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

A hearty welcome to all students in DH 780 this term. I look forward to meeting you on Monday (note that we’re in 4119). In the meantime, please look around. There’s nothing to prepare for our first meeting, but if you’d like to introduce yourself via the charming microblogging interface, Padlet, be my guest:

https://huntercollege68.padlet.org/jallred/dh-780-introduction-games-people-play-eju0g92tcgz67v2h

I trust that you’re on the Commons and a member of our group + site if you’re reading this, but email me if you’re having issues.

Re-reading Wardrip-Fruin on playable media this week, I thought of Wallace Stevens’s great long poem, “The Blue Guitar” (1937). The poem is a long riff on the way “things as they are” are transformed through the refracting energies of poetry (the titular “blue guitar”). I think both Bogost and Wardrip-Fruin, in different ways, want to think about how digital texts can marshal some of this deformative energy and create new ways of thinking about the same old, same old.

Here are some excerpts from the poem for those who are interested from a charming olde website of yore from one of my mentors, Al Filreis.

We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Interesting piece on the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books that touches on some of the overlap between print and screen-based media we discussed last night, insofar as the CYOI series anticipates some of the 1990s giddy fascination with “hypertext media” and the contemporary proximity between cinema, video games, and the novel.

BTW if it isn’t obvious, this is your space too: feel free to post anything course-relevant on the blog as we move through the course.

Katharina asked the very useful question last week, after I suggested that one or both groups might choose a substitute for the planned Billy Budd: what makes for a good text to play via Ivanhoe? Here are some thoughts on that score:

• you can “play” virtually any fictional narrative (or even historical event, legal debate, etc.): as long as there are an array of different personae to inhabit, the play will work.
• shorter is better: in my experience, the game works best in groups of 4-7, to allow for a range of different personae and to give a sense of the text as a whole. As I joked in class, Russian “doorstop” novels have too many characters and too much plot complexity to work well. Novella-length is great, given the time constraints.
• public-domain is always nice but less necessary here: we are transforming these texts and thus can “publish” our work in the open under “fair use.” So the only downside is the expense, potentially, of getting your hands on an in-copyright text.
• interesting publication history: if you dig deeply enough, almost any text has a rich publication history on some level, but it’s nice to think about texts that occasioned some kind of vivid debate, or had unusual itineraries through the publication process, or otherwise teach us something about the production/consumption/distribution of texts.
• As I mentioned in class, the Bedford Cultural Edition series has a few 19thC texts that have rich publication histories, are of manageable length, and are chock-full of the kinds of cultural materials that would enhance your play.

For an example, check out the site in which my honors course at Hunter played Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales last term. As you can see, both teams played the same text but with different emphases and different “paratextual” characters. The fun of the game emerges through the interactions, in which players, much as in improvised music or theater or dance, have to listen to one another in order for their expressions to mesh with the whole. Of course your play will look very different, but I think these students did great things with the project.