Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> In this article, I advance three points, each in service of “extending play” as a critical conceptual category. The article begins with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play,” tracing through its lens the possibilities for “deeply extending play.” The essay extends Geertz's argument that games and play are in/as/of/through culture. Games and play are not generative of, reflective of, just culture. Rather they are intensely interwoven. I argue that games and play, as conceptual categories, need to be viewed as “experimental systems,” and those concepts deserve to be informed by alternative perspectives. Finally, the article returns to the notion of “meaningful play” as mechanism of sense making and cultural negotiations with structures. Meaningful play lies at the core of exploration and encourages a different kind of reading of play(ful) spaces. Meaningful play is part of what makes games and play so fundamentally an aspect of the human (and nonhuman) condition. </jats:p>

<jats:p> At first blush, the romance might seem antithetical to gaming. The masculine hegemony of the video game industry creates specific genre expectations about video games. Just as “extending play” is about opening itself to new kinds of ways that people play, it also encompasses extending to new audiences. At the same time, there is always a risk of ghettoizing new audiences—reinforcing stereotypes that keep gamers marginalized. This essay analyzes one such extension: the complex relationship between the romance novel and the video game. Modleski illustrates how romance in books, television, and film are often dismissed as frivolous, but also demonstrate how audiences use romantic texts for a wide variety of purposes. Although universal, romance is an experience that can be understood as both general and specific as well as generic and subjective. The video game romance, while not a perfected genre, often struggles with these larger questions about identity and subjectivity. This article explores the tension between subjectivity and interactivity, as it relates to romance and gaming, specifically in the hidden object gaming genre. Analysis focuses on three romance-themed game texts: Harlequin: Hidden Object of Desire, Ravenhearst, and Love and Death: Bitten. With each of these games, I examine the different modes of interactive romance and demonstrate how subjectivity functions within the gameplay, complicating traditional notions of identity and subjectivity within the romance. Additionally, I illustrate how the games ignore the potential of player agency in favor of formulaic structures and subjectivities. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The debate over whether or not playing video games focused on shooting makes players more violent in daily life has obscured the potential benefits of playing these games. This article argues that playing games that virtually simulate predation (which is true of most shooters) actually has many positive effects that have not been adequately considered. Predation games are an important part of the cultural landscape and worthy of more nuanced analysis and discussion of how they may be affecting players positively. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article uses a thick description of a single point played by Ramy Ashour (Egypt) and James Wilstrop (England) during the finals of a professional squash tournament in 2008 to evoke the rhythms of virtuosic play and to describe the vast infrastructures we construct for its capture. I use the limits of the point to describe its preconditions—the body techniques, material technologies, and mediating architectures required for two professional players to have this single exchange. A sport’s apparatus is the condition of possibility for its agile bodies. And while professional sport may seem quite distant from free or casual play, by understanding the labor that goes into producing spectacles of institutionalized play, we can gain better purchase on the multiple types of value that reside in, and are extracted from, our daily playing practices. When combined, economic and emotional stakes direct forms of play toward their physical, psychological, and spectacular limits. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In 2012, MTV explored a new approach to voter engagement through “Fantasy Election.” The game had players draft candidates in the congressional and presidential elections onto personal teams in order to compete for points and prizes, which were distributed based not only on the candidates’ actions but also when players themselves took action to become better informed and involved during the campaign. In the end, Fantasy Election drew over 10,000 active participants. This article scrutinizes the design and effect of the game by using data from MTV’s exit survey of Fantasy Election users to explore whether and how games can be used to encourage voter engagement. By considering the self-reported motivations of players, and a broader discussion of the role of play, competition and reward in fostering political and civic participation, we consider how gamification strategies have ambivalent effects on developing a more informed and cooperative civil society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Interactive art often requires viewers to interact playfully with it in order to experience it fully, so it is reasonable to ask how game techniques and the theory of play can aid in its creation and interpretation. This article introduces the idea of “magical objects,” familiar things given unexpected and fantastical properties by concealed technology, and analyzes certain interactive art installations in this light. As a case study, it uses Fragments, an installation of interactive silk tapestries that whispered verse to the viewer when passed or touched. Fragments drew on techniques from digital games and play to reimagine the materiality of the book and engage contemporary urban experience. In doing so, it offered a model for the incorporation of playful thinking into the design of both installation art and educational displays. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay looks at the nexus of rhythm, gesture, and time to argue that play has a systematicity of its own, separate from that of games, which rarely comes to our attention. It constructs a genealogy by following the idea of a to-and-fro motion characterizing play through Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, to Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and finally to Nicolas Abraham’s essays on the phenomenology of rhythm. By looking at play as a selection of game acts, it is understood as having a style of its own that opens it up to microanalysis and interpretation. By opening up new rhythms and new ways of comporting one’s body, play is understood to have a radical connection with the experience of time, and the analysis ends with some speculation on the nature of their relation. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This piece examines the relationship between cheating, play, and work on the social news site Reddit.com. Using cheating as a point of rupture that reveals explicit and implicit game rules as well as ideological parameters of the game itself, I explore the humorous community backlash to the perceived “social cheating” of a prolific user (Apostolate). The backlash seemed to indicate that Apostolate was working excessively at the supposed “play” of Reddit, yet individual users put significant work into creating their playful chastisements, complicating a widespread community understanding of Reddit as “not work.” Thus, I argue that just as cheating cannot be considered the “other” of play, neither can work be considered the other of Reddit. Both are points of rupture which reveal the underlying mechanisms of the systems they are purported to “ruin.” </jats:p>

<jats:p> We ask the following: Is there anything that disappears (is ephemeral) in a scholarly text? Is it possible to foreground this ephemerality in order to write as performance rather than writing about or reading as performance? Exploring the performativity of text as well as how such textual performance interacts with clown and adaptation, we hope to enact a variety of disruptions of reader expectation, logic and flow, binaries, the academic article as a genre, and the commonly assumed reader–text relationship. Our incorporation of the gimmick of the Choose-Your-Own Adventure applies the clown’s nonseriousness to the “rules” (of time, of physics, and of academic convention) that differentiate the written text from performance. Our interpretative aim in incorporating these two systems of rules is to consider how space might be opened up for the performativity of text in order to bridge what is, in many respects, an insurmountable gap. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article examines the creation and circulation of graphics interchange format (GIF) animations as a mode of play with moving images. It understands the production and sharing of GIFs as part of a gift economy, as opposed to commodity exchange, where the liberation of the image from its original source entails a ludic appropriation that directs focus to the often-overlooked detail, gesture, or action. GIFs open an inquiry about the divide between art and commerce, as well as between play and work. They entail a type of spectatorship that revives outmoded forms of viewership, recalling the animistic tendencies of the reception of early cinema, and privileges the unauthorized and playful sharing of moving images through the figure of what this essay calls the “dispossessive spectator.” </jats:p>