Playful Practices in Ancient Greek Philosophy

This paper examines the philosophical practices of ancient Greece for symptoms of play, namely Socratic dialogues, sophism, Aristotle's idea of the perfect life, and thought experiments to find connections between rationality and play. And indeed, these practices can be identified as playful in ways that challenge Huizinga's and Caillois' definitions of play and games and point to an understanding of play as a mental activity.

Games on Working, Games on Gaming, Working on Games, and Games on Working on Games: On the self-referentiality that entangles neoliberal play and work

YomeciLand: Found Sound as Play

Dancing with the Hands: Frictions with Videogames, Dance and Gender

Dance has a long history within game studies and occupies a very literal niche within game design. When applied to more conventional videogame play, dance has provided a way of re-interpreting player performance, with the feminine cultural coding of dance used to challenge the masculinity of contemporary videogame culture. Exploring conceptions of choreography, dancing, and gender as understood through dance studies, this paper questions the applicability and efficacy of dance as a force of change. By examining alternative ways of running dance studios and making games, we see that it is not dance or play that produces new ways of exploring gender but rather the structures that surround them. In this light, dance emerges as a latent potentiality within game performances, but one that is still subject to pervasive and rigid ideas of gender.

The Sacred and the Mundane: Video Games in the Convenience Store

Metagaming in Competitive Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

The Divide between E-sport and Playing Games in China

The presentation will argue that rise of the E-sport has led to persistent transformations of gaming and media, which is crowding out other legitimate forms of gaming from the public perception and media discourses. First, it will briefly describe the growth of E-sport as media and entertainment phenomenon (Jin 2010; Taylor, TL, Seo, 2013). This spectacle is created through the stylization of e-sport events themselves and equally important through secondary texts (Szablewicz, 2015). Secondly, the talk will argue that media, old and new, become stakeholders in the narrative as they create the stories of unprecedented growth in terms of profit and viewer numbers. E-sport becomes the only acceptable type of gaming. The third section will draw on ethnographic data collected from 2013 to 2015 in China and demonstrate how the discourses on E-sport and their divergence from gaming impact the rhythms of play in the everyday life of the “youxi wanjia 游戏玩家” (video game player) as well as the “dianjin xuanshou 电竞选手” (E-sport Contestant). The vocabulary of E-sport titles has penetrated everyday language and the word ‘gaming’ or ‘playing games’ have been replaced. As videogame culture becomes marginalized, principals of obligation and professionalism devour ‘play’ beyond the point of mere ‘contamination’ (Caillois, 2001). As a result, video game players, who enjoy a variety of different games, are distancing themselves from the proponents of e-sport.

Algorithmic Play in Georges Perec’s Ludic Narratives

Smash Mods, Smash Creativity: Nintendo, Project M, and Enclosure

Playful Fabrication: Speculative Game Designs for 3D Printers