I wanted to pass along Nicole’s self-introduction and contact info. I’ve invited her to visit us in class as well, but especially since you’re plunging into the group projects this week, she might be a good resource/sounding board. Here’s what she gave me:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

While reading, I found myself returning to considering the craft of acting in the context of these theories. More specifically, two areas of acting: The American tradition based on Stansilavski (its development into Method Acting and Meisner Technique, among others) and improvisation. Both these approaches to performance/play-acting look at acting from a more internal as opposed to external perspective. “Acting is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances,” said Sanford Meisner 

So, yes, Improv and American Stanislavski fall into Caillois’ category of mimicry, or do they? 

Mimicry, as he defines it, includes theater; however, he seems to presuppose that this mimicry is based on external observations we make of others and then imitate. E.g. children copying their parents’  movements and words. In Method Acting, e.g., these external observations might serve as an entry point, but the mimicry would have to connect to something deeper, something that urges a more complete merging with the character an actor takes on. (See stories of Method Actors holding on to their characters beyond the confines of the playground. More on playground, later.) In the search for a deeper connection to something/someone embodied, losing oneself in a role that way might lead to its own kind of vertigo (an extension of Caillois’ Ilinx). 

The definition of mimicry in this context of the craft of acting then meets ever stricter parameters of technique. Here, a shout-out to Bogost, who clearly pinpoints the enjoyment of play because of its limits. Mastering these limits requires extensive training, long-term commitment, and rehearsal. And the intricacies of technique professionalize the initially accessible play. Mimicry, in its initial and open sense, then almost becomes bad acting. Good acting in this context requires time and work. Work is serious business. Here, The tension between amateur and professional is perhaps interesting to look at in connection to the duality Huizinga leaned on when trying to define play in opposition to seriousness.

What does it mean to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances? How does one practice it? Train for it? I suppose this is an interesting grey-area: How much of a game is training for the game? Or is training its own game? I think again of the coverage of Method Acting here, most recently Jeremy Strong in Succession, and stories one hears of actors not breaking character, even when they walk off the “playing field,” the stage, the film set. Are they doing what Bogost suggests in regards to seeing playgrounds everywhere?I suspect so. They are accumulating data/experience by living truthfully as someone else in an ever-expanding playground. They are taking their playground everywhere. By encountering the real world as someone else, they might even make the concept of the “real world” obsolete, or can they simply expand the playground temporally beyond the clearly delineated performance areas and make other people in it involuntary players? Here, I think of Huizinga again, who underlines voluntariness as a characteristic of play. I am also thinking of the Truman Show. Are people who do not know they are part of someone’s game, players?And now I am returning to Bogost, who talks about how encountering the world with a playful disposition teaches us to take “everything on its own terms.”Are people who are accessories in our game taken on their terms, or do they become tools, which wouldn’t be a great sign of respect?

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Overall, I appreciate all three frameworks provided and find myself drawn to the grey areas. The image I am stuck on at the end of writing this: An actor is waiting in the wing to enter. Their imminent entrance might seem like a portal into play, a transformation, but perhaps it’s less abrupt. Perhaps it’s more like dialing up a dimmer switch. And the basic disposition of the actor (or all of us) is a permanent state of half-play. Perhaps Bogost’s playgrounds aren’t that far away, and we simply have to step from the wing into the light to feel them again.

While working my way through the readings assigned this week, I reflected on how the definitions of play and typography of games could apply to the video game Journey. Released in 2012, Journey dumbfounded and delighted critics and players by providing an experience without the trappings of most videogame play. Instead of combat or point scoring, you begin the game as a robed figure without arms moving towards the summit of a large mountain. The player can jump, interact with an element in space to progress stages, and, when finding particular items, fly for a limited duration. Although communicated wordlessly, there is a narrative or progression through the game, albeit driven by emotion communicated in character movement and the evolution of interactivity in each of the games environments from placid and playful in the early desert scene, to fast sand surfing, to detection avoidance and eventually failure in. Although not the same as playing the game and the fidelity is high, you can watch a playthrough here to get a sense of how this game is different from mainstream games of the era.

I find Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle enticing in understanding the demarcation of the play-ground as “isolated…within which special rules obtain.” The abstractness of the game world and mechanism within lends itself to the isolation from everyday world. Even though the narrative arc, one of struggle to reach a summit, succumbing to the difficulty (and the cold) towards the top of the mountain with a fade to black, only to emerge into more colorful environment rejuvenated and able to ascending the mountain with a fade to white effect and looping back to the start of the game may trace a vague Christian tautology or ideas of reincarnation, the game isn’t concrete enough to exhibit even inscribed political or social commentary. It’s unable to participate mimetically in many respects. 

Generating a ribbon to span the parts of a broken bridge

Journey also matches the idea of secrecy of Huizinga’s magic circle in an oblique way. During game play, other characters appear in the game, identical to your own. When meeting a figure, they tend to enhance your gameplay in various ways. In some cases they’ll increase the size of your scare which allows you to leap higher. In other situations, they may provide a decoy for the guardians that surveil a later level and deter your progress. They may unlock a part of the landscape’s puzzle to ease your way through. These identical looking characters appear unannounced with no explanation or apparent reason. Only at the end of the game, when the list of companions is displayed, are they revealed as fellow players, helping you along the way, while you in turn do the same. It may stretch credulity a bit, but I believe this collaborative aspect “the charm of play” as secret in a transitory player community Huizinga attributes to play’s magic circle.

A companion appears at the start of a bridge

I struggled to tick off the typological categories offered by Caillois. You don’t play against an opponent (agon or competition), you don’t profit as in a game of chance (alea), and I’m not sure this game is interesting role-playing (mimicry or simulation). I did find the the description of dervishes evocative of the motions and robe flowing in the game:

Dervishes seek ecstasy by whirling about with movements accelerating as the drumbeats become ever more precipitate. Panic and hypnosis are attained by the paroxysm of frenetic, contagious, and shared rotation

(Caillois, p 29)

The feeling of vertigo in Caillois’ sense might stand in for the ambiguity a player feels having a certainty of the destination without fulling understanding how they will reach it, like the dervishes, managing “their entire descent [from a tall mast] with head down and arms outstretched” in full confidence they’ll land safely.

Final gripe: Bogast often feels like he’s justifying his work by aligning play with wellness co-option, like meditation practices allowing you to be be more focus and productive. I don’t know that pleasure or fun get purchase here.

I really vibed with Bogost’s first chapter of Play Anything.  I hope this does not come across as someone reading a self-help book and saying “oh yeah I already do all of that,” but I truly do feel like Bogost is describing a way of interacting with the world that I do quite often myself and had never thought to assign the word “play” to.

For example, I really like my job.  It’s just a part-time, office administration kind of job here at the Graduate Center.  It doesn’t particularly utilize the skillset that my upper-level education has trained me for.  It isn’t where I hope to ultimately land career-wise; it’s really a placeholder until I graduate.  Some of my tasks are monotonous, some are tedious, some are boring.  And yet, I think my job is quite fun, fulfilling, and I’m good at it.  I do a lot of work with a big registration spreadsheet that I helped design and manage.  In accordance with Bogost’s terminology, I absolutely see this excel spreadsheet as a playground.  There is a lot of potential tedium and monotony associated with the kind of tasks that I perform within this speadsheet, but it’s not fair to become frustrated or bored with the spreadsheet that was intentionally designed with the structure that is best suited to the tasks.  I appreciate that the tedium of the task and the apparent complexity of the structure force me to increase my attention to detail.  This is something I only recognized thanks to Bogost.  I even feel the same way about responding to emails.  The system of Microsoft Outlook, my keyboard, me, and the person I am writing to become a playground for me where the name of the game is the most effective communication possible.  As it turns out, I am constantly playing at work, and that is a big part of why I like my job so much.

If I’m playing at work, I wonder if I am playing when I do other things I enjoy doing.  Maybe that is the secret to why I find so, so much enjoyment out of the things I love.  Particularly, I really like watching movies, and I really like listening to music.  I mean, like, REALLY like doing them, like these are my biggest hobbies, my biggest passions.  As I have grown up and into myself, I’ve started to realize that I think I like these two things on a level that not that many people can relate to, but I always struggled to explain that to myself or anyone else.  It is not uncommon for people to see movies as an opportunity to turn their brains off for two hours; to just escape for a while from the responsibilities of the “real world” and experience some braindead relaxation.  The same can be said for music which is often delegated to the background.  I really do not feel this way, and the idea that movies or music are somehow separate from the “real world” or that I am “taking a break” when I consume them confuses me.  One of the biggest reasons for this that Bogost helped me realize is that I meet the structures of film and music way more than halfway when I engage with them.  I work with them, I dig into them, I make use of them.  I pay all of my attention to the music I’m listening to or the movie I am watching.  I dive into them, I live with them. I swim amongst their rhythms and beats.  The same way Bogost’s daughter used the patterns on the floor to inject some fun into the tedium of shopping (which by the way I thought was a universal childhood experience), I use the highly addictive melodies of my favorite songs to inject some fun into my constant existence.  Anytime I don’t have to be paying close attention to something else, I am engaging with my music.  And maybe I look a little insane, but when I’m listening to music, I am mouthing the words, nodding my head, drumming my fingers, because I am not allowing it to lie dormant in the background like floor tiles to be trampled over, I am engaging with its structures all the way and on its own terms.  I am playing when I listening to music and when I watch movies, and as a result they bring me crazy amounts of satisfaction.

It is really helpful personally to have this vocabulary of “playing anything”, because I’m not perfect, and even though I find that I can naturally play at most things, there are tasks I don’t enjoy doing.  One of these things is cooking.  I’m not good at it, and it annoys me that I have to go through the process of cooking in order to obtain the sustenance I need to live.  Getting to eat what I’ve cooked in the end is not really a motivating reward for me like it may be for others.  But, considering my track record of enjoying routines and playing with tedium, I would be lying if I said that, when I get down to it, I find cooking boring or annoying.  I have some mental obstacles to do with the fact that I am biologically forced to cook multiple times a day, but surely there is nothing wrong with the physical structures of cooking.  Following a recipe can be fun, and there are a million new and engaging mini-games that fall within cooking.  If I play while cooking, then the fun of cooking itself can and should be its own reward.  And guess what, as soon as I had this thought, I got up and made myself a meal with the confidence that I was going to have fun while cooking it.

To wrap this post up, I really enjoy Bogost’s refusal to define play and work as separate realms that inherently do not interact, even though that distinction is actually a fundemental part of how Huizinga and Caillois define and categorize play.  Although I was initially taken aback by this disagreement, I came to realize that, although all three authors are using the word “play”, I think Huizinga and Caillois are really defining and categorizing “games” and using the word play to mean the way we engage with games.  I think it is only with the presence of an intellectual separation between what is a game and what is not a game that Bogost can then attempt to blur the lines between game and not, work and play, tedium and enjoyment.  Bogost is using the word “play” not to invoke the strict definition set out by Huizinga and Caillois, but rather the idea of enjoying what you’re doing, whatever it is, by relating it to a concept that we all remember from childhood and can relate to.

The idea of a “magic circle” in Bogost text Play Anything (2016) resonates with me at my current part-time job at a grocery store.

Working customer service, one is always preoccupied with the idea of how to derive pleasure in a monotonous, emotionally performative, and labor-inducing job that rarely requires challenging to stimulating work. Most interactions with customers are based on chance at a fixed time and space; specifically, two hours scheduled on an assigned register during an 8-hour work-shift.

One of few challenges one is more likely to face in that scenario involve an argumentative customer, who wishes to complain about whatever issues they are dealing with outside of my control. Because of that, most interactions with customers are assessed by 5-second judgements I conceive pre-interaction. Questions I try to assess quickly include “Do they look like they’re in a hurry? Do they have earphones on? Do they want me to paper bag everything because they live close-by? Do they want me to bag groceries in two-evenly distributed paper-bags to ease their arms as they walk home? Do they want me to bag all the heavy grocery items into their reusable bag because they’re taking a car to their final destination? Am I gonna get snarked at because I didn’t tie up the egg carton with a produce bag? Am I gonna get snarked at because I didn’t spray hand sanitizer on each hand before handling their produce?”

For mental stimulation, I practice a form of Tetris while bagging the groceries. All frozen items in one separate bag, with raw meat layered in between bags of frozen peas or berries. Produce that is easily bruised will be packed on top of sturdier items, like canned beans, or boxed muffin-mixes. Small snacks, such as granola bars or peanut-butter cups, are left for last, as a courtesy for the customer, who probably bought the $0.99 impulse candy as a reward to be immediately consumed after the transaction is complete. Triangle-shaped cheeses are placed next to each other so their angles perfectly line up. Bags of leafy-greens and delicate tortilla chips are placed on top, to avoid damaging the delicate chips, or smushing the soft leaves. The rules to grocery-bagging were never taught, only enforced to let the time go by quicker. I heard the phrase “packing each grocery bag like an intricate, special gift” on a podcast from an over-enthusiastic grocer, describing the pleasure they receive from carefully doing this monotonous practice. At first I judged her, but now I get it.

Another ‘game’ I play involves the interaction with the customer during this limited, rehearsed interaction we experience together. It relates to Callois’ definition of alea, in that–

“Chance determines the distribution of the hands dealt to each player, and the players then play the hands that blind luck has assigned to them as best as they can.” –pg. 18

Each customer sent is not by my choice; therefore I must adapt to each situation differently. If I get the impression a customer feels slightly more engaged to small-talk, I start guessing what kinds of topics or humor they’d be more receptive to. Some interactions result in deeper, yet slightly uncomfortable information being passed around. While engaging with an older, male customer, he felt it was appropriate to disclose his suicide attempt to me following a distressing episode of depression. Another woman was shopping with her toddler, while holding onto a pair of crutches to ease walking with a heavy cast around her ankle. She informed me her husband is waiting outside in the car, hinting that the cast around her leg was a result of physical abuse on his end. I offered her help to her car, as she anticipated being scolded by her husband for buying “too many” groceries for the family, and I wanted to make sure another person was present to avoid any verbal altercation that would ensue between the both of them.

Bogost states in Play Anything (2016) that

“Frustration is one way of interpreting the difference between what I wanted and what lawns do. Another way is to acknowledge that the world is outside my head rather than within it.” –pg. 16

As a way to cope with long, monotonous working hours, I find myself observing customers and coworkers alike, assessing each interaction as a sort-of game, which the objective always is: “How do I avoid uncomfortable interactions or confrontations? How do I de-escalate a situation which has never escalated in the first place? What kind of stress would they be under that could cause me stress? Do they not want to make eye contact with me because they’re shy, they’re in a hurry, or they simply are a rude customer? Is there any miscommunications I played on my part that could have contributed to this disagreement?” Trying to imagine a strangers inner world and conflicts outside of my own has become a coping mechanism to avoid taking rude or demeaning behavior personally. It also allows me to engage in what Caillois terms as mimicry, in which I am the performer, delighted by the sheer presence of the customer, and driven by the idea of success being dependent on how well this contrived interaction will play out.

“…it consists in the actor’s fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell. The spectator must lend himself to the illusion without first challenging the decor, mask, or artifice which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.” –pg. 23