakettling protesters already kettled by riot police. It is no wonder that play as political action is so close to critical theater: it shares the ambiguous nature of an activity that can move between boundaries and meanings, as an act with its own purpose and as direct political action, seamlessly interwoven.

Political play takes place when the focus of the play activity is set on the appropriative nature of play and how that appropriation can be used creatively to subvert the establishment, institutions, or other forces. Play becomes political action when the interplay between the context and the appropriation lead to an activity that critically engages with the situation without ceasing to be play.

Play as political action is always ambiguous, on the fence of autotelic play and meaningful political activity. It is in that interplay, in that dance between the autotelic and the purposeful, that play becomes a strong political instrument, capable of appropriating contexts that are otherwise forbidden. Political play is expression of political ideas in the seams opened by appropriation; it is a critical expression through playful interpretation of a context. Because it is play, it can thrive in situations of oppression; because it is play, it can allow personal and collective expression, giving voices and actions when no one can be heard.