Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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Play and Playfulness in Lynda Barry’s What It Is
No full textThis article discusses play and playfulness in Lynda Barry’s autobiographical comics/instructional work What It Is (2008). The term ‘playfulness’ is commonly used in two primary but distinct ways, namely in a phenomenological sense concerning a free attitude accompanying a given play activity, and referring to a frame-breaking form of disruption. I refer to the former as play/playing, and reserve the term ‘playfulness’ for the latter, while also suggesting that playfulness implies a form of disruptive attitude or intent. Playing is a central concept in Barry’s work, one on which the author draws in terms of formulating the creative process. Barry’s insistence on the phenomenological or experiential aspects of playing both reinforces and is reinforced by the stylistic aspects of What It Is. Thus, assertions of playfulness based on elements of Barry’s work that subvert convention, often via a form of ambiguity, are consistently countered by Barry’s emphasis on process. It is therefore argued that, if What It Is displays a form of playfulness, it is primarily in terms of the way that it occupies the border between immediacy and authenticity, on the one hand, and constructedness, on the other. The article first establishes the approach to playing adopted by Barry throughout What It Is, based on the work of D. W. Winnicott, and links it to other conceptualizations of play/playing, before drawing a distinction between playing and playfulness. Following this, it examines how Barry’s delineation of the creative process as play, as well as the author’s approach to style, achieves a perceived form of immediacy and authenticity. After this, following consideration of the playfulness of Barry’s collage pages, the article considers how What It Is occupies the border between immediacy and constructedness
Steps towards a Phenomenology of Video Games—Some Thoughts on Analyzing Aesthetics and Experience
No full textThis paper aims at conceiving a heuristic framework for analyzing video game aesthetics as well as the ways in which these aesthetics are experienced. As the main point of departure for the thoughts laid out throughout the article, I turn to phenomenological contributions to film, media and game studies—with a special emphasis on approaches to kinaesthesia. After discussing essential papers on the kinaesthetic experience of playing video games as well as drawing on a phenomenological approach to the intersubjective sharing of affects by means of kinaesthesia conceived within the field of developmental psychology, I turn to a series of brief game-analytical sketches that are supposed to highlight certain aspects of experiencing time, space, and materiality while playing video games. Finally, the specific quality of interactive intersubjectivity in video gaming is discussed, resulting in the introduction of the theoretical concept of auto-affectivity
There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames
No full textIn 2020, Draw Me a Pixel released There Is No Game, a game that playfully engages with the concept of the metagame and its varied meanings to examine the relationship between developers, games, and their audiences. The game has much in common with other metagames released during the boom and bust cycle of the indie game market in terms of its themes and playful attitude toward its players. Like many of these games, it features an antagonistic narrator, who, upon launching the game, announces that there is no game. The concept of a game resistant to play has become a recurring theme in many metagames that critique industry pressures, trends, and players’ playful resistance to designed experiences. This article examines There Is No Game’s use of hypermediacy (as a feature of both its narrative and design) to deliver its critique of the industry, while offering insight into its own development. More than simply breaking the fourth-wall, hypermediacy becomes the instigator for critical reflection and is used to highlight the challenges faced by indie developers and the material conditions in which games are made. Yet, unlike its predecessors that share this critique, There Is No Game offers an optimistic perspective on the future of the industry
Can Playfulness Be Designed? Understanding Playful Design through Agency in Astroneer (2019)
No full textThe cultural phenomenon that Minecraft (Mojang 2009) has become over the past decade demonstrates, amongst many other things, a powerful appetite for games where the player is thrown in a virtual playground to do as they please. Aerospace-themed survival-crafting game Astroneer (2019) by System Era Softworks is one of many such video games released since that capitalizes on this trend. The appeal of such games lies in that they can be enjoyed by players with various interests, abilities and backgrounds: the average player can mine, build, and fight whatever and whomever they please, or even create entire games within the game. The design of such games is, in many ways, less constricted than that of other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. Freedom, playfulness, and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This article connects these notions and asks: can agency help us better understand how playfulness can be designed? By interrogating the paratexts surrounding the game’s development to see how developers discussed design decisions that facilitate playfulness, this article illustrates how thinking of agency as something afforded by game design can be a productive analytical tool to identify design decisions that facilitate player freedom and creative thinking. This, in turn, sheds light on whether, and if so how, playfulness can be designed
Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies
No full textThe article at hand explores the concept of playful scholarship, focusing specifically on the use of playfulness in re-assessing the collaboration between academia and societal partners to tackle “intractable policy controversies” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 23)—i.e., challenges in which opposing parties operate with conflicting frames (often without even noticing). After arguing that earlier attempts at using games in academia often only evoke the rhetoric rather than the spirit of play (Sicart 2014) and thereby limit spaces for actually playful scholarship, we emphasize how the heuristic of playful game design (rather than game play) can help address this issue.To illustrate our point, we draw on a recent research project about drug policies in the Netherlands, in which concerns of (among others) law enforcement, policy-makers and healthcare workers are characteristically entangled. In this project, we first we defined the societal context of drug policies as an “ecology of games” (Long 1958; Lubell 2013) and proposed two ‘base games’—one created from scratch and the other inspired by the CIA-developed card game Collection Deck. These games were iteratively played by a diverse group of academic and non-academic stakeholders using self-modifying rules that allowed participants themselves to engage in “playful design” (Flanagan 2014), changing, adding or removing rules in order to identify where the game-as-model deviated from their lived experience (and how they might translate their experiences into the ‘language’ of the game). Drawing on ethnographic data collected over the course of six months, we investigate how the contingent ‘versions’ of the game as boundary objects (Leigh Star 2010) facilitated a playful attitude towards the otherwise characteristically entrenched discourse on Dutch drug policies.As a basic frame of reference, we use and adapt Lieberman’s original definition of playfulness, based on “physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor” (2014, p. 23), and Shen’s differentiation between “situations for play” (2020, p. 540) and “playful states” (2020, p. 542) to interpret the processes in our community of practice. More specifically, we observe the impact of playful objects and object play (Riede et al. 2018) as well as bricolage (Antonijevic and Cahoy 2018) on playful attitudes within the group. This showed the constant tension between, on the one hand, expectations that the game itself should ‘produce’ new insights and, on the other, as Sicart recommends, “carnivalesque” (2014, p. 23) attempts at resisting ‘utilitarian’ play (e.g., exploring ideas that would be ruled out by conventional wisdom as optional in-game scenarios or events).Finally, we conclude with how adopting a playful game designer’s rather than a player’s perspective may challenge habitualized practices and corresponding roles inherent in public-private partnerships within academia. This makes different preconceptions amongst stakeholders visible, facilitates perspective change, and acknowledges the interconnected frames within intractable controversies by continually re-designing the base games
Introduction: Playfulness across Media
No full textThis is the introduction to the guest-edited Playfulness across Media issue of Eludamos. The articles collected here seek to demonstrate the productivity of the concept of playfulness across disciplines and the importance of moving beyond the study of primarily game-based playfulness in order to explore how a playful mood, attitude, or state of mind can manifest itself in and be encouraged by a range of different practices of play and a range of different (post)digital media forms that include, but are certainly not limited to, digital and nondigital games. While there obviously are some very productive intersections between game studies and playfulness studies, the articles also clearly show that the latter cannot and should not be conflated with the former
Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power : The Chronotope of the Abject in The Binding of Isaac
No full textThis article argues that a spatiotemporal approach to abjection in video games helps scholars understand how confronting the abject in gameplay maps onto biopolitical conditions of living and gaming under sovereign state power. By means of a slow reading of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this essay offers the chronotope of the abject as a flexible, interpretive tool to account for game narrative, mechanics, and iconography that map onto out-of-game lived realities. Drawing upon Kristeva’s psychoanalysis and Agamben’s philosophy of politics, I adapt Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold to the mutable video game medium in order to take up the threshold concepts of the abject, life/death, responsibility/ethics, and reading/writing presented in the game. Through the chronotope, I also reconsider this game’s critical response and relation to a Christian cosmology. Ultimately, the chronotope opens up a threshold space through which more just and equitable chronotopic relations might emerge
The Lifelike Death: Dark Souls and the Dialectics in Black
No full textThe article builds on Badious observation, that black is simultaneously characterized by lack and excess. In the Dark Souls trilogy the “dialectics in black” are realized as a law of movement, which structures how the game world is acquired. The games highlight a series of conflicting temporalities, which are realized in the play experience as a being-in-the-present. From the perspective of assemblage, this dynamic of conflicting temporalities can also be conceptualized as a longing for the melding of the human and inhuman. Here one can also find a hint as to how the Dark Souls games create “communities out of shared hardship” (Keza MacDonald and Killingsworth). In their many temporalities as well as in their specific game mechanics, the Dark Souls trilogy plots a hauntingly concrete point of contact between anonymous players, who feel connected in their shared loneliness
Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy
No full textIt behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game—invested as media philosophy is in how media engender modalities of thought — to grapple with the computer game’s heritage. Specifically, the essay addresses an issue raised by attention to the computer game’s historical intertwinement with the military and industry: the extent to which these cybernetic machines, overdetermined by their techno-epistemic conditions, continue to perpetuate the ways of thinking from which they derived. The first section of the essay reconstructs parts of this history, drawing primarily on Claus Pias’s computer game genealogy: Computer Game Worlds (2017). It pays particular attention to how the prehistory of time-critical action games reveals their close relationship with and tacit optimization of player pre-reflective perceptual and sensorimotor capacities. The second section considers the lasting implications of the computer game’s historical a priori vis-à-vis their propensity to train their users. It engages with Patrick Crogan’s argument in Gameplay Mode (2011) that computer games are the “reproduction rather than simply the ‘product’ of […] Cold War mentality” and foregrounds his claims as important considerations for any attempt to think media philosophically with and through the medium (2011, p.105). That said, the essay concludes recouping the computer game by way of the very training function it appears condemnable for. Drawing on Mark Hansen (2000), my contention is that Pias and Crogan place in relief what I figure as a creative consequence of computer game play with implications for media philosophy: brokering our corporeal, pre-reflective adaptation to and, thus, agency within our contemporary lifeworld. It is by virtue of, not in spite of, computer games cybernetically working on us that they potentiate ways of thinking about and living in digital culture.
Playing Make-Believe with #homemadeDisney Pandemic Ride Videos
No full textIn response to the closing of the Walt Disney theme parks at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fans of Disneyland and Walt Disney World produced videos re-creating their favorite rides and attractions for a viral social media trend dubbed #homemadeDisney. The typically short (usually 30–90 seconds) videos from #homemadeDisney turned ‘guests’ into ‘cast members’ (staff) and smartphone owners into living room ‘imagineering’ ride designers. Participants engaged in a form of shared make-believe (Walton 1990) by assembling household objects as props, improvising ride elements, and performing as theme parkgoers for one another. The extensive collection of social media videos analyzed for this article reveals how fans interpreted attractions through a shared mimetic grammar (Milner 2016), the ride aesthetic (Telotte 2008), and the playful nature of the theme park experience