Notes
Chapter 1
1. The most convincing academic argument on the topic is Juul’s A Casual Revolution (2009), which focuses on the success of casual games and how they have expanded the audience for computer games.
2. The champion of this idea is Eric Zimmerman, who specified it in a manifesto in late 2013: http://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century -will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204 (accessed October 16, 2013). This idea, however, had already been popular, with different phrasings, in game developer venues such as the annual Game Developers Conference. Game designer Clint Hocking provided a useful summary and insightful critique of the ludic century ideal in his blog in late 2011: http://www.clicknothing.com/click_nothing/2011/11/redacted-the-dominant-cultural-form-of-the-21st-century.html (accessed November 22, 2011).
3. Heather Chaplin and Eric Zimmerman presented this idea at the 2008 Games + Learning + Society conference, later to be published as Zimmerman’s manifesto (see note 2).
4. This book is written as an update to the tradition of Huizingan play, a canon consisting roughly of Huizinga (1992), Sutton-Smith (1997), DeKoven (2002), Caillois (2001), and Suits (2005). The update will consist of an expansion of the theories used to explain play, as well as a focus on materiality and design: how the objects of play, the playthings, are designed to help us engage with the world through play.
5. Isaacson (2011).
6. Huizinga remains a central figure in the understanding of play, and although the theory of play I am presenting here is markedly post-Huizingan, it is still very much affected by his ideas. Homo Ludens was Huizinga’s interpretation of a third dominant anthropology of humans. If Homo sapiens was the being or reason, and Homo faber the being of production, Homo ludens would be the being of play. This being would also be responsible for the play element in culture, which in Huizinga’s view was at the center of Western culture. Play, mostly understood as ritual, had an imprint in the configuration of history and culture that needed to be defined, and so play needed understanding too. Huizinga’s ideas, only moderately influential outside cultural anthropology, are still informing our understanding of play, despite the fact that Homo Ludens is a relatively outdated book (for a critical review of the text, see Henricks 2006).
7. To be fair, this idea is also present in Huizinga. However, his insistence on play being separate from real life weakens the creative and expressive capacities of play, as it can be understood only within the bound context of its own performance, and not within the larger context in which people play, or the multiplicity of intentions behind this activity.
8. Caillois (2001) writes about the idea of the corruption of play and its potential dangers in chapter 4 of Man, Play and Games. Sutton-Smith (1997) dedicates some critical thoughts to gambling and cruel play.
9. These ideas are explored in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1993).
10. As presented in Schechner (1988). For an annotated introduction to the use of the concept of play in performance studies, see Schechner (2006).
11. While Schechner provides interesting examples of dark play, I contribute with one example I expand on later in this book. When playing the game B.U.T.T.O.N., some players might be compelled to exert more physical violence than others. For some, that violence is part of the play, and in playing, that is manifested as an act of dark play: it is unclear if the tackling responds to an interpretation of how to play the game or a different desire. It is an exploration of the boundaries created by this game. See also Wilson (2011).
12. Understood in the sense of Russian literary theorist Bakhtin (1984, 2008).
13. “The feast was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom” (Bakhtin 1984, 89).
14. “Next to the universality of medieval laughter we must stress another striking peculiarity: its indissoluble and essential relation to freedom.… This freedom of laughter was, of course, relative; its sphere was at times wider and at times narrower, but it was never entirely suspended” (Bakhtin 1984, 89). Where Bakhtin writes about laughter, I write about carnivalesque play, which I claim is similar; in fact, laughter is a manifestation of carnivalesque play.
15. Twitter bots are essentially computer programs designed to generate tweets and post them on that social network. And if you don’t know what I am talking about, read this piece by Sarah Brin: http://nybots.tumblr.com/post/62834461397/who-led-the-horse-to-ebooks (accessed October 17, 2013).
16. By postromantic, I am referring to the focus that particularly game aesthetics pays to the notions of authorship, form, and individual expression.
17. In this sense, this work is close to that of critical designers like Dunne (2006), Sengers and Gaver (2006), Sengers et al. (2005), and Hallnäs and Redström (2001).
18. Not strictly from an etiological perspective such as those presented by Schechner (1988); however, I am interested in play not as a biological manifestation but as a cultural manifestation.
19. “Maybe scholars should declare a moratorium on defining play” (Schechner 1988, 3).
20. Besides this temporal framework, my minimalist understanding of play also wants to stay away from the essentialist approach that many humanistic thinkers take when trying to understand sociocultural phenomena. I am trying to understand play and why it matters, but I am not trying to formally define play. If anything, my definition is indebted to the work in sociology that has seen play within its cultural, social context. This book owes much to Henricks’s Play Reconsidered (2006), though my approach is both more humanistic and more interested in the objects of play, and they lead eventually to questions on design and materiality. However, it is my intention to provide a nonessentialist take on defining play.
21. The notion of context is a dangerous one. A word commonly used in sociological studies, context is often applied to the understanding of everything that surrounds the human action that is relevant for a situation (Goffman 1959; for an overview of the topic, Ritzer 2000 is a very good textbook). My understanding of context, though, is willingly different. I am inspired by the work of Bruno Latour (1992), and other actor-network theorists (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999), but I am also closer to the postphenomenological tradition of Verbeek (2006), which tries to see technologies in context as part of our way of experiencing and constructing the world. In this theory of play, context encompasses the social, cultural, technological, and physical situatedness of play and how objects are an integral part of what play is. In this sense, then, I am closer to an understanding of context that also introduced some elements of classic ubiquitous computing literature, particularly the work of Dourish (2001, 2004). More specifically, I think that my understanding of context is close to Dourish’s understanding of “practice”: “By turning our attention from ‘context’ (as a set of descriptive features of settings) to ‘practice’ (forms of engagement with those settings), we assigned a central role to the meanings that people find in the world and the meanings of their actions there in terms of the consequences and interpretations of those actions for themselves and for others” (2004, 27–28). I stick, however, to the concept of context because of its colloquial clarity.
22. In texts on soccer (J. Wilson 2008; Goldblatt 2006), there is often a discussion of the source of great football: Does it come from the streetwise kids who learn to dribble while playing in open public spaces with no age or skill segregation, or is it something nurtured in scientific training in academies? The Argentinian fascination for potrero soccer (played by slum kids who make it to the top and, possibly, a consequence of Diego Armando Maradona’s sociocultural impact, since El Diego is arguably the best player of all time, and is himself of extremely humble origins) is somewhat opposite to the classic Dutch focus on training at an early age. These approaches yield different play styles, that is, different individual and collective interpretations of playing the game of soccer.
23. Again, this idea is close to Dourish’s understanding of context: “As competent social actors in particular domains, we can find the world and the settings we encounter as meaningful. This unification of action and meaning is also central to the question of context, since context is essentially about the ways in which actions can be rendered as meaningful—how a particular action, for example, becomes meaningful for others by dint of where it was performed, when, or with whom” (2004, 24).
24. This is, of course, an interpretation of the classic design research concepts of affordances and constraints (Norman 2002), though I’d claim that objects designed for play, or playthings, answer better to the notion of designed signifiers that Norman introduced in Living with Complexity (2010).
25. In the next chapter I write about how playfulness is an attitude that allows different interpretations of nonplay contexts. A very simple example is the Apple computer. Apple’s focus on making computing machines feel playful, filling them with animations and quirks, suggests a different attitude from the user than toward a conventional gray-box computer. This was one of the core design drives of Steve Jobs, and a good example of how a playful attitude can be invoked in contexts that do not necessarily involve, or lead to, play.
26. Since I understand play as a form of expression akin to language (as does Sutton-Smith, 1997, 219: “Play is like a language: a system of communication and expression, not in itself either good or bad”), I take that as a term of comparison. Languages are not designed, or at least not in the same ways play is designed for. By designed, here, I am referring to the capacity of humans for artificially creating playthings that aid the activity of play. It is an understanding of design as a science of the artificial (Simon 1996, but specially Cross 2007), as the collection of knowledge, skills, and insights that leads to the creation of objects that contribute to the experience of being in the world (Verbeek, 2006).
27. Pye (1978) has an idea of the aesthetics of design that is deeply influenced by the importance of form and function in the creation of the objects. It is still a surprisingly popular approach, even though usability gurus like Norman (2004) have distanced themselves from this modernist idea.
28. This is one of the foci of the initial chapter of Homo Ludens, as well as the usual topic in many game studies books (Salen and Zimmerman 2004; Juul 2005). See also Henricks (2006, 209–212) and the formalist works of Avedon (1971). Also, the study of rules cannot avoid the importance of Wittgenstein (1961, 1991).
29. Readers will recognize here the work of Goffman (1961).
30. This attitude toward play has been mentioned by Huizinga, Caillois, and Sutton-Smith, but it is Suits (2005) who named it “the lusory attitude.” DeKoven (2002) bases much of his work on understanding this attitude and how it is malleable, changing with the context and purpose of the playful activity.
31. Unlike what Huizinga (1992) thought: “The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt.… As soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses” (11). Unlike Huizinga, I’d claim that in many cases when the rules are transgressed, new play worlds emerge.
32. Examples abound: house rules, self-imposed challenges (http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/2009/12/permanent-death-complete-saga.html), and even sports tactics: they are all interpretations of rules in order to facilitate play.
33. Again, Huizinga (1992): “The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a ‘spoil-sport.’ … He must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community” (11).
34. All the works of the New Games movement, the late 1960s movement that wanted to encourage more playful, noncompetitive games, are within this interpretive frame, particularly those of DeKoven, for whom playing is more important than playing by the rules.
35. This idea is adapted from the original concept of orderly and disorderly play that Henricks (2009) proposed.
36. As Nietzsche argued for in The Birth of Tragedy (1993). I am aware that this is a work of the young Nietzsche, and very much a text written as a particular response to a cultural and artistic climate. However, the dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac is, as I will argue, relevant for understanding play, even though it implies a certain freedom of interpretation of the original concepts.
37. Nietzsche (1993) writes: “And let us now imagine how the ecstatic sound of the Dionysiac revels echoed ever more enticingly around this world, built on illusion and moderation, and artificially restrained— how their clamor voiced all the excess of nature in delight, suffering, and knowledge, and even in the most piercing cry: imagine what the psalmodizing apolline artist, with his phantom harpnotes, could have meant compared to this daemonic folk song” (26). Incidentally, the rise of physical indie games that are inspired by folk games like B.U.T.T.O.N (folk games are understood to be popular games that are played in groups and transmitted through communities of play), and the presence of folk games in many indie events (such as IndieCade, the yearly festival of independent games ), could be interpreted as a Dionysiac reaction to the Apollonian presence of computer games (formal systems running on computing machines) that dominated the late twentieth century.
38. “Play is characteristically buoyant and disrespectful, and players are indulgent in the broadest sense of that term. Committed to living in the present, players insert their interests and enthusiasms wherever possible. Within the boundaries of the event itself, action typically dances and darts. We demolish our carefully constructed castle of blocks and are fascinated by the clatter of its collapse” (Henricks 2006, 205–206).
39. Huizinga (1992) mentions the importance of play as a creator of order, an Apollonian footprint that can still be felt today in the way we think about play. See, for example, Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005) and its hypothesis that playing is akin to learning since it consists of pattern recognition behaviors. We learn, and play, by recognizing order—a valid way of understanding play, but only one possible way of acknowledging the ways in which play matters.
40. There is a certain pleasure in rational, goal-oriented play. While instrumental play can be a highly positive type of play (Taylor 2006a), it can also lead to worse instances of instrumental play (Sicart 2012), in which the very purpose of play is lost in external rewards and mindless interactions.
41. “Play can be deferred or suspended at any time” (Huizinga, 1992, 8).
42. Bakhtin (1984, 2008). Incidentally, the presence of Bakhtin can also be felt in some design research work. See, for example, Wright, Wallace, and McCarthy (2008).
43. This is not a totally new idea in play studies: “Festive events are typically an alternation between patterns of aggressive, creative activity and its opposite—a more receptive and adaptive mode” (Henricks 2006, 92). However, the application of Bakhtin’s carnival and its important ties to ideas of modernity and freedom separates my work from other theories of play.
44. See also Schmitz (1988): “Like art and religion, play is not far from the feast, for art celebrates beauty and religion celebrates glory, but play celebrates the emergence of a finite world that lies outside and beyond the world of nature while at the same time resting upon it” (33). Similarly, see Fink (1988) or Esposito (1988).
45. “Laughter at the feast of fools was not, of course, an abstract and purely negative mockery of the Christian ritual and the Church’s hierarchy. The negative derisive element was deeply immersed in the triumphant theme of bodily regeneration and renewal. It was ‘man’s second nature’ that was laughing, the lower bodily stratum which could not express itself in official cult and ideology” (Bakhtin 1984, 75). And, “the feast was a temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers. For a short time life came out of its usual, legalized and consecrated furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom” (89).
46. “The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly described as follows: Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore, laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter” (Bakhtin 1984, 66).
47. “In other words, medieval laughter became at the Renaissance stage of its development the expression of a new free and critical historical consciousness” (Bakhtin 1984, 73).
48. “Seriousness was therefore elementally distrusted, while trust was placed in festive laughter” (Bakhtin 1984, 95).
49. “Laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without destroying and distorting the very contents of the truth which it unveils. Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning” (Bakhtin 1984, 94).
50. “The images of games were seen as a condensed formula of life and of the historic process: fortune, misfortune, gain and loss, crowning and uncrowning.… At the same time games drew the players out of the bounds of everyday life, liberated them from usual laws and regulations, and replaced established conventions by other lighter conventionalities.… The peculiar interpretation of games in Rabelais’ time must be carefully considered. Games were not as yet thought of as a part of ordinary life and even less of its frivolous aspect. Instead they had preserved their philosophical meaning” (Bakhtin 1984, 235–236).
51. “Play is usually thought to be a time when people ‘take over’ their own affairs.… In play, so it is argued, people can have the world to their liking.… Play gives people a chance to shape the world—and to do so according to their own terms and timing” (Henricks 2006, 7–8).
52. Also known as Ninja Slap: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ninja%20Slap (accessed December 1, 2011). See also http://ultimateninjacombat.com/ (accessed December 1, 2011).
53. http://gutefabrik.com/joust.html (accessed December 1, 2011).
54. Incidentally, appropriative play also happens in the case of spectatorship. Sports are a case in which the appropriative nature of play can be used to understand the ways in which we contemplate play. To see a game being played, a sport or something like Ninja or Joust, is also to participate, to play—a minor, perhaps secondary way, but also a way of performing the basic appropriative move that defines play as an activity.
55. A Marxist would probably be proud of this interpretation of play, following Henricks’s (2006) exegesis of Marx: “Indeed, the objects themselves are much less important than the experience of human relationship that derives from the activity” (37).
56. http://camover.noblogs.org. See also http://www.disinfo.com/2013/01/camover-a-game-to-destroy-cctv-cameras/ and http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2013/jan/25/game-destroy-cctv-cameras-berlin (accessed February 1, 2013).
57. In Schechner’s own words, “Dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed, as in spying, con-games, undercover actions, and double agentry. Unlike the inversions of carnivals, ritual clowns, and so on (whose agendas are public), dark play’s inversions are not declared or resolved; its end is not integration but disruption, deceit, excess, and gratification” (1988, 13).
58. “Play creates its own (permeable) boundaries and realms: multiple realities that are slippery, porous, and full of creative lying and deceit; that play is dangerous and, because it is, players need to feel secure in order to begin playing; that the perils of playing are often masked or disguised by saying that play is fun, voluntary, a leisure activity, or ephemeral—when in fact the fun of playing, when there is fun, is in playing with fire, going in over one’s head, inverting accepted procedures and hierarchies; that play is performative involving players, directors, spectators, and commentators” (Schechner, 1988, 5).
59. And not only adult play, but also children’s play, as Sutton-Smith has already noted (1997, 111–123).
60. Schüll’s (2012) work on the design of gambling machines is particularly fascinating: “From virtual reel mapping and disproportionate reels to video slots’ asymmetric reels; from the illusory player control conveyed by stop buttons and joysticks to the illusory offs conveyed by teaser strips: These methods, supported by a whole corporate, legal, and regulatory apparatus, gave machine designers greater control over the odds and presentation of chance while fostering enchanting ‘illusions of control’, distorted perception of odds, and near-miss effects among gamblers. In what amounts to a kind of enchantment by design, finely tuned, chance-mediating technologies function as ‘really new gods’, captivating their audience” (95).
61. See also Henricks’s (2006, particularly pages 169–170) reading of the works of Goffman.
62. “What does seem distinctive about play is the degree to which the characteristic rationale for the activity … is contained or restricted within the activity itself. To play is to acknowledge that this restricted sphere is a legitimate place to operate, that people can passionately pursue objectives here without interference or condemnation from other spheres. There will be personal or social consequences for what occurs.… However, these consequences are for the most part kept ‘in the room’” (Henricks 2006, 191).
63. See Suits (1988): “All instances of play are instances of autotelic activity” (19).
64. This is of course a jab against the idea of magic circle, which is a common (mis)interpretation of Huizinga’s proposal of autotelic play. See Consalvo (2009). Goffman’s ideas can also be used to destabilize the idea of magic circle: “Games in fact have boundaries that are semi-permeable. Certain issues inevitably come through” (Henricks 2006, 151).
65. http://mightyvision.blogspot.dk/2012/08/vesper5.html.
66. Again, the influence of actor-network theory should be clear here. I understand the activity of play as taking place in an ecology of things, people, and processes, all of which are related in multiple and varying ways through time. The purpose of a theory of play should be to identify the workings of these networks and propose a vocabulary that allows for approaching instances of the activity in meaningful, critical ways.
67. “To play a game is to reclaim suddenly experiences he has had before or even, more profoundly, to retrace the steps of anyone who has ever played the game” (Henricks 2006, 13).
68. “To play is to know that there is a wider world—with all its obligations and complexities- just beyond the gates of the playground. Furthermore, this wider world is needed to give play its sense of urgency and meaning. From those external settings, people import the frequently contradictory values and challenges of their times as well as their own more general issues about personal functioning” (Henricks 2006, 219). Also, in the way I understand the ecology of play, postphenomenological thinking has a lot of weight: through playthings, we experience play, and they have a role in shaping the activity in the ways they mediate it, but also in the ways they open themselves to being interpreted, questioned, appropriated.
69. “The realm of play, if participated in openly, offers obvious opportunities to explore alternative modes of awareness, to develop insights into and knowledge of new modes of being, and to explore radically different possibilities perhaps not readily available elsewhere” (Meier 1988, 194).
70. The careful reader will have probably noticed how I’ve eluded the classic notion of play as being “voluntary.” The more I think about play, the less I see the notion of voluntary as being an important ontological mark of it. It is true that we often choose to play, but the initial choice may be followed by playing without the intention of playing, just for social pressure. Play is an activity we often engage with voluntarily, but voluntariness does not define the activity: play can happen, and it often does, without being a choice on the part of the players. It is, once again, a remnant of Huizinga’s idealized vision of play that often leads us to think about play as obligatory voluntary.
71. “As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, a freedom, by the way, which could just as well be his anguish, then his activity is play” (Sartre 1988, 169).
72. “To play is to take an explanatory attitude toward being at all times” (Fink 1988, 105).
73. Sartre (1988, 170).
Chapter 2
1. The idea of software appropriating the hardware, and the potential political, legal, and ethical implications, are explained by Lessig (2000), though more pertinent analysis of the relations between software and hardware can be found in Bogost and Montfort (2009) or Wardrip-Fruin (2009). However, the most interesting insights on the relation between software and hardware are often found in science and technology studies (see Latour 1992, 2005). See also Kittler (2010).
2. Although this is not the place to discuss these matters, an interesting thread that needs to be explored when thinking about the relations between play and the digital domain is that of the role of gatekeepers in the shaping of playful technologies. For all the potentialities that an iPhone presents, it is ultimately the corporation that produced it, Apple, that allows software to run on it. The way this institutional presence affects the inherent freedom of play should be a subject of interest for researchers and creators of digital play.
3. Sports cars are often marketed as this kind of emotional playful devices, like the Mazda Zoom Zoom campaign (http://zoom-zoom.mazda.com/, accessed December 9, 2011); thanks to Mark J. Nelson for this observation. Similarly, the use of colors in household appliances (see, e.g., the Danish brand Bodum: http://www.bodum.com/dk/da/shop/prodlist/30/, accessed December 9, 2011) elevates them from dull instruments for food production to part of the sensory experience of cooking. Marketing theorists have written extensively and appropriately about “playful consumption” and how it can be leveraged in the marketplace (see Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Holbrook et al. 1984; Grayson 1999; Molesworth and Denegri-Knot 2008).
4. See Blijlevens, Creusen, and Schoormans (2009) for an account on marketing, design, and emotions.
5. The rise of gamification as a concept in 2010 is testimony to this idea—that through play and its values, businesses and services can better engage consumers. Gamification in its commercial phrasing was widely criticized, yet there is still some hope in thinking about playfulness outside the domain of formalized play. See Deterding et al. (2011a, 2011b) for a complete, thorough, and hopeful critique of the gamification.
6. Sports car commercials often present the product in a playful way. Similarly, worldwide brands such as Apple (“Think Different”), HP (“The Computer Is Personal, Again”), and Nike (“Just do it,” and particularly its football commercials of the late 1990s with Eric Cantona as a star: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egNMC6YfpeE ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdhvp-iYR3s; accessed December 9, 2011) use the rhetoric of play to engage their potential customers by appealing to a different set of values from those often applied to their commercial domains (computing, sports).
7. A typical example is the publicity for caffeinated energy drinks, which dress themselves as sporting radical lifestyles even though the drinks are an important part of modern performance enhancers in the workplace.
8. This is resonant of the Frankfurt school approach to modernity. See Adorno and Horkheimer (2010).
9. This definition of playfulness is inspired by Lieberman’s work (1977), though my approach is less sociological, and probably less influenced by Goffman and other sociological theorists and more imbued with the rhetorics of playful design and performance studies.
10. This reference is close to Debord’s situationist international and their interest in political playfulness. Wark’s (2011) excellent summary of the movement is a good introduction to the topic, though some readers may be familiar with Debord’s idea of détournement (Debord and Wolman 2009).
11. The attraction and pleasures of labor are already well observed by Marx in both its economic and cultural importance. Henricks’s (2006) detailed reading of Marx through the lens of play contributes to understanding the instrumental pleasures of formalized work and how those pleasures are akin to the result of play. Of course, Adorno’s (2004) resistance to these pleasures and his idea of how aesthetics can free us can be relevant for understanding these pleasures.
12. See Henricks (2006): “Playful expression tends to be organized as a series of pleasant individual escapades or interludes, officially permitted departures from public routine. In this way, even the ‘escape routes’ for public expression have been anticipated and prepared by formal organizations” (106).
13. Besides the work on marketing and playfulness and Lieberman’s book (1977), the notion of playfulness is also present in design research (Gaver 2009; Nam and Kim 2011), critical theory (Benjamin 1999d; Adorno 2004) and performance studies (Schechner 2006). The idea of play as an activity is independent of the ideas proposed by activity theory, though some inspiration was drawn from Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006), particularly in the importance of the sociocultural and technical contexts in the practice of both play and playfulness.
14. The idea of frames refers to Goffman (1959), even though, as Henricks (2006) points out, “[Goffman’s playfulness] refers primarily to various forms of imaginative role play that sometimes interrupt the flow of social interaction” (164), rather than to a different activity or attitude than that of play.
15. By “resisting” here I am referring to the fact that even though some attitudes are often guided toward objects or contexts, these worldly domains may ignore our attitudes. Verbeek (2006) gives the example of speed bumps and speed radars, and how they incite violent responses from drivers. The machines, the things, resist the attitude of the drivers, who cannot impose their will on those machines. Playful designs are a negotiation, a dance of this resistance, oscillating between acceptance of playfulness and rejection of actions that don’t lead to the desired outcomes (see Sengers et al. 2005 for a reflection on this type of design approach from a human–computer interaction perspective and Gaver et al. 2009 for a critical reflection on the success of these approaches).
16. This idea is present in some of the philosophy of sports dedicated to the aesthetic ideal; see Morgan and Meier (1988).
17. See http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323375204578269991660836834 (accessed October 17, 2013).
18. I designed a game around this very premise: http://deterbold.com/catastrophes/dead-drops/.
19. A video of the famous penalty can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd1Hr96IenI (accessed December 9, 2011).
20. See, for instance, Brown and Duguid (1994), Newton (2004), Taylor (2006a), and Turkle (2007). Despite their different methodological traditions, all of these texts share a certain critical perspective on the relations between technology and humans. Outside of design research or science and technology studies, the work of postphenomenologists provides equally interesting insights on the relation between technologies and practices.
21. http://www.tinkerkit.com/fake-computer-real-violence (accessed February 4, 2013).
22. http://accidentalnewsexplorer.com/ (accessed December 10, 2011).
23. There is dark playfulness like there is dark play, and it is not my intention to be normative about it. In fact, dark playfulness is likely to be an interesting approach to understanding politics through technologies and actions, as in the playful use of billboards by the Billboard Liberation Front (http://www.billboardliberation.com/, accessed December 10, 2011) or many of Banksy’s works, which are much more context dependent than what photographical records may show (his work in the Gaza strip is an example: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/0,,1543331,00.html; accessed December 10, 2011).
24. http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/best%20day%20ever/ (accessed December 10, 2011).
25. There are resonances between this idea and Goffman’s theories: “Goffman posits a continuum between play and games. Play is typically a temporary transformation of some practical activity. An ordinary object suddenly becomes a ‘play-thing’ and is abandoned just as quickly” (Henricks 2006, 165). I am not arguing here for a continuity between play and games, but for understanding games as props for play (or, in a weakest sense, games as the form of play). Hence, Goffman’s insights are only marginally useful.
26. http://www.doodlebuzz.com/ (accessed December 10, 2011).
27. I am indebted to Sebastian Möring for this concept.
28. Incidentally, they can also be contexts modified for play, such as spaces taken over by play. For instance, the space around foosball tables at IT University is often transformed during leisure hours into improvised stadiums for hard competition. The context of the public space of a university is modified to accommodate a play activity.
29. Compare, for example, the initial release of Apple’s Keynote presentation software with the version of Microsoft’s PowerPoint available at that time: Apple’s focus on animations, images, and videos, as well as the care for design and typography, made Keynote a much more playful presentation software.
30. http://www.liveplasma.com/.
31. http://www.twittearth.com/.
32. http://julianoliver.com/output/packet-garden.
34. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Moss-Graffiti.
35. I am here referring to classic works such as Dreyfuss (2003) and Pye (1978). Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (2002) is a usability take on functionalist thinking and therefore also part of the tradition I am referring to.
36. I am not blind to the commercial angle of this reflection: lack of personality eases the turnaround of new household projects.
37. “People appropriate and reinterpret systems to produce their own uses and meanings, and these are frequently incompatible with design expectations and inconsistent within and across groups” (Sengers and Gaver 2006, 3).
38. That is, the system is not guaranteeing functionality: “Systems that are open to interpretation don’t need to be tailored to fit every possible niche audience; instead, the same system may support many ways of experiencing and acting in the world” (Sengers and Gaver 2006, 3).
39. “In our culture, technology often carries connotations of precision, correctness, and authority which can make users feel that the system’s apparent interpretation (e.g., the data it collects and presents) must be more correct than users’ own understandings” (Sengers and Gaver 2006, 6).
40. This is the idea behind Dunne’s (2006) user-unfriendliness concept.
41. These are better explained by Gaver et al. (2004), who write that playful technologies are meant to “promote curiosity,” “de-emphasize the pursuit of external goals,” “maintain openness and ambiguity,” “support social engagement in social activities,” and “allow the ludic to be interleaved with everyday utilitarian activities.”
42. While I am aware that this may sound like a harsh criticism, there is an important issue at stake: the idea of playful design is important, and its proponents argue for its current success in the world of design. However, there is a certain disconnect between the ideas, the implementations, and the actual presence of these radically playful technologies in our everyday technological use. For playful design to be as successful as Gaver (2009) claims, it should be present in many more technologies than it is now. It’s true that we’re witnessing a shift toward playfulness in technology, but the presence and role of institutional gatekeepers prevent the focus on ambiguity to prevail.
43. Dunne’s works, as revolutionary and interesting as they are, still take place and space in the art gallery. Interestingly, the method of cultural probes, developed between Gaver and Dunne, is actually quite popular in playful design companies such as IDEO.
44. Many of the interesting answers are collected in the blog “Shit Siri Says” (http://shitsirisays.com/, accessed December 12, 2011). More interesting, and politically relevant, is how a glitch in Siri prevented it from giving directions to abortion clinics (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57334773-501465/siris-abortion-answers-are-a-glitch-says-apple/, accessed December 12, 2011). Winner (1986), Latour (1992), and Verbeek (2006) provide interesting angles to explain this embedded politics in design.
45. Again, there is an obvious commercial side to it: when disposing of an Apple product equipped with Siri, we cannot but think that we’re actually disposing of Siri. The personal attachment to this playful companion can be an extraordinary market tool that might prevent users from leaving the platform on emotional grounds.
Chapter 3
1. Except Sutton-Smith, who dedicated a volume to toys (Sutton-Smith 1986), all other major play theorists, from Huizinga to DeKoven, focused on games as the form of play, paying little to no attention to toys. Ironically, critical theory (Benjamin 1999a, b, c) and literary theory (Stewart 1993) have given due importance to the cultural role of toys in the context of play.
2. In the three texts from which this chapter draws inspiration (Sutton-Smith 1986; Benjamin 1999a; Stewart 1993), toys are defined only in oblique ways. It seems that, much like play, there is something obvious with the colloquial use of the concept of toy that makes it difficult and paradoxically trivial to define toy. Intuitively we know what toys are. In this chapter, I keep that ambiguity alive, so I will not propose a formal definition of toy, but I will describe toys from both a cultural and a technological perspective.
3. The authors of the texts that inspire this chapter seldom question the materiality of the toy. There are interesting insights in Benjamin’s work, but most of the time he does not question the toy as a thing. However, in order to insert toys into this ecology of play, their very materiality, the way they act as playthings, is fundamental. The portable theory of play I am proposing here requires paying attention to the “thingness” of things as much as to their cultural roles. In this sense, the chapter diverges from Benjamin, Sutton-Smith, and Stewart in the attention to the material conditions that make toys a plaything.
5. http://www.danieldisselkoen.nl/man-eater/ (accessed February 5, 2013).
6. Anybody who has looked in awe at a model train or at Sim City knows how these types of mechanical toys, in their alterity, are fascinating devices to look at; they are tiny worlds that paradoxically seem to operate on appropriately scaled-down versions of the same laws our physical world obeys. In Stewart’s (1993) words, “The toy world presents a projection of the world of everyday life; this real world is miniaturized or gigantized in such a way as to test the relation between materiality and meaning. We are thrilled and frightened by the mechanical toy because it presents the possibility of a self-invoking fiction, a fiction which exists independent of human signifying processes” (1993, 57).
7. I appropriate the concept of procedurality as coined by Murray (1998) and Bogost (2007), since it explains how some toys are created to reproduce in different scale processes, from trains to cities to steam engines. Instead of the complicated terms of simulation, simulacra, and other loaded concepts, procedurality allows me to focus on how these toys are created with a set of processes in mind—processes that define them—and that on occasion can be performed without any human presence. Model toys, and software toys like The Sims and Sim City fall into this category of procedural toys.
8. In classic design research terms, the fascination produced by procedural toys can be explained by how they obscure the system image, forcing us to reconstruct it as a playful process; in other words, making the user image becomes a play process (see Norman 2002).
9. “Toys can be thought of scientifically as a series of object ideoglyphs of modern object reality” (Sutton-Smith 1986, 243), and, “What we need to realize is that whatever the type of play, it is partly because the toy is a schematic and familiar signal that the players can treat it in their own preferred way” (Sutton-Smith 1986, 250).
10. http://www.flong.com/projects/yellowtail/ (accessed February 5, 2013).
11. A sketch of this history can be found in Benjamin (1999b).
12. See Sutton-Smith (1986): “The development of the modern concept of toy seems to have occurred first between the years 1550 and 1750 when the new idea of the industrial machine began to change the nature of the world” (58), and, “The modern toy may be seen in part as a symbolic legatee of this first optimistic scientific view of the planned universe. In its smallness the toy, along with other miniatures, represented a departure from the thousands of years in which the major ‘science’ for the peoples of the world was the science of largeness, of the macrocosm, of astronomy” (59).
13. See Benjamin (1999b): “Here, perhaps, is the deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen: the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a ‘doing as if’ but a ‘doing the same thing over and over again,’ the transformation of a shattering experience into habit—that is the essence of play” (120). This idea resonates powerfully in Adorno’s (2004) aesthetic theory.
14. Formalized in the Huizingian sense that games are the form of play, an analysis that Caillois (2001) reiterates and that is also present in Schechner’s (1988) understanding of play in relation to rituals. The main issue with this focus on formalized play is, again, its lack of interest in the material elements that compose that form, the physical instantiations of play. By focusing on toys, I want to overcome that problem and describe how play can be effectively materialized in objects that are not formalized play but can be used in formalized play.
15. By this I mean that a toy is just a collection of signifiers, affordances and constraints placed to cue certain types of play behaviors. The meaning of the toy cannot be located in its design but in the way it is used, or in how the design is actualized in the act of playing with it.
16. Or, as Sutton-Smith (1986) would put it, a toy is an instrument for the different rhetorics of play. See also Suits (2005) for a reflection on different types of play and what is required to engage in play activities, particularly the idea of games as creating unnecessary challenges.
17. In this sense, I follow Benjamin’s footsteps, claiming that the freedom afforded by some toys is better because it leads to the positive aspects of play: “Because the more appealing toys are, in the ordinary sense of the term, the further they are from genuine playthings; the more they are based on imitation, the further away they lead us from real, living play” (Benjamin 1999b, 115–116).
18. Sutton-Smith (1986): “The toy is a model of the kind of isolation that is essential to progress in the modern world. Just as it, as a miniature, is abstracted from the world about it, which it represents in some way, so must growing persons learn to abstract themselves from the world around” (24).
19. This material thinking is relatively close to Heidegger’s ideas on technology, particularly those expressed in “The Question Concerning Technology” (available at http://www.wright.edu/cola/Dept/PHL/Class/P.Internet/PITexts/QCT.html, accessed December 12, 2011).
20. “To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form” (Benjamin 1999b, 100).
21. The idea of dimensions is an interpretation of Lim, Stolterman, and Tenenberg’s (2008) nomenclature to describe prototypes. In this sense, I believe that toys are excellent ways of thinking about prototyping for games, particularly for digital games, since they can be described using prototyping theory. In other words, for prototyping games, toys provide a natural way of starting to explore different design spaces.
22. I am referring here to the fact that games are not the only or even the dominant form of play and that toys and their materiality are as important as any other form of play for understanding playing.
23. http://www.generativemusic.com/ (accessed December 12, 2011).
24. Affordances, signifiers, and constraints are part of the design process, that is, they are consciously built in. Filters might be consciously created, but they might also be “discovered” by players as they interact with an object with a playful attitude. I am trying to stay away here from a normative design stance because I believe that in the design of games and toys, the question of how the object filters the activity is a productive one to ask during conceptualization.
25. That has an effect in professional sports. In every Soccer World Cup, a new ball is presented, each time a more perfect sphere than in the past. And in every World Cup, some players complain that the new ball “plays differently” than the previous ones did, affecting their game.
26. http://vectorpark.com/levers/ (accessed December 12, 2011).
27. As I noted in chapter 1, this book proposes a romantic vision of play, one driven by Schiller’s (1988) famous statement that people are fully human only in play. I addressed the problems with my approach to play in the introduction and return to them in the conclusion to this book in chapter 8.
Chapter 4
1. I am referring here to the Santa Maria and Easter Islands playground: http://monstrum.dk/projekter/santa-maria-og-paaskeoeerne-paa-aarhus-plads.
2. Monstrum.dk.
3. The adventure playground was the idea of Carl Theodor Sørensen, even though the modern understanding of the word comes from the British adoption of his ideas, thanks to the initiative of Lady Allen of Hurtwood. Kozlovsky (2008) provides an excellent critical history of the adventure playground.
4. Solomon (2005) gives a compelling account of the trivialization of the American playground and modern attempts to revitalize these spaces as creative social spaces.
5. See, for instance, Seitinger et al.(2006), Lentini and Decortis (2010), or Wilhemsson (2006).
6. Academically, a good starting reference is Soute, Markopoulos, and Magielse (2010). I also recommend that readers look at playground designers like PlayAlive (http://www.playalive.dk/Globalt/produkt.htm) or Creative Playthings (http://www.creativeplaythings.com). These types of playgrounds are enhanced by technology, but that technology is used to monitor and closely steer behaviors within the playground. Therefore, they are examples of a tendency toward more regulated, normative play in the context of the otherwise more open spaces of the classic playground.
7. Note that the adventure playground is a pattern in Alexander et al.’s A Pattern Language (1977, nr. 73).
8. Kozlovsky (2008) suggests this critical reading of playground design, comparing it to panopticist designs.
9. A good example, besides the Monstrum playground, is Berlin’s MountMitte playground, oriented to an adult experience of vertigo. See http://mountmitte.de (accessed February 5, 2013).
10. But not exclusively so. Even an architect like Alexander writes in A Pattern Language, “Any kind of playground which disturbs, or reduces, the role of imagination and makes the child more passive, more the recipient of someone else’s imagination, may look nice, may be clean, may be sage, may be healthy—but it just cannot satisfy the fundamental need which play is all about” (1977, 368).
11. Again, Solomon (2005) provides an excellent overview of the American example, in which overtly protective safety regulations made playgrounds boring spaces for children.
12. Dumas and Laforest (2008) give a good account of skateboarding and its relation to urban spaces and sports.
13. The literature on parkour and space is quite varied. For a deeper version of the analysis of the relations between urbanism and parkour, I recommend O’Grady (2012), Geyh (2006), Mould (2009), Bavinton (2007), Rawlinson and Guaralda (2011), and Waern, Balan, and Nevelsteen (2012).
14. See Nitsche (2009) for a comprehensive account of the relation between space and games.
15. Interestingly, Vincent Ocasla, a player of Sim City 2000, claims that this game can be “finished” and shows as proof Magnasanti, a totalitarian city of 6 million digital inhabitants. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU and http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city.
16. See visitproteus.com. Incidentally, on its release on January 30, 2013, Proteus created some stir in the gaming communities because it does not fit the traditional, conservative definitions of games. For me, Proteus is an object we play with and a space we play in, and so it can be defined as a game—as well as a playground or even a toy. What is important is not its ontological nature but what we do with it.
Chapter 5
1. Art and aesthetics, as I will note throughout the chapter, are not the same thing, but as Danto (2009) wrote, “Ontologically, aesthetics is not essential to art—but rhetorically, it is central. The artist uses aesthetics to transform or confirm attitudes. That is not the same as putting us in the mood of calm aesthetic contemplations, which has tended to hijack the concept of aesthetics” (116). See also Jansen, O’Connor, and Halsall (2009).
2. Interestingly, the history of the novel is one that started with playful forms, like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy; only in the nineteenth century did it become a more serious affair. Are games and toys, so often forced to be “serious” to be respected, following the same path? And if so, what are we losing?
3. The relation of play and the twentieth-century avant-garde, particularly with the Fluxus and situationist international moments, is particularly interesting. Flanagan (2009) is the reference text for this history, though Friedman (1998) and Knabb (2007) are also extremely interesting.
4. See, for instance, Stiles’s (2007) reflections on Fluxus, play, and humor: “Filled with the marvel of a sense of discovery and release, Fluxus humor escorts freedoms: the freedom to play and goof-off, the freedom to value that play as an aesthetic habit (one’s brand), the freedom to abandon reason and aesthetics and just to be” (57).
5. Again Stiles (2007), writing about Fluxus, summarizes this idea more precisely: “In order to really goof-off well, the instrumental sense of purpose deeply ingrained in Western ego and epistemology has to be abandoned” (52).
6. I think that the beauty of play also says something about art and the works of art, an idea I owe to Dave Hickey (2007): “What if works of art were considered to be what they actually are—frivolous objects or entities with no intrinsic value that only acquire value through a complex process of socialization during which some are empowered by an ongoing sequence of private, mercantile, journalistic, and institutional investments that are irrevocably extrinsic to them and to any intention they might embody” (119).
7. The most interesting recent summary of this relation can be found in Kwastek (2013). She addresses many of the problems that arise when using classic play theories in the study of the arts, particularly digital aesthetics. Kwastek acknowledges that play is a fundamental concept for understanding the aesthetics of interactive digital art. Her chapter on the aesthetics of play is good to read in parallel with this book, as I have tried to solve some of the interpretational problems she observes in her study.
8. See, for instance, Gumbrecht (2006): “What we enjoy in the great moments of a ballgame is not just the goal, the touchdown, the home run, or the slam-dunk. It is the beautiful individual play that takes form prior to the score.… A form is any phenomenon with the capacity of presenting itself to our sense and experience in clear distinction from everything that is not a part of it. But a beautiful play is more than just a form—it is an epiphany of form. A beautiful play is produced by the sudden, surprising convergence of several athletes’ bodies in time and space” (189–190).
9. Drucker (2009) presents an interesting view on the relationship between aesthetics and computation: “The role of aesthetics is to illuminate the ways in which the forms of knowledge provoke interpretation. Insofar as the formal logic of computational environments validates instrumental applications regarding the management and creation of digital artifacts, imaginative play is crucial to keeping that logic from asserting a totalizing authority on knowledge and its forms. Aesthesis, I suggest, allows us to insist on the value of subjectivity that is central to aesthetic artifacts—works of art in the traditional sense—and to place the subjectivity at the core of knowledge production” (xiii).
10. Bourriaud (2002).
11. Kester (2004, 2011).
12. C. Bishop (2004, 2009, 2012).
13. Kaprow (2003).
14. Of course, it is not an instant but the appreciation of the process that matters, that makes play beautiful: “Scoring serves to define and articulate overcoming opposition. It helps determine the completeness of play and thereby the overall form of the game. It gives a closure to our experience of sport often lacking in everyday life.… To appreciate the conclusion, though, we must see it as the fulfillment of what has preceded” (Kupfer, 1988, 462–463).
15. Even Sartre (1988) would agree: “But there is always in sport an appropriative component. In reality sport is a free transformation of the worldly environment into the supporting element of the action. This fact makes it creative like art” (170).
16. However, there are always ethical issues when winning is seen as the goal. See Hardman et al. (1996), or Feezell (2006).
17. In this sense, I am closer to Adorno’s ideas that play and art, at least the high kind of art, modernist expression, that Adorno (2004) privileged, might be at odds with each other: “In art, play is from the outset disciplinary; it fulfills the taboo on expression that inheres in the ritual of imitation; when art exclusively plays, nothing remains of expression” (400).
18. See http://doougle.net/projects/mega-girp.html (accessed February 6, 2013).
19. This is not to say that the objects are not important. They are, but mostly as facilitators of the experience of play, as elements in the ecology of play: “Aesthetic objects create a space for reflection, through experience. They break the unity of object as product and thing as self-identical that are the hallmarks of a consumerist culture. They do this through their conceptual structure and execution, in the play between idea and expression. An aesthetic object may be simple or complex, but it inserts itself into a historical continuum of ideas in such a way as to register. Aesthetic objects make an argument about the nature of art as expression and experience. They perform that argument about what art is and can be, and what can be expressed and in what ways, at any given moment” (Drucker, 2009, 180).
20. See Bourriaud (2002) but also, and a more poignant work, Youngman (2011).
21. For instance: “The first question we should ask ourselves when looking at a work of art is: —Does it give me the chance to exist in front of it, or, on the contrary, does it deny me as a subject, refusing to consider the Other in its structure? Does the space-time factor suggested or described by this work, together with the laws governing it, tally with my aspirations in real life? Does it criticize what is deemed to be criticizable? Could I live in a space-time structure corresponding to this reality?” (Bourriaud 2002, 57).
22. A description of it can be found at http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=147206 (accessed February 6, 2013).
24. The origins and history of the game Ninja are obscure. A canonical description of the rules can be found here: http://ultimateninjacombat.com (accessed February 6, 2013).
25. http://www.precise-ambiguities.net (accessed February 6, 2013).
26. This is best summarized by C. Bishop (2004)—for example: “In the meantime it is necessary to observe that it is only a short step from regarding the image as a social relationship to Bourriaud’s argument that the structure of an art work produces a social relationship. However, identifying what the structure of a relational art work is is no easy task, precisely because the work claims to be open-ended. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that relational art works are an outgrowth of installation art, a form that has from its inception solicited the literal presence of the viewer” (63).
27. Again, Bishop (2004) writes: “If relational aesthetics requires a unified subject as a pre- requisite for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony. It would thereby provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other” (79).
28. In Kester’s (2004) own description of his theory: “The emphasis is on the character of this interaction, not the physical or formal integrity of a given artifact or the artist’s experience in producing it. The object-based artwork (with some exceptions) is produced entirely by the artist and only subsequently offered to the viewer. As a result, the viewer’s response has no immediate reciprocal effect on the constitution of the work. Further, the physical object remains essentially static. Dialogical projects, in contrast, unfold through a process of performative interaction” (10).
29. Though context is extremely important, it is so in the perspective of what Kester (2004) calls the catalyzation of the viewer: “This catalyzation of the viewer, the movement toward direct interaction, decisively shifts the locus of aesthetic meaning from the moment of creative plenitude in the solitary act of making (or the viewer’s imaginative reconstruction of this act) to a social and discursive realm of shared experience, dialogue, and physical movement” (54).
30. “What is at stake in these projects is not dialogue per se but the extent to which the artist is able to catalyze emancipatory insights through dialogue” (C. Kester, 2004, 69).
31. See Wilson and Sicart (2010) for a brief introduction to abusive games.
32. The classic monograph on Nordic live action role playing games is Stenros and Montola (2011).
33. Jeepen games are an experimental type of role-playing game extremely close to improvisational theater: a scenario is laid out for players, who through mostly improvised interactions explore a topic rather than a narrative—though the experience can be based on a narrative. See http://jeepen.org
34. http://jeepen.org/games/fatmandown/.
35. For a proper description of the concept of bleed, see Waern (2011).
36. “Play, of course, is at the heart of experimentation. Elsewhere, I’ve pointed out the crucial difference in the English language between playing and gaming. Gaming involves winning or losing a desired goal. Playing is open-ended and, potentially, everybody ‘wins’. Playing has no stated purpose other than more playing. It is usually not serious in content or attitude, whereas gaming, which can also involve playing if it is subordinated to winning, is at heart competitive” (Kaprow, 2003, 250).
37. “Avant-garde lifelike art is not nearly as serious as avant-garde artlike art. Often it is quite humorous. It isn’t very interested in the great Western tradition, either, since it tends to mix things up: body with mind, individual with people in general, civilization with nature, and so on. Thus it mixes up the traditional art genres or avoids them entirely.… Lifelike art makers’ principal dialogue is not with art but with everything else, one event suggesting another. If you don’t know much about life, you’ll miss much of the meaning of the lifelike art that’s born of it. Indeed, it is never certain if an artist who creates avant-garde lifelike art is an artist” (Kaprow, 2003, 203).
38. Originally designed for a Penn and Teller’s never-published game (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_Mirrors), Desert Bus has seen its popularity grow thanks to its quirkiness and charm. A playable version of the game can be found at http://desertbus-game.org.
39. A classic example of the extreme interpretation of this idea is PainStation: http://www.painstation.de.
40. “As direct play is denied to adults and gradually discouraged in children, the impulse to play emerges not in true games alone, but in unstated ones of power and deception; people find themselves playing less with each other than on or off each other” (Kaprow, 2003, 121).
41. Interestingly, Adorno (2004) might have agreed with this idea: “Only when play becomes aware of its own terror, as in Beckett, does it in any way share in art’s power of reconciliation” (400).
42. A valid approach to the aesthetics of playful objects might be taken from a Gadamerian perspective, like Davey (2009): “The brilliance of an artwork’s speculative revelation is that it can enable us to perceive a circle of meaning where prior to the insight we saw none. The shock of aesthetic or speculative recognition is suddenly seeing events and experiences that we assumed to be a disparate and unconnected as being in fact connected and moving toward a fulfillment of meaning that we had not anticipated” (151).
43. I would also like plaything designers to take up this challenge and allow rowdier and more dangerous and shocking approaches to making people play, like the coordinated melees that can happen when playing B.U.T.T.O.N. As Hickey (2007) wrote: “I would like some bad-acting and wrong-thinking. I would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, that cannot be construed as anything else. I would like a bunch of twenty-three-year-old troublemakers to become so enthusiastic, so noisy, and so involved in some stupid, seductive, destructive brand of visual culture that I would feel called upon to rise up in righteous indignation, spewing vitriol, to bemoan the arrogance and self-indulgence of the younger generation and all of its artifacts” (123).
Chapter 6
1. With his gesture when receiving the 1968 Olympic Gold Medal for the 200 meter dash, Tommie Smith brought the world’s attention to the African American black power movement. Jesse Owens defeated the Nazi athletes in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 while retaining sportsmanship in his treatment to the competitors. Diego Armando Maradona became first a symbol of overcoming poverty through talent and then a political symbol when he almost singlehandedly eliminated England in the 1986 Soccer World Cup. Martina Navratilova, perhaps the best tennis player ever, has used her worldwide fame to speak out on gay rights and political issues.
2. Videos of the goals scored in that match can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY40__rBvSk (accessed February 2, 2013).
3. The conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the sovereignty of the Falklands was historically long, though the Argentine dictatorship in power between 1976 and 1983 saw it as an opportunity for diverting attention from the country’s catastrophic economic situation. The Argentinian defeat in the war had the positive outcome of accelerating the effects on the decline of the military junta.
4. See Adorno (2001), particularly the essay “Free Time.”
5. In his reading of Marx, Henricks (2006) hints at this political interpretation. A selection of relevant articles on this topic can be found in Morgan and Meier (1988).
6. The works of Boal (2002, 2008) and Freire (1996, 2001, 2010).
7. The history of critical and political play has been dominated by a perspective centered in the rich Northern Hemisphere countries, which means that we have ignored the importance of play as a critical device in the poverty and dictatorship-rammed countries of Latin America. I am indebted to Enric Llagostera for this observation.
8. This is particularly the case of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996), fundamental to understanding the liberating powers of performance.
9. See Stenros and Montola (2011). Notice, however, that Nordic live action role playing games, while examples of critical play, have very different sociocultural and economic contexts from the Marxist Latin American theories mentioned before.
10. Munthe-Kaas (2011) describes the dystopian System Danmarc Nordic live action role playing games, which presented the idea of a futuristic Danish state in which the underclass was confined to ghettos and deprived of any rights or welfare state benefits.
11. Virtanen and Jokinen (2011) describes the Nordic live action role playing game Ground Zero, which explores the “first day of a nuclear holocaust” (65).
12. See Debord and Wolman (2009), or Knabb (2007) for an account of the politics of the Situationist International. Wark (2011) provides an appropriate sociocultural overview.
13. The work of culture jammers Adbusters is clearly influenced by Debord’s theories, though it is always complicated to delimit how much in Adbusters is politics, and how much is a pose. Go to https://www.adbusters.org and draw your own conclusion.
14. Richter and Britt (1997) give a good overview of the politics of Dada in the context of the art world and the political situation of the early twentieth century.
15. Friedman (1998) is the canonical Fluxus reference.
16. Bogost (2007) has a more nuanced and detailed approach to the problem of political or persuasive games, and how technology plays an important, material role in their configuration. However, Bogost is still focused on the object itself rather than the experience or performance. Another example in this tradition would be Frasca (2004).
17. That is, play can be the performance of political ideas for expression or for exploration, as Boal (2008) and Freire (1996) suggested.
18. This 2009 Guardian article explains kettling and its implications: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/03/g20-protests-police-tactics (accessed February 7, 2012).
19. Metakettle is actually a political game that has never been played, since the developers never found the occasion to do so. However, the game rules and designer notes are clear enough to give an idea of the game as it should be played: http://www.terrorbullgames.co.uk/games/metakettle_pnpgame.php.
20. Because of its focus on humor: “In a society thoroughly indoctrinated with prescribed cultural values, the idea of affirming personal idiosyncrasies that could include goofing-off, seems irresponsible and ridiculous—but liberating” (Stiles 2007, 53).
21. In this sense, play is connected to the notion of art that Kaprow (2003) defends: “Power in art is not like that in a nation or in big business. A picture never changed the price of eggs. But a picture can change our dreams; and pictures may in time clarify our values. The power of artists is precisely the influence they world over the fantasies of their public.… As it is involved in quality, art is a moral act” (53).
22. This is similar to what Freire (1996) criticizes as the banking model of education, where students are there to be filled with knowledge by the teacher.
23. The importance of performativity in the mundane was already highlighted by Schechner (1988): “Work and other daily activities continuously feed on the underlying ground of playing, using the play mood for refreshment, energy, unusual ways of turning this around, insights, breaks, opening and, especially, looseness.… Looseness encourages the discovery of new configurations and twists of ideas and experiences” (17).
24. The canonical and brilliant critical history of hacktivism in modern days is Coleman (2012).
25. The New York Times ran a comprehensive story on trolling in 2008: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=1.
27. More details on the importance of the silly humor in these online sites can be found here: http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free.
28. This was the so-called project chanology. See https://encyclopediadramatica.se/PROJECT_CHANOLOGY.
29. Some relevant academic reflections on trolling and politics are Coleman (2011), Knuttila (2011), and Vichot (2009). Another interesting reference is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0.
30. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up.
31. In this sense, it is close to Schechner’s idea of dark play: “Dark Play occurs when contradictory realities coexist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out” (12).
32. See Savicic and Savic (2012).
33. See http://michaelrakowitz.com/projects/parasite/ (accessed October 17, 2013). See also similar projects at http://unpleasant.pravi.me/category/strategies/reapropriation/ (accessed October 17, 2013).
34. See http://criticalengineering.org.
Chapter 7
1. The idea of games being a form of play is derived from the common idea that games are ontologically defined by their rules. Good examples of this argument are Salen and Zimmerman (2004), Suits (2005), and Kirkpatrick (2011).
2. The discussion on how the form of games can evolve through time is not well discussed in the game studies literature, even though Juul (2007) explored this topic in his history of tile matching games.
3. UEFA is a famously conservative institution that tries to keep the practice of professional soccer as low tech as possible. See J. Wilson (2008) for a parallel history of the evolution of game tactics and of game rules.
4. The North American Scrabble Players Association maintains a web page with the official rules of competitive Scrabble: http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/Welcome_to_NASPAWiki (accessed October 29, 2013).
5. I find Simon’s (1996) reflections on the nature of an artifact a good illustration of this idea: “An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point—an ‘interface’ in today’s terms—between an ‘inner’ environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an ‘outer’ environment, the surroundings in which it operates” (6).
6. A symptom of this is the rising popularity of game design programs in universities around the world. However, the profession of the game designer still has to find its place in the popular culture collective mind: there are virtually no game designers represented in sit-coms, Hollywood movies, or pulp novels.
7. Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, the founding fathers of game studies in the twentieth century, gave games a privileged position in their understanding of play, even though they also mentioned rituals and other communitarian activities as important. In fact, it is sociologists like Erving Goffman and critical thinkers like Paul Freire and Augusto Boal who focused on play more than on games.
8. By “games” here, I am referring mostly to computer games, which are now a dominant economic and expressive cultural power. A very interesting argument about the cultural importance of games, without resorting to trite economic arguments, was put forth by Anthropy (2012): more and more people are using games to express themselves, just as they do with music and poetry.
9. For instance, the revitalization of playgrounds as public spaces for play or the popularity of software toys in smart phone platforms.
10. With German romanticism, an era in which the original creator was privileged was started; we are still in this era, a reflection of the importance we assign to creators of original material.
11. A good example of this is the inclusion in the 2011 New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition Talk to Me of video and computer games: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome/. See also Antonelli (2011).
12. See for instance Bogost (2007, 2011), Flanagan (2009), Frasca (2007), and Fullerton (2008).
13. Interestingly enough, in design research even the most formalist and functionalist arguments show awareness of the importance of context and use: “Product semantics as a study of the symbolic qualities of man-made forms in the cognitive and social contexts of their use and the application of the knowledge gained to objects of industrial design” (Krippendorf, 1995, 157), and, “Meaning is a cognitively constructed relationship. It selectively connects features of an object and features of its (real environment or imagined) context into a coherent unity” (159).
14. See Cross (2007)—for example: “Designing is a process of pattern synthesis, rather than pattern recognition.… This pattern-constructing feature has been recognized as lying at the core of design activity by Alexander in his ‘constructive diagrams’ and ‘pattern language’. The designer learns to think in this sketch-like form, in which the abstract patterns of user requirements are turned into the concrete patterns of an actual object” (24–25).
15. See, for example, Pye (1978): “The designer can only ensure that the intended results do occur, by selecting certain properties for its components, namely those required by the nature of the result, of the objects, and of the energy put on it. That in principle is his job” (19).
16. Löwgren and Stolterman (2004) make a sympathetic case for the thoughtful interaction designer as a creator aware of the morals and politics involved in her work.
17. A classic work on the aesthetics of design is Pye (1978). See also Drucker (2009), Hallnäs and Redström (2002), and Hekkert (2006).
18. In the words of Stolterman and Löwgren (2004), design is about “tight coupling.… Minimize the distance between user intentions, user actions, and the effects of these actions” (118).
19. I am using the term as defined by Norman (2004).
20. The idea of games as putting unnecessary obstacles as challenges is inherited from Suits (2005).
Chapter 8
1. See Lemon Joust: http://www.deepfun.com/fun/2012/07/lemon-jousting/ (accessed February 11, 2013).
2. http://www.ideotoylab.com/balloonimals.html.
3. This is a simplified understanding of computation and computers, which are also capable of helping to send people to the moon or allow Facebook to exist.
4. Norbert Wiener is probably the most interesting philosopher in the classic discipline of cybernetics, a type of system theory. His classic book, The Human Use of Human Beings (1988), provides a deeply humanistic, ethics-driven account of systems theory and its importance for understanding human.
5. See tinysubversions.com. An updated list of Darius Kazemi’s bots can be found here: https://twitter.com/tinysubversions/darius-kazemi-s-bots/members (accessed October 17, 2013).
6. https://twitter.com/AmIRiteBot (accessed October 17, 2013).
7. Other excellent Twitter bots are Metaphor-A-Minute (https://twitter.com/metaphorminute), Six Words Sale (https://twitter.com/SixWordSale), and Two Headlines (https://twitter.com/TwoHeadlines) (accessed October 17, 2013).
8. This is an idea inspired by Bogost (2012) and Latour (2013).
9. The work of Dourish (2001) has been particularly influential in my way of seeing technologies as stage-setters and props for performance.
10. And again, this is an argument that should be read in the context of my romantic theory of play. It can be argued that the combination of play and computation is exciting when it carefully balances the human being in the world and the computational being in the world—when the human and the thing both play expressively.
11. Or humanistic: a cultural expression of being human and human beings.
12. Computation need not be human to be a form of expression or of being in the world. I am taking an anthropocentric, and therefore sometimes philosophically outdated, perspective here, but I don’t want to imply that computational play is not expressive, productive, or ontologically relevant.