Utopian Considerations(4) : Movements in the key of Play
Johan Huizinga’s book “Homo Ludens” presents Play as freedom, a feeling and a moment in life that brings great joy to its practioneers.
To play is not to work : that’s one the decisive statements Huizinga makes in his book Homo Ludens, to play is not to work towards a goal or to try and produce something outside of games, to play is simply to play, an action that seems to be entirely focused on its own realisation.
Play recurs in all parcels of life, because it’s not the fruit of an arborescent structure that is confined to either the home, the workplace or the public space, it’s an affect and a mode that happens as culture-producer, as tradition-enforcer, as a social form. Play comes and goes. It’s never over, only left off, for later.
At the moment Play stops being done for its own sake or is done against one’s will, it’s no longer a game but simply work under a new cloak.
Man, Play and Games - Roger Caillois - “The corruption of games”
Under our current predicament gamification intends on bringing the play element
into work. It can’t.
Or at least it can’t hold onto Play because what gamification engineers is a play of instant gratification, a quick buck. There’s no playfulness, no improvisational quality, no ability from the very players of these gamified platforms and interfaces to play with the matter of the software, the sandbox, except if they’re already of the developper world and have the right tools, ressources and access but even that ends up becoming work : a tiring task for something outside of the task rather than play for its own sake.
Different exemples of gamification could be : microdosing, as a puerile instrumentalised form of ilinx, company lottery as a low-engagement form of alea, activity tracking devices as low-tier forms of agon, etc.
All of these try and make work and effort a bit pleasurable, they try and incentivize productivity through distraction without taking into account that everywhere around us there are more interesting distractions competing for our attention. And beyond some of these easy gamifications of work and data-extraction there’s also the not too innocent realisation by some of the current game-schemers and designers that, in fact, economies are elaborate emergent assemblages rather than spontaneous “natural” social relations.
Gamification in work-settings doesn’t soothe the players in us all, it simply disguises the worker under a different name. There’s an interface for you to gaze at and fiddle with but no sandbox. You’re not here to create but to produce within the confines of the game, to provide time and energy to a task. Yet a user is still refused the name worker, because to recognize this engagement with systems that harness their data would be to admit some form of labor is being performed. It would be to admit that the user is always giving something out even when they don’t intend to.
To say that the user/worker is robbed of their labor implies it was something that was owned by them in the first place, that labor can be possessed, that flows can be enclosed, it’s a view that is unraveled by the interconnected nature of work and the sociality it upholds, if we’re to go outside of liberal notions of work and play and think through utopian lenses then this won’t help.
Thinking through the complex inter-relations sustained by play, its culture, its learning, its practices, that’s to say those that are produced through it, means having to go beyond the idea of a play-economy into a play-ecology.
The fact that play and games are revealing themselves as dominant cultural logics in a myriad of settings should also bring into the limelight all the ludic studies models and theories that can help us see through some of this.
For instance, an ecology of play means looking at things not in terms of schemes and targets and deadlines or rational-actors interactions but rather in terms of processes interlaced and interconnected. Feeds, loops, accumulations, stratified aggregates. The way things are built up over scales of time. (what would a Geology of Play be like ? Apart from simply listing the amount of tech detritus in landfills to shame the gamers in the audience, obviously.)
The framework of “an ecology of” sheds a light on enmeshed contexts and settings, the way all of these social practices’ outputs overlap and stack up, the way settings have porous boundaires, the functional equivalence you find in different forms of games that retain the same form of Play ; retaining difference while allowing for the repetition of communicative and distributive functions, not a sterile fungibility like the reserve army of labor unemployed people are to the capitalist totality but rather situated and contextual practices, parts that constitute wholes that reiterate necessary thresholds. That said I can feel myself coming back to the idea of necessity when I should simply describe, not ascribe. There’s no necessity in a game besides the fulfillment of play.
Players.
Let’s be foolish and imagine a future.
Out of the play society emerges those who are always learning to play. They don’t think their way through the learning though, they have to play to learn to play.
In the repetition of the games they’re a spectactor to, they get to experience as many affects as there are games ; the surrender, the vertigo, the control, the drag.
Games are not necessarily simulations of the “real” but they always make claims on it, give intel on it.
To live in a society is to drift through activities as they come to you, only focusing when the time feels right or necessary. Just the same we learn not through reading but through doing, this is what i mean when i bang my head against the keyboard screaming in a thousand ways “practices practices practices” : we learn in the doing, to learn through the ingurgitation of information is not learning, it’s getting informed. Reading about a method is not learning the method but learning to read about the method.
>Getting the knowledge about a field or a practice means getting some of the conclusions and none of the process.
Learning occurs through the exploration of an area made possible by a set of rules and boundaries. Learning occurs by exploring a possibility space.
In learning, repetition doesn’t aim at memorizing a single sentence until it’s imprinted in one’s mind like a scar, rather repetition is all the trips through a possibility space, a specific path or trail is followed, to wander around, to come back to familiar spots, to go and look at pieces that have been overlooked, all of it creates a sense of the place that couldn’t be gotten to by simply being informed about it.
This isn’t about an essence of pure play either but about the way games teach you how to think through them moreso than any other translation of the rethoric they’re using on you.
As an aside : in scaling this up and out you can see how cultural memory could be organised differently, by embedding histories and knowledge in practices rather than simply writing down information about them onto media that can be lost, erased, destroyed.
If you want knowledge to stay accessible, it’s best to leave it where it’s already at and to bring computing capacity to it rather than the other way around, that way practices get carried through time regardless of History.
In closing that parenthese, it’s important to remember that repetition is not an option but an integral part of the process of the procedural rethoric of play.
>The play of theatrics doesn’t embed itself in sociality as much as it gets recognised and played with.
Where person is taken under and over by persona and character. Conversations fall into playfulness or are engineered to be games people can re-run if the session has been unsatisfactory.
>Irony is but the larval state of a realised and complexified play state. (bad faith and/or irony is a social game, where the other person is being played with in such a way that you can mock them for having believed you to be truthful when you defended such or such position). It’s mimicry as the carrier of mockery. Theatrical, affective.
Gamestonks : I don’t want to sum it up, everybody has already done that in a better way. It’s not activism or revolutionary or evil, it’s supremely interesting regardless ;
The movement of money guided by a memers murmuration as accelerated by High Frequency Trading algorythms, billionaire hypemen and contradictory messagings.
This is assymetrical not because one side has the state and the other has plucky proles, but rather because there are more than two sides, a dynamic situation that has no solid common base but a set of unequal grounds. Shifting.
It is play, it’s gambling after all.
Homo Faber
In effect, it seems like (Game) design is less about solving problems than generating problems you don’t wanna think about in the process of design, problems which will inevitably become the hallmarks of what you’ve designed in the first place.
Design is always already about sculpting and sculpting implies understanding both the matter you’re sculpting but also the voids around it. Design is always already about the myriad of games people will play with what you’ve designed.
The reason why “less is more”, “function over aesthetics” and other such maxims get credence in jobbing-designers classes is because they recognise the limitations of a design practice that figures itself as divorced from a larger ecosystem ; the designer makes a model which will be integrated into larger wholes, if that model is too complex to be integrated or be molded in a way that’ll favor that integration, then the model is a failure of design.
Here it’s important to distinguish between artist-designers and jobbing-designers, the first ones generally occupying the space of stylistic experimentation and precarious work (which is why their practice is generally paired to other jobs on the side) while the latter being workers who have an instrumental role in different structures, for exemple companies and corporate settings. It’s not a hardline between the two, rather a set of practices, habits, networks and legal situations that differ in some ways : the first ones are generally taught to be auteurs, while the latter are to be collaborators or providers. They’re both artisans and they all exist at all levels of wealth and access to ressources.
On the Jobbing/Instrumental side there’s an obvious favoring of a kind of modular design, of units that can be paired, integrated, used and discarded or added to, rather than one totalizing model that handles all functions by itself, there’s no intentional panopticon-like structure but out of this aggregation of models and pieces emerges a larger superstructure (and eventual megastructure).
It’s not all random but there’s no one plan, more like an inter-relay of objects and protocols. Plans within Plans.
Individual and collective designs always come to interact in this larger whole, which doesn’t emerge as a market but as stacked up infrastructural spaces and tools.
The practice of Design regiments and organizes according to the institutions that allow for its implementation, if it’s not mindful of all that it does then it will intensify or shun things that governing bodies have no direct hold over, because they don’t have their eyes on them.
To make things clearer for me and you : It’s not a problem of hate when a municipal body decides to implement hostile design as a means to push homeless people out of public spaces.
Not hate but carelessness and inattention. A specific set of priorities that reroutes people’s misery and slow death out of the view of real citizens who don’t need to sit for hours or sleep on a bench and are only there for their lunchbreak before their next shift, or sat down to rest for 5 minutes before moving on with their day. (+ these also are generally the most uncomfortable seats you can find.)
The function of public benches as spaces of sociality is restricted to a certain timeframe and activity : it becomes less of a seat and more a tool of exclusion in terms of its function. The problem of homelessness is not tackled by the benches as much as pushed away because (re)design alone could not get rid of a problem that is economic and political in nature.
The inability of design-workers to see themselves as workers exploited under the same regime as the houseless is one of the things that allows hostile design to be realized and thus create new inventive ways of intensifying precarious living, at best.
Aside from being commissioned work or the artistic expression of an individual, design takes place at the base of social life, it operates within the constraints of a socio-economic model and therefore has little chance of changing society through morales or statements.
With that rant out of the way, it’d be interesting to look at the way the orientation of bodies in the public space could take different forms under another socio-economic model.
Recalling the fact of entropy and the way designing is not problem solving but problem making, maybe you could create practices and objects that build around problems to extinguish them rather than merely push them away.
Recall that all places are always of the place as much of as the people.
It takes work to maintain somewhere as it is, it takes work to make sure the machinery of architecture is made to be livable. It takes the work of hands that can be invisible or numerous or loving and well-rested.
It doesn’t have to be a chore if you love where you live, to take care of it so that it can then take care of you.
As a shell, as a nest, as the place you get to. Not loving the place where you live in as you would a vacation, loving it as you love a well worn tool you know is not gonna break because you’ve been taking good care of it.
LINKS
QANON AS ARG
The fucking seven-days weekend
I think of a society where Play holds a large place but without preventing plurality. I don’t wanna live in a society where I only have one thing to do throughout all my days even if it’s a game.
And Play implies playground, groundwork, care, so much to do and think and maintain. A fluid society.
There’s no shortage of work to bring about the world you wanna live in but who said work was the surest way to get and stay there ?
I remember seeing countless informed and less informed arguments over the “end of work”, the right to be lazy, what a revolution would be like, the necessity to work certain tasks, divisions of labor, etc…, there’s a lot to be said depending on contexts, forecasts, models, strategies but my personal position is that i just want the seven-days weekend guaranteed.
And the best way to get to the seven days weekend is to build a world that can afford everybody to do whatever they want as they should and would on a weekend, communism is free time.
An end to factory-time, gigwork-time, masterclock replaced by any number of candles, no more bullshit metrics on when to wake up, except to get fresh bread. we should all get a permanent vacation is my most sincere political belief, stripped of all strategising, foresight and reflection, listening only to my gut, the only thing i know and believe deep down is that we all could, and ought, to get that supreme relief of the seven-days weekend. The workweek that’s always ending and therefore never begins, no time but free time.
Proper utopia.
I don’t know, this is my lower back and sacroiliac joint speaking.
My weekends feel like extra-worktime for work i want to do rather than have to : writing and research, political organising/meetings/action, food distribution, it doesn’t feel like the end to my workweek, only its continuation through a slightly different schedule. They are not truly weekends but transitions.
The seven-days weekend. A positive slacker society, a permanent vacation. This feels like a tangible utopia to me. Not available in two days of action but tangible and felt. I know what a week where you wake up at the time of your body feels like.
I know what getting enough sleep (and maybe too much sometimes) feels like.
I can imagine a world of slack and slowing down.
Playbour
With work understood here as the tasks necessary to maintain society in process, that’s to say maintenance and innovation.
Playbour is not gamification.
Playbour is what happens when labor disappears before play as you design work away into games. A transitional phase between the work-society and the play-society, where the imperative of productivity cedes ground to leisure. Society as a game for itself rather than a machine for the production of something else.
The idea of work as a series of games you’d play implies that there’s people who’ll have to design and plan, to an extent, the outcomes of these games. Schemers. This creates a tension between the role of player and schemer, would it create and entertain a new class system ? Or simply inter-related cultures that build on top of one another. So many modalities here: is there a top time limit for how much someone can spend time being a designer and then they have to be a player, do you have to play the very games you participate in designing to make sure you understand what you’re actually doing, is there a system of turns with regards to how many schemers and players there can be at a given time?
Gaming literacy implies expertise : It’s very easy to think of this eventual playbour society as creating new cultural schisms revolving around the different genres of play. Like there are different forms and modes of play (agon, ilinx, mimesis, alea…) there’d be people proficient enough that they’d end up becoming experts in different forms, favoring their realm to another, opposing the fusion of different modes because it’d pervert the sanctity of ilinx for exemple, or refusing to have luck in a game of agon because it makes the game of who is superior into a pure randomizer, betraying its supposed essence as a scorepoints maker.
There’s so much to be thought already, this is still so largely reliant on notions of human players, I haven’t even touched on games that exist for themselves. Maybe because games are already so embedded in human sociality that it’s hard to think them outside it but Playbour does imply a measure of autonomy on the part of these games and their re-enactment regardless of the input of human participation. Because if we have to play the game is it still one ? Has it suddenly turned back into work ?
Obviously, any viable system is always already incomplete and in motion or it’s no longer a system but a graveyard, that much is certain, if it stops moving it’ll starts rotting. Plannification is a tool and a base for flourishing rather than the end point, a characteristic of play is the fact that you’re not supposed to be able to predict the outcome of a game in advance, making it a weak production-planning tool/framework
L’aléa du jeu : the point of gambling is that you’re making a bet on what will happen, and the thrill, the uncertainty, the possibility of losing (something) is what creates tension, engagement and pleasure. Play can occur within a planned context but it requires a measure of autonomy, uncertainty, in order to be played in earnest. Prediction, planning, scheming is never fullproof under play because after all ; play is never over, only left off.
Let’s have fun
Ospare@protonmail.com / Ospare@substack.com ---
decades in weeks, aye ? We're still here though.
You're tough but even you could use a breather, steal some time to rest yourself won't you ? I'll see you when I see you.