session 5: space and politics
What drives our politics, and what fuels our society? Media technology might have encouraged our fixation on speed, but its implications for a digitalising polity, beyond accelerating towards insatiable consumerism, may have carved a virtual venue for an alternative, play-centred, politics.
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Reading:
> Mary Flanagan, “Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games and Activism”, Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Perth, Australia, 2007. > Jérôme Sans, “The Game of Love and Chance: A Discussion with Paul Virilio”, Dialogue from VirtualY2K (1999), InfoTechWarPeace, Watson Institute. Guest activity: Workshop on the radical political potential of video games and gaming culture by Martin Roth, Research Associate in the Beyond Utopia Project, Leiden University. |
student reflection
© Sien van der Plank"Boundaries: the first and founding premise of play"
By Sien van der Plank
BA (Hons) Liberal Arts and Sciences: Sustainability & World Politics, Leiden University College The Hague
On the one hand, there is a lot of content and excitement and thought from this week’s video-gaming session that I would love to explore more: asking for example why some games were so thrilling and others repulsed me. On the other hand, this week’s session has provoked me to question the whole concept of play again; particularly because of the link to space. The ordering of space often invokes the development of boundaries – which Huizinga described as essential to play: so why do so many games urge you to question the very boundaries that make it work?
Of the computer games the class played for Tuesday’s session, the rules and the boundaries were among the most discussed points. Boundaries and playing with the rules stood out to a lot of people as determining the fun factor of the games. Most of us identified that pushing the limits was half the game: it was finding out what you can and cannot do, and then repeating the game to see if there was more space to be explored than one initially thought. If the options were limitless in the game, would it have been a game at all?
I think not. Huizinga was correct in writing that there needs to be “the limitation as to space”.[1] Consider the example of play in arranging space for a choir performance, where a moment in space and time is taken aside, and different rules, order, and a fun-element applied. In a recent choir session, a picture was drawn (see image), where the ‘available’ space was most certainly played with: rather than doing ‘standard’ choir arrangements, all sorts of possibilities as to how to use and change the space were thought up. Yet had we pushed the rules further and spoken of destroying elements of the space or changing the walls, it would no longer have been play, but instead brutally intruded into ‘real’ life. This may not be the best example, but the point is that the orchestration only remains play when there are rules and boundaries – it is the framework separating the performance from the ordinary or everyday that makes it play.
As a final consideration, I want to refer to Flanagan’s discussion of games in urban spaces. Locative games, out on the street and particularly those that use or engage with non-players, push against the boundaries between play and non-play quite vigorously. The role of non-aware participants in some of the games she describes violates the core principles of Huizing’s play, because these players are not free in their choice to partake, and are not aware of the rules. The only aspect that makes them a part of the play is their being within the boundaries of space of the game. However I find that including such unaware participants crosses the line between play and not already: the players are situated both within and outside of the boundaries, are both free and not free, both involved and not – the line between reality and play has overlapped, and in doing so there remains no distinction between the two.
Part of the play is playing with every aspect of the game. But that is why we need concrete, established rules – to keep play as play and prevent it from merging with reality. For if it does, we have to accept Shakespeare’s (much overused) words that “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, and therefore potentially conclude that distinction between play and reality is superfluous anyway.
[1] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, reprinted 1980), Chapter 1.
By Sien van der Plank
BA (Hons) Liberal Arts and Sciences: Sustainability & World Politics, Leiden University College The Hague
On the one hand, there is a lot of content and excitement and thought from this week’s video-gaming session that I would love to explore more: asking for example why some games were so thrilling and others repulsed me. On the other hand, this week’s session has provoked me to question the whole concept of play again; particularly because of the link to space. The ordering of space often invokes the development of boundaries – which Huizinga described as essential to play: so why do so many games urge you to question the very boundaries that make it work?
Of the computer games the class played for Tuesday’s session, the rules and the boundaries were among the most discussed points. Boundaries and playing with the rules stood out to a lot of people as determining the fun factor of the games. Most of us identified that pushing the limits was half the game: it was finding out what you can and cannot do, and then repeating the game to see if there was more space to be explored than one initially thought. If the options were limitless in the game, would it have been a game at all?
I think not. Huizinga was correct in writing that there needs to be “the limitation as to space”.[1] Consider the example of play in arranging space for a choir performance, where a moment in space and time is taken aside, and different rules, order, and a fun-element applied. In a recent choir session, a picture was drawn (see image), where the ‘available’ space was most certainly played with: rather than doing ‘standard’ choir arrangements, all sorts of possibilities as to how to use and change the space were thought up. Yet had we pushed the rules further and spoken of destroying elements of the space or changing the walls, it would no longer have been play, but instead brutally intruded into ‘real’ life. This may not be the best example, but the point is that the orchestration only remains play when there are rules and boundaries – it is the framework separating the performance from the ordinary or everyday that makes it play.
As a final consideration, I want to refer to Flanagan’s discussion of games in urban spaces. Locative games, out on the street and particularly those that use or engage with non-players, push against the boundaries between play and non-play quite vigorously. The role of non-aware participants in some of the games she describes violates the core principles of Huizing’s play, because these players are not free in their choice to partake, and are not aware of the rules. The only aspect that makes them a part of the play is their being within the boundaries of space of the game. However I find that including such unaware participants crosses the line between play and not already: the players are situated both within and outside of the boundaries, are both free and not free, both involved and not – the line between reality and play has overlapped, and in doing so there remains no distinction between the two.
Part of the play is playing with every aspect of the game. But that is why we need concrete, established rules – to keep play as play and prevent it from merging with reality. For if it does, we have to accept Shakespeare’s (much overused) words that “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”, and therefore potentially conclude that distinction between play and reality is superfluous anyway.
[1] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, reprinted 1980), Chapter 1.