Book by Miguel Sicart. See also: games
- This book extends María Lugones’s concept of playfulness as world traveling as a way of understanding playful relations with software.
- Briefly put, to play is to travel to others’ worlds to meet them there.
- As a scholar in game studies, I spent long periods of time in virtual worlds, playing but also just hanging out. I realized I was feeling nostalgia for those worlds, not just for their geographies or the stories they contained, but also for the person I was in those games and how those games saw me.
- Any time we find purposefully designed inefficiencies or any time software is used in a purposefully inefficient way, we will find play. Eric Gordon has described play and playable media as being “meaningfully inefficient,” an idea that powerfully translates Bernard Suits’s philosophy to the information age.
- On the difference between objects and things
- Objects are static materials. They have properties we can describe. A door that hasn’t been opened, the computer that’s powered off.
- Things are active materials, the results of agents interacting with objects. They have agency, they can act upon us, on themselves, on their surroundings.
- And object that is interacted with becomes a thing.
- A good way of grasping this distinction is that we can use adjectives when we talk about things (the chair becomes comfortable or uncomfortable when someone sits on it)
- Donella Meadows understood the ethical imperative in Wiener’s cybernetics. For her, “Living successfully in a world of systems requires of us more than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity — our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.” Play can be an instrument to close the world, to exclude others, to impose our systems of white Western control on every other. But play can be, and ultimately should be, a liberating way of world traveling. Playing software should be a passport to understand others and ourselves, to propose different worlds and live in them, and do so together.
- Understanding that meeting as world traveling implies that in the play interface, agents need to negotiate how they relate to each other. […] World traveling in play implies seeing others, negotiating agencies, being allowed to create that world together. […] This idea of loving world traveling means that even when agents reduce their agency, submit to rules, do what they are told, they do so voluntarily, fully understand the reasons and the ways in which that submission can be stopped. Submitting to others is also a recognition of others’ agency, and voluntarily submitting others is also a recognition of the other.