Short lecture covering technologies of play, playmaking, play after the Internet, and gloss of issues around labor/materiality.

1. The Production of Play
J E F F W A T S O N , P H D - @ R E M O T E D E V I C E
A S S I S T A N T P R O F E S S O R
U S C S C H O O L O F C I N E M A T I C A R T S
C O M M 3 0 9
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2. Play After the
Internet
• In just one month in 2017, YouTube users streamed a combined 3 million years’
worth of videos; over the course of 2018, they watched some 50 billion hours of
gaming videos alone. That’s 5.7 million human years per year—or 15,616 human
years per day—worth of let’s plays and livestreams.
• In the summer of 2018, Instagram’s one billion users combined to spend roughly
104,000 years of time on the service each and every day.
• Tinder claims that it arranges over 1 million dates per week.
• On a weekday afternoon in early August of 2019, there were 703,200 players
playing PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS on Steam; elsewhere on the same
platform, another 672,835 players were playing Dota 2, and 561,446 were spawning
into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
• In the first quarter of 2019, gaming fans around the world watched 2.7 billion
hours—308,219 years—of Twitch content; 302.4 million of those hours—or 34,521
human years—were accounted for by League of Legends streamers alone.
• According to Facebook, as of June, 2019, the social media site had 1.59 billion
active daily users.
• Zhou, “YouTube Says People Watched 50 Billion Hours of Gaming Videos This Year.”
Molla, “People Spend Almost as Much Time on Instagram as They Do on Facebook.”
Tinder, “Tinder - Meet Interesting People Nearby.”
Valve, Inc., “Steam.”
Valdes, “Fortnite and Apex Legends Propel Twitch to 2.7 Billion Hours Watched in Q1 2019.”
Facebook, “Company Info | Facebook Newsroom.”
By the numbers

3. Structure of the Talk
Part 1: What is Play?
Part 2: Technologies of Play
Part 3: Play After the Internet

4. What is Play?

5. What is Play?
Autotelism and productivity

6. Autotelism

7. Autotelism
•Flanagan: Play is “a voluntary act” that “offers pleasure in its own right (and by its own
rules)” (5).
•Diane Ackerman: play in animals and humans alike is an “activity enjoyed for its own
sake . . . As instinctive as breathing.” (Deep Play)
•Game designers frequently invoke the language of “intrinsic motivation”—the doing of
something for its own sake, rather than for some external, or “extrinsic” reward—as a
signal trait of play.

8. Productivity

9. Held and Hein, 1963

10. Productivity
•Very young children begin to play with little structure at all. As the sociologist Roger
Caillois might put it, their play is the play of paidia: loose, improvisatory, and unbound by
convention. But over time, as children grow, they seek out structure in their play; in Caillois’
terms, their play becomes the play of ludus: constrained, focused, and guided by made
things. Psychologists such as Terry Marks-Tarlow suggest that this seeking out of structure—
a gravitation toward ever more constructed technologies of play—is of a piece with the
socialization process. “As children enter into relationships with playmates, with objects, and
with the surrounding world,” Marks-Tarlow writes, “they imitate and internalize the roles
and expectations of adults to make meaning out of society.” Through experimentation with
structured play, “children begin to relate to adult norms and to acquire what it takes to be
accepted as a player in society.” See Caillois and Barash, Man, Play, and Games. (See Terry
Marks-Tarlow, “The Fractal Self at Play,” 42)

12. Productivity
“Brahman is full of all perfections. [So] to say that Brahman has some purpose in
creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation
something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence there can be no purpose of
Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman.
It is a Lila or sport of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss.” Miśra,
The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo, 187.

13. Playmakers and
Technologies of
Play
•Playmaking is the particular kind of making we do
when we organize, facilitate, or otherwise make
possible a playful situation for ourselves or others.
Play does not emerge out of a vacuum. As Thomas
Henricks puts it, “players always play at or with
something or someone.” (See Henricks, Play and
the Human Condition)
•Technologies of play are assemblages (or “things”)
that organize playtime.
Ordering logics and
assemblages

14. “The magic circle”
See: Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Consalvo, “There is no Magic
Circle”

17. FLUXUS

18. "Games and play activities
themselves, with their emphasis on
order and conventions, act as
technologies that produce sets of
relationships, governed by time and
rules, played out in behavioral
patterns” (Flanagan 17).
"how the game is designed and presented
carries implications for the social group"
(Flanagan 17)

19. Games as
“social
technologies”
(Flanagan)

20. "with varying degrees of storytelling, conflict, and
competition added into the (often, technology driven)
system. In this book, I choose not to follow such strict
definitions. Games can be thought of more productively
as situations with guidelines and procedures. Perhaps
games are themselves a technology." (Flanagan
2009:16)

21. "Games, functioning as an ordering logic—a machine, or
a technology—for creating social relations, work to distill
or abstract the everyday actions of the players into easy-
to-understand instruments where context is
defamiliarized just enough to allow Huizinga's magic
circle of play to manifest. From this one example, it is
possible to see how games in and of themselves
function as social technologies." (Flanagan 2009:18)

32. We cannot understand what play “does” in the world if
we dwell exclusively on the player experience; instead,
we must move into *context*, asking questions like what
supports the play, and what does the play support?

33. DAVID PARNELL
“Spectacle and Sport in Constantinople in the 6th Century C.E.”

34. In the sixth-century Byzantine
Empire, spectacle, sport, riot,
chanting, and government were
all intimately linked (Parnell
646).

35. In November 561 CE the fans gathered at
the chariot races in the hippodrome of
Constantinople created a serious
disturbance. . . . The fans of the Green
racing team attacked the fans of the Blue
team. When the emperor Justinian heard
about the riot, he ordered the commander
of his guards to separate the two sides.
The guards, however, proved unable to
stop or even slow the fight, and it
continued with the Blue fans invading the
seats of the Green fans, chanting “Burn
here, burn there! Not a Green anywhere.”
In response, the Greens spilled out of
the hippodrome and proceeded to riot in
the streets, stoning the people they
encountered, stealing property, and
chanting “Set alight, set alight! Not a
Blue in sight.” The riot lasted all night
and into the next morning (Theophanes
Chronographia 235–6, trans. C. Mango). .
. . In the cities for which we have
evidence, chariot races were connected
with violent riots (638).

36. With their population swelling,
and with enthusiasm for
spectacle growing alongside the
burgeoning prosperity of late
fifth century Constantinople,
the Byzantine state depended on
popular entertainment spaces
like the Hippodrome for a
variety of reasons.
Most fundamentally, the
Hippodrome was a meeting place,
a site for gathering enormous
crowds, and a demonstration of
the raw material and social
ordering power of the empire.
The hippodrome was in service
for most of a millennium and
for much of that time it
represented one of the most
important public spaces in
Constantinople (Parnell 641).

37. The Byzantine emperors
tolerated the deadly riots that
were endemic to the Hippodrome
because, as Parnell puts it,
"they needed the partisans"
(644).

38. Over the centuries, the
partisans had likewise uncovered
needs that only the Hippodrome
could satisfy, beyond the
intrinsic pleasures of
spectatorship and camaraderie.
As demographic and political
alignments shifted, the
racetrack became a context for
the airing of grievances and the
organization of young men.

41. Zoot Suiters, racist Navy men, the “Zoot Suit Riots”

45. Only play can deconsecrate, open up the
possibilities of total freedom. This is the
principle of diversion, the freedom to change
the sense of everything which serves Power;
the freedom, for example, to turn the cathedral
of Chartres into a fun-fair, into a labyrinth, into
a shooting-range, into a dream landscape...
Raoul Vaneigem

46. Play After the
Internet
Going beyond the magic circle

47. the Internet has
magnified and circus-
mirrored the
technical relation
between play and
power into new and
volatile forms that
present novel
challenges and
opportunities for civil
society

48. Assemblage
Games, and their play, are constituted by the interrelations between (to name just a
few) technological systems and software (including the imagined player embedded in
them), the material world (including our bodies at the keyboard), the online space of
the game (if any), game genre, and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game
and situate us outside of it, the emergent practices of communities, our interior lives,
personal histories, and aesthetic experience, institutional structures that shape the
game and our activity as players, legal structures, and indeed the broader culture
around us with its conceptual frames and tropes.
Taylor, 332.

49. "Thinking about games as assemblage, wherein many
varying actors and unfolding processes make up the site
and action, allows us to get into the nooks where
fascinating work occurs; the flows between system and
player, between emergent play and developer revisions,
between practices and player produced software
modifications, between local (guild) communities and
broader (server) cultures, between legal codes, designer
intentions, and everyday use practices, between
contested forms of play, between expectation and
contextualization. . . . This approach evokes something
along the lines of what Bowker and Star (1999) call an
"ecological understanding" of phenomena which I
would argue resonates with assemblage." (Taylor
2009:333)

51. [There is] no better place to understand
China’s true sacrifice than the shores of
Baotou toxic lake. Apparently created by
damming a river and flooding what was
once farm land, the lake is a “tailings
pond”: a dumping ground for waste
byproducts.
…
Tim Maugham, BBC Future
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-
the-worst-place-on-earth

52. "A recent United Nations study estimated that the production of just one
desktop computer required 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of
chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water—and that does not include the
human labor involved." (Ensmenger 2013:82)

53. "Each object in the extended network of an AI
system, from network routers to batteries to
microphones, is built using elements that
required billions of years to be produced.
Looking from the perspective of deep time, we
are extracting Earth's history to serve a split
second of technological time, in order to build
devices than are often designed to be used for
no more than a few years." (Crawford and Joler
2018:5)

54. "Cooling even a medium-sized high-density
server farm can require as much as 360,000
gallons of water a day. At an AT&T data center
in Ashburn, Virginia, more than 1.35 million
gallons of chilled water are required daily."
(Ensmenger 2013:83)

55. "in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, journalists with the BBC discovered that more than 50 tons
of illegal e-waste was being transported into the area each year. Of this illegal waste,
only 10 percent was recycled. . . . The other 90 percent, which included lead, dioxin,
and other toxins and carcinogens, was dumped directly into primitive landfills, where
it quickly contaminated the water supply" (Ensmenger 2013:82)

59. “There is something resistive in live streaming . . . It is an
enjoyable, communal, and often transformative
experience. Yet these qualities do not prevent live
streaming from also being exploitative. As Mark
Andrejevic observes, "creative activity and exploitation
coexist and interpenetrate one another within the
context of the emerging online economy" (2008: 25)."
(Walker 2014:7)

60. "With live streaming, play is now just one more
node of socialized labor, in which labor "is no
longer restricted to the factory floor but
encompasses all of the social processes" (Read
2003: 117)” (Walker 7).
Read, Jason. 2003. The Micro-politics of Capital. Albany: State University of New York.

61. "We have to determine what verbs are
available to whom, to identify what pressures
these systems place on us. We have to ask how
are our actions—how is our play—pushed,
pulled, restricted, encouraged, and
transformed. And to whose benefit?" (Walker
10).

63. Education of this sort begins by dispelling received
notions of the inconsequentiality of play, as such
notions can blind us to the powerful roles of
technologies of play in the becoming of individuals
and societies alike. By educating ourselves and our
peers with understandings of the myriad ways that
machine-economized play can deepen divisions in
society, exacerbate labor exploitation, damage the
environment, proliferate attack surfaces for
psychological warfare, install and operationalize
surveillance systems, and so on, we can begin to
"harden our operations" against the most predatory
uses of post-Internet play.

64. Critical Play and
Critical Players
“There is no magic
circle”Awaken society to the
value of play…and the
values in play
EDUCATE

65. Jason Morningstar, Winterhorn (2017)

66. "Rather than focus on gamers or marginalized
groups, researchers must address how video
games enter into people's everyday lives.
Normalizing video games for all audiences,
finding ways to emphasize their 'everydayness'
in contemporary media culture, is a more
productive approach to demands for
representation. This is the only way to argue
for representation in this medium in a way that
does not reify the very categories already used
by the industry” (Shaw “Do You Identify as a
Gamer?” 40).

68. Because resistance alone is never
enough, the second verb, "advocate,"
entails pushing for policy changes
across the panoply of jurisdictions
overseeing the technologies and
practices that structure playtime in
post-industrial neoliberal pseudo-
democracies and nascent fascist states.
Such advocacy can mitigate the harm
that post-Internet technologies of play
can inflict upon laborers, players, and
the environment. By advocating for
better regulation and investment, we
can hobble cynical actors and help to
create space for variants of organized
play to exist at greater remove from the
marketplace.

69. ADVOCATE
Fair and equitable
manufacturing and labor
operations
Diversity and inclusion
Stronger and more
independent advisory
bodies
Public investment in play
More play in the everyday

75. Finally, if we are to reverse the global anti-
democratic trend, we must work not only to
ensure that responsible and caring people
hold the keys to the halls of power, but also
to create the conditions on the ground for
discovery, enlightenment, solidarity, and
peace. Thus, the third verb, "intervene,"
entails jumping into the play war with both
feet. By looking to the examples of artists,
activists, educators, and ethical
entrepreneurs using play to challenge
and/or overthrow entrenched power
structures such as white supremacy and
neoliberalism, we can take "active measures"
of our own and turn play's growing power to
our advantage.

76. Get people playing with
each other in pro-social
ways
Develop new visions for
the future
Radicalize and
deradicalize
(*re)subvert the
transgression drive
INTERVENE

77. Independence of subjectivity from the streamlining
effects of economization = real room to play.

78. "As the game industry involves an increasing number of
educators, designers, and scientists, there is
considerable need for games that take on, and
challenge, the accepted norms embedded in the
gaming industry. There is a need for a critical approach
not only in examining such games but also in creating
them." (Flanagan 2009:10)

79. The Production of Play
J E F F W A T S O N , P H D - @ R E M O T E D E V I C E
A S S I S T A N T P R O F E S S O R
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