As much as I would love to do a project that is expansive and creative, for this course I am going to try to be creative within the confines of a final paper. I will be writing about play theory as applied to sport, and in particular, as applied to sports betting. This is in keeping with my mission to use the PhD program as a playground in which I can explore how sport might be used as a vehicle for doing political education.

In the paper, I plan to argue that sports betting, as a form of “play,” alienates participants from athletes’ labor. This shifts spectators’ focus from the game and its players, to betting, a game about the game. As someone who wants to do political education through sport, this presents a different entry point into the subject that I believe is increasingly relatable to sports spectators and thus an interesting/exciting space to theorize and explore.

I may focus on world football because of the transnationalism of that sport and the increased potential for the arguments explored in the paper to travel across different global contexts; however, I’m also considering basketball, which also has international appeal and popularity, and whose betting context I am more familiar with.

Either way, I’ll begin with an overview of the historical development of sports betting and its relationship with and treatment of the athlete. At minimum, I’ll be relying on Huizinga and Caillois to establish a play theory foundation that discusses the phenomenon of sports betting and how it fits into the larger regime of play; concurrently, I’ll discuss sport as play, the professionalization of sport and athletes’ labor, and the extent to which sport remains or ceases to be play in a professional sporting environment.

My plan is to then discuss Boluk & Lemieux‘s concept of “metagaming” to further tease out the relationship between sports betting and professional sport in the current moment. I want to do this discussion in conjunction with a discussion regarding the proliferation and evolution of sports betting “metagames” in the past 15-20 years. This would include a discussion of the market-share bidding wars (haha) between major industry players like DraftKings and FanDuel; an exploration of the extent to which publicly placed bets have increased over time, given legalization of sports betting in a growing number of states; the landscape of major sport leagues’ partnerships with sportsbooks; the creation and explosion of daily-fantasy betting; and the extent to which all of the above contemplate and interact with athletes’ labor. It makes sense here to pull in Zuboff and discuss the extent to which any of this creates “guaranteed” behavior on the part of the spectator, which I would argue is another means for alienating consumer and worker.

I also want to discuss gamification and how, as applied to sports betting, it furthers exploitation of both the athlete and the user (it would be nice if all exploited parties reckoned with this together, instead of spectators insisting on/not questioning athletes’ exploitation for the sake of their own entertainment). I’d like to explore Walz & Detterding a bit more to do this discussion, then look to any horizons that have some liberating political potential.

[I need to build out my sources a bit more, but I feel good about these first ones as a starting point]

I was drawn to this class due to the concepts of choice, agency, determinism, and interpretations of self-autonomy. Despite not being an avid gamer, I appreciate the opportunity to complete tasks within a framework of ‘play’ that is devoid of immediate real-world consequences. Games offer a cathartic experience by providing options to pause, restart, replay, quit, and essentially, try repeatedly. They encourage us to learn from our mistakes, creating a safe space for exploration devoid of real-life repercussions.

Exploring our options in the real world often involves considering everyday thoughts and decisions in common settings, such as running errands, cleaning, watching TV, and doing laundry. These are tasks that all individuals usually encounter, unless they have the luxury of hiring help or sharing these responsibilities with a partner or parent.

Instead of the narrative-rich universe typical of first-person games, the user will encounter options on how to perform everyday tasks from the perspective of a person practicing OCD techniques.

An example of a text-based game-play is as follows:

Experiencing intense cleaning compulsions. You decide to

1. Give into compulsion and spend 2 hours deep cleaning the sink, the handles, and the faucet to make sure there are no germs
2. Ruminate on how you cannot trust your anxious thoughts on how dirty the sink is. You write in your journal for 45 minutes about the conflicting choices presented in the name of ‘mental health’. Immediate satisfaction in ‘self-soothing’ activity for a perceived danger that, cognitively, you know isn’t real, must be avoided.
3. Decide he best course of action to distract from the impulse is to go running.

If 1 is picked

Your spend 2 hours of your day deep cleaning instead of writing that project proposal you’ve been ruminating about. You plan how you’re going to write this project proposal while getting into the deep crevices of the sink. Everything is going to work out. You feel in control. You feel like you can accomplish everything you needed to do without compromising your compulsion.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. Take a shower to clean yourself again after sweating from cleaning. You need to feel clean in order to begin writing this paper proposal. Once your thoughts are organized in the shower, and you brainstorm while doing a 7-step skin-care routine, you will surely feel ready to write this project proposal.
      2. Decide against showering, rationalizing that you already gave into your first compulsion to deep clean the sink (which was probably already clean to begin with, considering you deep cleaned it 2 days ago after your night shift from work), and guilt yourself into believing that starting on this project proposal is the ‘responsible’ course of action after you’ve gave into your initial compulsion.
      3. You feel overwhelmed with your decisions and decide to post-pone making one by brewing another cup of coffee. Surely, a caffeinated drink will clear your head and give you the motivation to pick the right decision.

If 2 is picked

You must decide which color of pens to use for journaling. You just got a new journal from MUJI; the sides are clean, the paper is crisp, and you don’t want to ruin your new notebook with the color that ‘feels’ incorrect.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. The navy-blue pen size .5
      2. The navy-blue pen size .38 with ink running out
      3. The gray pen size .5
      4. The dark-green pen in .38 that slides mores smoothly than the other ones; it is your favorite pen.
      5. The black-pen size .70 that is also your favorite pen, although you feel guilty for having 2 separate favorite pens, like they’re almost in competition with each other. You can’t decided which one you like more. You feel guilty for favoring one pen over the other, almost like they’re your children, or like you’re in a love triangle and can’t pick which partner to spend the rest of your life with. The consequences are dire, and the ambivalence you hold towards these two pens morphs in shame. Do you even know who you are? You can’t make a simple decision between two, inanimate objects that are designed to be thrown out and purchased again anyways? They are temporary and say nothing about you as a person. But the fact that you don’t even know your own preferences, your own likes or dislikes, or the fact that you can’t make a decision about two simple pens to write your compulsive thoughts is so embarrassing.
      6. The generic plastic BIC pen you stole from work. You hate the way it slides over the paper in uneven fashion, and how the ink is inconsistent. You know using this pen will bring your great discomfort, but healing is all about putting yourself through discomfort, and so this might be the ‘right’ decision for you to make.

If 3 is picked:

You have to decide which clothes to wear in your closet. You notice your closet is unorganized, as you haven’t sorted out your laundry from ‘worn once (still wearable) from ‘worn 3x but maybe nobody will notice any potential smells’ from ‘absolutely stained and improper to wear in public’ from ‘clean’.

Your options are

1. 1. 1. You decide to quickly sort your clothes into 3 piles just to get more organized for the future, and then finally wear an outfit for running.
      2. Haphazardly find the running pants and shirts that are either in the ‘worn once; still wearable’ category or ‘clean’ category without organizing.
      3. Grab any sort of shorts and t-shirt and endure the dirty feeling of running in somewhat-quetionably-clean clothes in order to alleviate your anxiety about a dirty sink that could potentially harbor COVID-19 viruses. This is the option that will bring you the most discomfort. And healing is all about enduring uncomfortable situations with dignity and strength. You already made the right decision to not deep-clean your sink, and so, this options also seem like the right decision for you to make.

Although, start thinking that you can frame it as a situation where you made the tough decision, and as a reward, you can spend a little extra time picking out the clothes that feel clean to you. I mean, you have to compromise somehow, right? Rewarding yourself for a correct behavior will only reinforce the notion that physical distraction is an effective coping mechanism. It’s kind of like your Pavlov’s dog, but you are the dog and the master at the same time. These are your choices, and your life is defined by the choices you make, whether short-term or long term. You have more control over your life than you think you actually do. It’s time to start monitoring your feelings on the spot and question whether your anxiety-driven obsessions are rooted in rationality or irrationality. It’s hard to decide because they feel so real and so rational. It’s almost an injustice to not feel anxiety in situations like these. But maybe I should reward performing one coping mechanisms by performing a compulsion, because then I’ll associate it with positive feelings.

Right?

1. 1. 4. Get overwhelmed and make your way into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee instead.

The objective of this game is not to ‘successfully’ overcome a compulsion. Instead, it offers a first-person experience of performing everyday tasks while constantly weighing the pros and cons. This game aims to portray the ongoing struggle with OCD, not its defeat. It’s about enduring OCD in a way that minimally disrupts everyday life and managing the associated emotional stress. The ‘final boss’ in the game is not an external entity trying to defeat you. Instead, it’s your internal monologue advocating for your safety in harmless situations. The very voice trying to protect you is also causing harm, masked by intense compulsions driven by irrational fear.

Computation in humanities academic research garners continued support as measured by grant funding. While computational humanities research methods spark detractors levying either claims of neoliberal contagion of universities and digital humanities’ complicity therein (see Allington, Brouillette, Golumbia here), or confirming known biases in literary canons (see Kirsh here), new research using computation continue apace, sometimes with countervailing results (see So and Roland’s Distant Reading and Race). In the past few years, an effort to reconcile the computation-heavy distant reading of the 21st century and the mid-20th century’s predominant mode of close reading appears as expressed with methodological arguments (see Gabi’s Computation as Context) and in practice (So again in Redlining Culture). Practitioners of distant reading and computational methods view skills and tools using information technology as another marker at their disposal when staking a claim. While Gabi believes that distant reading operates as context–like historical background–for close reading, the debate between close and distant techniques obscures a basic question: can computation enhance the practice of close reading?

To explore potential answers to this question, I’m proposing a project called Myoptic Appliances. Whereas Voyant Tools offers scholars a quantitative dump of graphs and tables about an inputted text, this project gives readers a visceral experience of close reading by providing potential alternatives to word choice and sentence sequencing. Mypotic Appliances would employ parts of speech tagging and sentence parsing to rearrange text(s). Perhaps tags and sentences from two texts could be intermingled to demonstrate the differences and similarities between two related texts.  A user of this application can initiate the types of text transformations through a web interface; playing with the text and playing it like a piece of improvisational/aleatoric music.

To control the scope of this end of semester timeline, I will select passages from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a short story in Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportman’s Notebook. At the time of writing, I’m inclined to select the scene from Stowe’s work where Shelby decides to sell Tom and Henry, and the story“The Baliff” from Turgenev. Why select these two texts separated by continents, seas and cultures? Both works were 1852, and were instrumental in changing sentiment about unfree labor in their respective countries. The hope is that the similarity and differences in these texts might make an interesting prototype of how a web application like Myopic Appliances might operate in the future.

This project would generate questions in regards to three of Callios’ types of play. How do the transformations between texts evoke alea, where the parts of speech or sentences to be swapped aren’t completely in the player’s control? To what degree does the player mimic Brion Gysin’s cutup technique for composing sentences and paragraphs by using this application? Is there any sense of Ilinx in mixing and matching texts for the player? This project also builds upon Uncertain Curves and Outrageous Angles, a end of semester project I worked on with Brianna Caszatt for Doing Things with Novels in Fall 2022. I would be remiss if I neglect to acknowledge McGann and Samuel’s deformative criticism. Imaginably more surprising would be the influence of one of the few software engineering niches I’ve inhabited over my profession. Small-data engineering, in opposition to big data, asks how smaller datasets (only hundreds of TB vs. hundreds of PB), simpler datastores (data lakes vs. warehouses) and  one-shot pipelines (e.g. using DuckDB embedded in a script) can lead to effective insights about a company’s data with minimal infrastructure.

While discussing Shelley Jackson’s My Body – A Wunderkammer in class, I said that I would like to know for each page, how many other pages point to it, and that knowing that would illustrate something about the body parts most on Jackson’s mind, the body parts that she mentions most while discussing other parts.  The more I thought about that, the more I felt like I had put my finger on something really interesting: a kind of text analysis that can only be done on hypertext literature.  A lot of work has been done in the field of text analysis as well as visualizing text analysis (as Kai mentioned in class, Hanna Piotrowska’s project “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler: Text & Data”).  Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what ways visualizing hypertext analysis would differ from visualizing traditional text analysis?

For my project, I will perform some hypertext analysis on Wunderkammer and then design a visualization based on the analysis.  As I said before, I am interested in how and how often the different pages connect to each other.  By going through the website page by page and listing where the hyperlinks on each page take you, I will create a sort of adjacency matrix where the pages are nodes and adjacent nodes are the pages you can reach directly from a specific page (applying my computer science background here).  With this, I will be able to draw a map of Wunderkammer’s internal logic, where each node is a page and edges between nodes represent a hyperlink connection, and node size many represent how many pages lead there.

There is a lot I can do visually that plays on the same ideas of Wunderkammer, like laying my graph out like a human body, mirroring the collection of links on the image that makes up the front cover of Wunderkammer.  I will likely hand draw (or digitally hand draw) my visualization so that I have more control over the visual aspect of my piece and can try to capture the same feeling as the illustrations in Wunderkammer.  I hope that my visualization will offer an additional way to understand Wunderkammer by diving into the mechanics that make it so unique, the web of interwoven stories and what they say about each other by being connected in the way they are.

In “Playing an Automated World”, before moving on to persuasive play and gamification, Sicart talks about “soft automation”, the process by which citizen services are being turned into apps.  It is hard to tell exactly how Sicart feels about these kind of service apps; he brings up the argument that it displaces labor, but that is an argument that has been used against most every form of automation for the last one hundred years.  Perhaps Sicart sees that the gamification trend blends dangerously well with service apps.  Either way, I immediately though of what might honetly be my favorite app, or at least the app I think is designed the best: the MTA TrainTime app.

This is an example of soft automation.  You used to have to go to the train station to see when the trains were coming, or look at a printed time table, and you used to have to buy your tickets from a person in a booth, or a machine at the station.  Now, it’s all an app.  In this case, luckily, it’s a really good app; disciplined, yes, but intentional, interactive and, as far as I can see, about as low on exploitation or gamification as possible.

There are many sections of the app that are so well designed and fun to interact with that they encourage exploration.  For example, on the Search tab, there is a list of all the stations and a detailed system map that encourage you to explore lines and stations you would never expect to travel on.  The Status tab shows the service status of all the train lines, and you can click into any service interruption to get a detailed explination. On the Trips tab, you select an origin and destination station to see the train schedules.  Clicking into a specific scheduled train takes you to a live trip status page, complete with another map with real time footage showing the location of the train, as well as organized information about where your stop lies and the fare specific to your trip.  There is a button that will find tickets in your wallet that apply to this trip and prompt you to either buy and activiate a ticket, but I do not feel that the point of the screen is to prompt me to buy a ticket.

Overall, the high amount of work that went into this app to create a higly user-friendly and interactive app shows through, and I feel the intention is to make accessing train information as easy as possible as well as to encourage me to gain more awareness of the whole train system.  There are no points, no measuring how many tickets you buy, no goals to reach, just a robust collection of important, easily accessible, and constantly updating information.

Interestingly, I have also used the NJ Transit app that serves much the same role as the MTA app but for New Jersey trains.  The NJ Transit app is so much worse.  It is distinctly lacking in maps, so there is nothing to visually explore and I do not get the feeling as much that I am being shown real time numbers, even if I am.  It is so much less intuitive from a UI perspective and frankly kind of ugly to look at.  I spend the least amount of time possible on the NJ transit app, while I quite literally enjoy my time spent on the MTA TrainTime app.

So, is it okay that we have soft automated train times and tickets?  I would say so.  But more importantly, I think the MTA TrainTime app is a good and important example of a service app that does its job, does it well, and does not do anything else.

While giving away Bezos’s money, I thought back to the wonderful work of Bo Burnham. If you’re feeling sinister, check out the hilarious Bezos I and II here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/35qVMfUfBN6q2xzm9rZn5a?utm_source=generator

When reading about procedural rhetoric and the game examples Bogast provides, Mark Sample’s Content Moderator Sim came to mind.

I first ran into Sample’s work during the heady days of pandemic influenced online courses during Kevin Ferguson’s Alternative Data Cultures class in the spring of 2023. With the COVID-19 panic still raging, an uniquely enjoyable part of this online course was that the authors of our readings often popped in 30 minutes at the beginning of the class to chat about their work. When Sample arrived to speak with us during our second session, my classmates pressed him on the particulars of the essay we read. Mark generally agreed with some of our critiques, but pointed us to his non-essay work as his current scholarly interest (this gesture became a hallmark of our guests in what was a fascinating and often screwball course that took equal inspiration from McGann and Samuels’ Deformance and Interpretation and Stephen Ramsey’s The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books). 

Sample describes Content Moderator Sim as a “workplace horror game.” This piece is hosted on Itch.io, a site often used to host budding or hobbyist game developers. The premise of this simulation imagines the interactor in the middle of a shift as an employee at a subcontracted company, ViralTitans, Inc., who moderates social media content. After initiating the experience, the user sees four main UI elements: 

• A timer represented by a progress bar at the top of the screen,, showing the remaining time the user has to review the current case 
• The current case, which often requires clicking links to get more specific context about it
• After revealing all of the context about the current case, the options to Approve or Block the post
• Occasionally if you take too long clicking through the content links,, a nagging manager in the form of instant messages and notification sound pings the user, imploring them that more posts equals more revenuing, and the more cases you review and approve, the better for VitalTitans

Content Moderator Sim’s UI with managerial IM on display

The second to last post reviewed at the end of the shift is too horrible to even be described, and the user (UI) has a momentary breakdown, before a manager IM prods you back to the task and hand, though you’ve run out of time to moderate the post that disturbed you. At the end of your shift, the user receives a summary of their performance review from ViralTitans Inc. An option to see a secret score; or your “secret power” listing the social impact of your scoring.

ViralTitans Inc.’s Score

Your Secret Power Score

Reminiscent of the McDonald’s Game, Content Moderator Sim could be categorized as procedural rhetoric, as the argument is made through the processes followed and tradeoffs made by a content moderator as experienced by the user. Much like Molleindustria’s work. Sample’s piece lays bare the inevitable bind of the user caught up in a system of processes that result in (digital) capital accrual at best, but also social worsening regardless of the tradeoffs you make. While the company score reveals the economic output of your work, the secret score reveals that every decision made in the moderator’s position has the power to wreak social havok even while the moderator is extremely disempowered in their work experience. This simulation ultimately argues for dam(n)ing the medium of social media in some sense. Content moderation is frequently offered as a panacea to the damage caused by social media. In Sample’s piece, regardless of whether the user approves or blocks posts, they still abide by the destructive power of the processes unfurling upstream and downstream of their job.

Another Version of the Secret Score

While Bogost would acknowledge Sample’s work here as procedural rhetoric, I’m less certain of its description as a persuasive game. There is a distinct lack of Kittler’s “selective interaction,” particularly with the timing element and linearity of gameplay. The extreme constraints of someone working as a social media moderator is, in fact, a major point of this simulation. The intervention of the “player” in this “game” more closely resembles Balance of the Planet, an example Bogost uses to highlight abstract play in potentially persuasive games where the cause and effect of interaction is hard to decipher. Still, the vividness of the experience “playing” Content Moderator Sim recommends it as procedural rhetoric, enacting the power of computer supported processes by using those very same processes.

Unless you have objections based on the content warning, I recommend giving Content Moderator Sim a go. It takes a few minutes, is a little preachy at the end, may not exactly be a game, but is a good example of the unique power of procedural rhetoric when contrasted with other rhetorical types.

A bit late to the party, but this just in from the left-wing journal of politics and culture, Jacobin:

Gamification Is Exploitation

The trend of gamification – applying elements of game play to other areas of life – is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.