What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? (thebaffler.com)

Sharing an article about play that I really enjoyed, although its a bit of a departure from some of the material in class. Graeber wrote this piece on animal play back in 2014, where he asks us to reconsider some fundamental assumptions about biology – like what motivates play in living creatures, and whether that play could simply be end in and of itself. I appreciate how he describes science’s obsession with explaining reality in rational and objective terms, when play can be both fundamental to the human experience and irrational in it’s motivation. There are some definite parallels to our class, although he deviates quite a bit and references figures like Darwin and Kropotkin in lieu of ludic specialists like Huizinga and Bogost.

The article also meanders into chemistry, physics, and metaphysics and asks if play could exist at the most fundamental levels of material reality. Some portions I didn’t find super convincing, but overall it’s a sprawling read that definitely got me thinking about the various scientific and material assumptions underlying our understanding of play.

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible…

In trying to find something to write about for this blog, I began cycling through memories of my frustrations with various online environments. I think I want to focus on Turnitin.com; it’s not a site I’ve explored since high school, but my memory of first using it was enough to make me interested in revisiting the website.

In the writing of this blog, I went to the Turnitin website and sure enough, I still have an active account with an old email address attached. I was able to change my password because I still know my dad’s middle name, and so I eagerly entered the site. I was hopeful I might unearth some old essays from English class, or maybe a short paper from history class—anything that might remind me further of how weird it felt to submit my papers to a machine rather than to a teacher. Unfortunately, the only items I saw in my account were a few paragraph-long submissions from my senior year Spanish IV class. (It’s pretty incredible that single paragraphs in an entirely different language were subject to the same surveillance as my extended papers in English-language courses.)

Importantly, though, the Turnitin interface today doesn’t look much different than it did when I first used the service: it is truly a no-frills website with a few buttons you can click to submit items, look at your enrolled classes, and view/adjust your profile. I guess the landing page is a bit nicer than it was back then? But it gives me the same shivers and shudders now that it did when I was a teenager, scared out of my mind that my usual writing would trigger some plagiaristic laser sensor and give me an F on an assignment. I was very taken with the academic experience in high school and competed a ton with my classmates, so the idea of taking such a hit to my grades was terrifying.

The fear did not prevent me from having a clear-eyed understanding of how absurd the entire enterprise felt, though—I understood that people did copy information from places without attributing it to the proper source (or to any source at all), and I remember the emotions surrounding that specter of punishment. What I remember less of was seeing any interrogation of why a student might feel compelled to finish a paper that way. Even though we were definitely taught how to do citations, even that felt a bit cursory. And it all played into this weird dynamic, wherein it felt like the teachers were on a crusade to say “Gotcha!” to those of us who strayed too far from the prescribed, righteous path.

I will never understand the grading of written work product with numbers and percentages, and so seeing the land of plagiarism become “gamified” in that way was and remains bizarre to me. Back then, I didn’t agree with the premise, either: teachers were absolutely using the technology to single out “cheaters,” irrespective of the circumstances that might lead to someone doing that. And for my part, I look back with such pity on my younger self, as I congratulated myself each time a Turnitin submission ticked only 4% on the plagiarism meter. I hate that school did that to my brain, and that gaming themes were used to do it.

This past Saturday, I used a ride hailing app on my phone to get to Baltimore Penn Station. Having worked on an early on-demand ride app a decade ago, I struggle to pay close attention to the experience of using my phone to hail a vehicle. When you’ve had a varied career in software, you generally want to forget all of the specific details you’ve accrued by working in industries you never thought you’d know anything about. For any single purpose service software, the design patterns, user interfaces and workflow tend to converge on an ossified user experience bereft of delight. My experience of this for hire vehicle software is strictly utilitarian. The brain’s automation of drudgery is sometimes a blessing. This Saturday though, a notification from this particular transportation app puzzled me. I received an anniversary badge for six years using the service. I swiped the banner with this message quickly to the left. Remembering the blog assignment for class, and despite previously deciding to write Linkedin’s persistent gameful efforts, I investigated this badge further. 

First, I had to discover a way to recall the badge. Finding the badge again wasn’t straightforward for me. The “Notifications” option from the hamburger menu (eww) informed me that there were “no notifications yet.” Next, it occurred to me that playful elements like badges must be associated with the “Rewards” screen. As discussed in Walz and Detterding’s introduction to The Gameful World, advertising / rewards systems were early manifestations of gameful experiences. But the “Rewards” section of this transportation app only revealed stale discounts for the service I had ignored and affiliate links to related services like hotel reservations. After 30 seconds fiddling around in the settings, and perhaps owing to colorblindness, I noticed a “new” profile option, and navigated to this profile, where my badge lived along with an assortment of others.

The “Lyftiversary” badge depicts a lopsided, physics defying cake with a lit candle on it. Part of the icing, likely due to OS settings, is black. A message congratulating me for six years (cueing the confetti) with this service confusing me; the first trip in my history dates from 2014. 

My anniversary badge in all its glory.

There are two “locked” badges on my profile. One award, called “Helping Hand” is granted if I donate through the company’s charitable giving effort, which rounds up your trip fee to a whole dollar amount and donates the remainder to a charity. Receive the “Two-Wheeler” badge by reserving a Citi bike through the service. Inspecting the app thoroughly and conducting an internet search produced no evidence that these badges relate to any material benefit to me as a user of this service.

Reflecting on this experience and the reading we’ve done so far, I think it would be difficult to construe these badges as “playful” in Sicart’s sense. This element doesn’t “bring[] the benefits of play” to “[an] activity[] that is not play.” As Bogost decries gamification as “contorted [game design] techniques for producing compliance,” I could play this service better, but there’s little motivation to do it without any benefit to me beyond the elements of the game. There is certainly an emphasis on “emotional engagement” in the relationship I’ve had with this service in the celebration of our anniversary, a type of engagement we would shed from these soft-automated services in one of Sicart’s potential futures. Part of my skepticism in class about the efficacy of various digital mechanisms like gamification, geolocation-based advertising, and data pillaging comes from a doubt about the sophistication of these methods, and the broad applicability of techniques that find success for one or two companies for a duration of time. These mechanisms succeed in conjunction with other coincidental factors, in the Pokémon GO example, IP probably aided in it’s success as much as the game. In the case of my experience with this badge, the notification nagged me enough to zap me of my attention as a resource independent of any other techniques intended and poorly implemented.

I was talking with a friend about class and limitations making play fun, and he mentioned an episode of Bluey that explores this: “Shadowlands” (season 1, episode 5).

It’s adorable, but it does also require Disney+ subscription to watch. In case you have it, here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXx0znW2muQ

If you can’t watch the whole episode, this clip should be free, though it does appear to cut off right before the “a-ha” moment when the character who has previously been changing all the group’s gameplay to make it easier for her learns that the rules are what make games fun: https://youtu.be/lU1aHKr3hJg

Just wanted to alert you to two extremely helpful facets of our program:

1. You can consult with the simpatico and highly skilled/knowledgeable GC Digital Initiatives Fellows: they’re great for chatting through ideas for final projects, thesis topics, etc.

2. You can attend one of the many stimulating workshops on offer each semester from the GCDI, starting with tomorrow’s Intro to Python, Part 2.

See you Monday!

Great talk last night, and thanks to the presenters, Katie and Dan.

I wanted to post a link to the free/open Manifold edition of the book I mentioned last night, Metagaming. We will read an excerpt for the 11/20 class under the “critical play” rubric, but I think the argument is relevant to the “gamification” topic as well.

Have a great week and see you Monday.

My attempts to explain Don Quiquote to family and friends have been interesting. Last week after our group’s presentation, I sent a voice note to a close comrade, telling them about our game and the concept/utility of gamifying a story at all. It was not my best explanatory work, but it started a cool conversation about the potential for using games and play to further our own radical/revolutionary goals. I’ve had similar experiences discussing parts of the course material throughout the semester thus far.

The idea of turning a text into a game is very new to me, so it does not fit as cleanly into my more well-tread, politics-driven elevator pitches about various topics and ideas (but we’re getting there). I think that is the beauty of this experience, though: through our collective gamification, not only have I felt challenged to help create something interesting and different, but I’ve also been afforded an opportunity to practice speaking about it with others.

The latter portion of that process, speaking with others, is vitally important to me. I hate the idea of standing still in the academic context, remaining a consumer and not insisting on being a sharer, first. This course’s core concepts have been easy to share because of the accessibility of the idea of games and play—I’ve found myself discussing some of the concepts with people at work, with my students, with my friends. There is something about games and play that make the sharing of these ideas feel less like the extractive tooth-pulling I normally encounter in GC courses, and more like organic and genuine sharing. The extraction method is fine, but it is also exhausting and makes me resent a lot of things about the academic context and its policing of information.

By contrast, working with my group was genuine fun: everything from the generation of the game’s name to the discussion about the story itself had a levity to it that I didn’t realize I needed from this semester until I had it. When I worked on the presentation it was easy to channel those good vibes and help produce something that would be generative, accessible, and useful.

I am still stuck on this idea of use and usefulness, which I know might be framed as antithetical to pure play, but I can’t help it—I insist on ensuring that what I do in the GC is tied to some form of political education, improvement of material conditions, etc. After our group’s presentation, I remember blurting that the game we’d created could have helped me a ton in law school with memorization. Upon immediate further reflection, I knew I did not want a future filled with better (or any) lawyers, but I also knew that my lizard brain was reminding me to seek out the practical applications of these ideas. I am still reflecting on this, and I am still speaking about it with others. It’s nice to have engaged in an activity that generates such possibilities.

The team I worked with put together The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman game. I appreciated the approach we took to playing with the first book, which focused on a formal or even ahistorical dissembling of the text. The game elaborates the tropes employed by the narrator of the novel, in which interruption and digression often stunt plot advancement of the protagonist in favor of ancillary detail that reveals more about character, intellectual topics of the time, and reveal the idiosyncrasies of time as a matter of subjective experience. Thinking through how we could express the digressive narrative in a game took the entire team’s input into account. At the beginning of each session when we met, I had a slight dread that what we were talking about might not materialize into anything resembling a game. Each time though, our combined inputs helped push us into an articulable experience for someone on a screen. I gained respect for the advantages an engaged group of people could bring to a project like this.

I processed the text in ways that lend themselves to digital methods. I wrote scripts that used regular expressions to isolate only the dashes in the text, leveraged the Natural Language Toolkit/nltk to find punctuation in the text, and translated the first book of the novel to morse code from scratch. I also conducted a few experiments, for example morse code page that scrolls down, repeating the first book ad nauseam until you click on the text which reverts to the top of the translated text. There were a few Javascript functional tidbits I added to the site like storing a name for the dedication.

Isolating the dashes and confirming that they differ in length in the original text struck me as something I might gloss over in standard reading of the text. It’s well worth thinking through how and if the length of dashes add semantic meaning to the text.

All congratulations aside, I wish we had more time to make the experience somewhat more playful for the interactor. At minimum, I know we could make the existing interactions slightly more fun by animating how the text appears upon each expansion. In keeping with the narration of the novel, we could add more whimsy to the experience of navigating the steps to play. When I reflect on the end product and the experience of making it, it occurs to me that we end up playing more than visitors to the website possibly could, which gives me a slight twinge of disappointment, even allowing for time constraints and the necessity to produce something over a matter of hours.