8    Play in the Era of Computing Machinery

What have computers ever done for us? They might have helped develop health care, security, commerce, transportation, and education to an extent that marks an era of prosperity and wealth previously unimaginable. But besides that, what have they ever done for us?

Well, they are the key elements of digital toys and digital games, which keep us, the modern developed world, entertained when we are not working. They have also become machines that can sense, interpret, and communicate with the environment, thus enriching the playful possibilities of toys and work devices. Computers have revolutionized play as much as they have all other domains in society. But what does this mean for our ecology of play? What is the relation between computation and play?

I start by describing what computers can do. Although we tend to give computers magical powers that turn them into cultural actors rather than “mere” technologies, a computer is a relatively simple machine that can do very few things very well. In essence, the computer excels at four things when we think about them for play:

1. A computer can perform calculations quickly and precisely. This capacity is useful in many different contexts, from rocket science to medical care. Its calculating power also allows it to create real-time simulations of complex systems, for instance, making worlds with coherent physics. Fast calculations also allow computers to act on complex input instantaneously. In Johan Sebastian Joust, the different machines involved (a conventional computer plus the embedded computers in the PlayStation Move controllers) calculate at high speed accelerometer data variations, effectively creating the challenges that make the game interesting. While the same play experience can be reproduced with analog resources, the use of computation gives Joust a different aesthetic experience, the magic feeling of having a lighted wand in your hands that reacts to movement and music.¹ In Joust, computation enhances the aesthetics of play.

2. A computer can store large amounts of data while accessing them very quickly. This allows computers to act as externalized memory storages and also to create whole worlds with graphics, sounds, and computed behaviors. For those of us who love sports, the data immediacy that modern broadcasting offers has fundamentally changed the experience of watching any sport on television. While nothing beats the ritualistic communion with strangers that happens in an arena, sports broadcasting offers an enhanced, networked understanding of sports that contextualizes, explains, and even predicts actions while we are watching a game. Sports spectatorship has shifted from being essentially an affair in the present tense to a multilayered perspective in time and space, where actions take place now but are seen in the contexts of their past and their future.

3. A computer is equipped with a series of sensors programmed to sense its environment and turn analog input into computable digital data. The computer on which I am writing this chapter has one high-definition camera, one microphone, and an accelerometer. It can see, feel, hear, and gather and process all those data. Similarly, most smart phones today know their geographical location, and some can even detect the proximity of other phones. Play, particularly toys, has greatly benefited from this computational sentience. A smart phone toy like Balloonimals makes use of accelerometer, touch, and microphone input to simulate playing with balloons. By providing touch and movement input, users can “inflate” and “shape” a virtual balloon, making it take the form of an animal.² Using the sensors on a smart phone, Balloonimals reproduces the creative activity of making shapes with balloons. Similarly, Noby Noby Boy playfully appropriates the sensors of the phone in order to make the act of mediating the world through those sensors a playful affair, making the camera take pictures that then become part of the digital toyful world of Boy.

4. A computer is often a part of a larger network of computers, which can help increase the previous three characteristics exponentially. Newstweek playfully appropriated the networked capacities of computers to tease our trust of online media. Part of this play happened with the network itself, with the connections between machines and the relations established among them. A computer is seldom alone: there’s always traffic of data between machines that forms an alternative space we are only marginally aware of. The networks of computation are also our networks, our spaces for play.

Computers are, then, fast and efficient calculating machines that can process their analog environments into digital data they can perform operations with and are part of networks of data and information together with other computers.³ They are also the embodiment of a way of understanding the world: because machines compute the world through systems, we might think that the world is actually a system composed of myriad subsystems.

We need therefore to think about the relations between systems and play and how play, in this the age of computing machinery, can coexist with computational thinking. The challenge for play in the era of computing machines is to learn to appropriate another dominant way of seeing the world—the systemic one.

Since computers are very good at calculation and data, provided the data are presented in a computable way, we have seen the emergence of a type of thinking that argues that the world can be understood through the description of the systems it is composed of. Thinking about the world as a collection of systems leads to a logical reduction of complexity, but also to new ways of understanding the world. For instance, cities are no longer irreducible collections of people and buildings and traffic and institutions and more; they are also patterns of systems that can be analyzed and described within different levels of abstraction. From there to Sim City, there is only one step: using a computer to simulate some of those systems. The affinity between this way of thinking and computation is striking: both benefit from the methodical reduction of complexity to systemic patterns that can be formalized.

This type of thinking has an extremely interesting impact on society, particularly in the way we address politics and even the ontology of human beings.⁴ It is also a way of understanding and acting in a world closely connected to play as a mode of being. Both play and this type of understanding of systems, like reducing the world to patterns for behavior, also thrive in the emergence of rules.

The crucial difference between systems in this narrow sense and play is how play seeks appropriation, while system thinking thrives with reduction. This reduction is not necessarily a negative trait; it is a key of the scientific method. But it can be at odds with the performative aspects of play; play is action and performance, while “system thinking” is reduction and synthesis.

Computers are effective tools for practicing this type of systems-centric thinking, and they therefore reward designing for this type of experience of the world. But play requires other types of computational designs—more open, more attuned to the pleasures of performativity. By performativity, I am not exclusively reducing play to a bodily experience. As in the case of software toys and procedural toys, there is performative pleasure in tinkering with them to figure out what they do. In fact, there are arguably performative pleasures in the computational processes themselves. They are systems, but they are open to performing with them or performing themselves in a creative, expressive way, an openness in which they are playful.

The most interesting examples of performative playful processes are Twitter bots. Originally thought to be sleazy marketing tools (and still widely used for that purpose), bots in the hands of creators like Darius Kazemi have become proper computationally playful expressive devices that harness the inherent possibilities of computation as a form of expression and its role in our social and cultural contexts.⁵

A bot like Kazemi’s AmIRite⁶ playfully engages with Twitter’s trending topics, rearranging them in creative and automated ways, quite often showing the needed absurdity of Twitter.⁷ But even more, Twitter bots allow us to partially understand how computers see the world through their strict syntactical rules for the creation of sentences. What they say is, arguably, what they experience. We can playfully peek into the computational being’s experiences through Twitter bots⁸—their playfulness being their only mode of existing in the world.

In the age of computing machinery, play and computational thinking need to help each other imagine new ways of being in the world. Computational systems need to be aware that they can be played with, that function and completeness are a consequence of the contexts in which they are deployed.⁹ And play needs to benefit from the ways computing machinery can enhance our being in the world.

I have thought of play as a dance of resistance and appropriation, of creation and destruction of order. In the age of computing machinery, we need to see play as both playing systems and playing with systems, as appropriation and resistance of systems. Computers give us the pleasure of bound, limited, logical experiences; play gives the pleasure of breaking those boundaries and making them ours. Play allows us to reambiguate systems designed for clarity and efficiency. If system thinking creates patterns to explain, understand, and express the world, play appropriates to sometimes disrupt patterns for the sake of expression.

What, then, is the place of play in the era of computational machines? Computers are excellent play pals: their characteristics help us augment the world, delegate activities, and deputize users. Computers can provide an enhanced perception of the world, a different layer of data, and feedback that can contribute to play. In Johan Sebastian Joust, the software interprets motion and opens a space of possibility that is complementary to that created by the game.

Computers can help play take over the world. For its part, play needs to demand from computers more than the capacity to store and manipulate and move data: computers should take their place in the world and play with us—not for us, not against us, but together with us. Computation and play share some ontological traits, and so they should work together creating the beautiful spaces for play.

It is no surprise that the so-called ludic century is happening in the era of computing machinery. These calculating devices are more than aids. They open the world for interpretation, and the world is richer through computation. But to enjoy that richness, to take it and make it human, we need to express ourselves through it.¹⁰ Computation can be human¹¹ only when we embrace it as what it is: not a technology but a modality of being, a form of expression.¹² Through play we embrace that possibility: play and computation are fellow travelers because both are ways of expressively being in the world.

There are risks: the capacity that computers have to relate the world to us can lead to the design of machines that addict us through play. Slot machines, video games, and even toys can give us both the pleasures of appropriative, creative play and an overtly focused being through systems. That encapsulated world of rewards and seemingly controllable chaos lies at the heart of the risks of play and computing. Even when it comes to their potential dangers, play and computation are closely connected; they simplify the world and make us crave that expressive simplification.

We don’t need computing to play, and we don’t need play for computation. But the alliance of computation and play, playing the world through computation or computing the world through play, are the most definite ways of defining the era of computing machinery.

Computers can do only a few things well: compute fast vast amounts of data while sensing the world and being in a network. Through these capacities, computers can make sense of the world and augment it, expanding the physical context into an informational context. All of these characteristics can be appropriated through play for expressive reasons: data and sensors facilitate the sensual play of Johan Sebastian Joust; networks and data are manipulated in Newstweek; Noby Noby Boy lives of the world captured and translated by a tiny portable computer. There is more than the world to playfully take over now: there’s the world, the machines, and the way the machines make the world exist. There is more to take over, and more interesting, machines are not active accomplices in this appropriation.

In fact, what computer programs do is appropriate a machine and express themselves to it—hence the natural relations between play and computation. A computer is a universal Turing machine that can be programmed to become any other Turing machine. It is a machine that is programmed to take over and express itself through another machine. Programming a computer is making it play—that is, be another machine. So let’s be bold: all computation is play.

Play is appropriation, expression, and a personal affair. Together with computation, they bring us an expanded world with which we can play, that we can make ours as we delegate to and appropriate machines. Play has always done that, but only play in the era of computing machinery has the opportunity to connect us to a whole world besides the world in which we play. So in this era of computing machines for play, what have computers actually done for us? They have opened a new world to play with while being at play.

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We have now reached the end of this trip. I have sketched the map of an ecology of play, a world of playthings and spaces and computers where we play to express who we are and what we can do. This expression will make the world ours through play, making our memories flow and giving us places to remember, people to love, and knowledge and wisdom and foolishness. We are what and how and where and with whom we play, our mark in the world and in time.

Play gives us the world, and through play we make the world ours.