P–L–A–Y–I–N–G Tristram Shandy

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At first, I was very skeptical about turning Tristram Shandy into a game. It’s long-winded, confusing, told by an unreliable narrator, frustrating but also funny and unpredictable. The process of reading and annotating it with the group was helpful to highlight our interests and observations. We all agreed that the digressions stood out—it takes Tristram so long to get to his story and how could he possibly start before he was even born (Book 1 does not even cover his actual birth)? Our early idea of looking at the punctuation and Kai’s first python outputs of text and experiments with motion really got us going. The fact that NLTK does not consider the dash as punctuation made us want to focus on the dash even more! Sterne in particular uses the dash seemingly with abandon but he may have also placed them intentionally within the text. By doing the opposite of a typical text analysis, and seeing only the dashes, the digressions are emphasized even more in our game. The dashes page is my favorite! Perhaps you don’t know what they say or mean but you’re keenly aware of their existence and the author’s attempt at diverting attention and creating tangents. And, thinking about the different variations and uses of dashes—a pause, an omission, a conclusion, an intrusion, an insertion, a separation, an exclamation, an attention-grabbing symbol, etc.—adds a level of meaning and understanding to this story that you wouldn’t normally get with a close read or conventional text analysis. In printed form, the dash is a typographic, visual expression. On a digital screen, the dash retains this characteristic but can also become interactive (we made them hyperlinks). If we ventured into audio, the dashes would have been a ripe area for sound experimentation.

Another area of Tristram Shandy that interested me was the black page representing Yorick’s death. When confronted with this on Project Gutenberg, I wished I was reading a printed copy instead. It must be a bit unnerving to see this physical page after reading so many long-winded sentences printed in a serif font of the time period. I immediately thought of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square painting of 1915, the seminal starting point of non-objective art, which Tristram Shandy pre-dates by more than a century. Sterne had profound foresight including this in the novel before the emergence of abstract art. Bri pointed out the black page was turned into an exhibit in 2009 where artists rendered their own interpretations. Our digital interpretation, albeit hidden unless you come across the line “Alas, poor Yorick”, allows the viewer to create their own version of the black page by playing with the mouse. Coloring areas of the digital page with black text generates a void and relates to other areas of the game where we purposefully “erase” text. I really enjoyed taking this discursive text and turning it into voids, erasures and empty spaces.

My specific part of the game creation involved taking our versions of the text (punctuation, characters, TLDR phrases, commands to the user, meta-discourse) and turning them into html pages. There was a lot of searching and replacing involved and dealing with the intricacies of Microsoft Word and Google docs. It wasn’t a perfect process (grammatical errors abound), but seeing Sterne’s text in code was eye-opening. It was like I was inserting my own digressions to the text (code needed to be added to in order to hide areas or link other parts of the text). The end result when viewed as html is completely headache-inducing and unintelligible (reminiscent of Kai’s morse code page). Here’s a snippet:

Lastly, I applaud Maria and Bri’s skill in writing the dedication and instruction pages. It adds a level of humor akin to Tristram’s tone as the narrator. I appreciate the task of writing as you normally wouldn’t, like drawing with your left hand when you’re right-handed. This speaks to that zone of uncomfortableness, frustration, but also amusing experience of reading Book 1. We hope we were able to translate these feelings into our game!

Tristram’s spill beyond the Magic Circle

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As we’ve heard via Bogost in his preface to Play Anything, games are appreciated because of their confined nature. “Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited.” (x) Huizinga’s Magic Circle (a graspable shape with a firm border) speaks to this idea of a game as something bordered (i.e., constructively confined) as well. And (most) novels offer a similarly bordered thrill — a confined word for a reader to discover and conquer. Not Tristram Shandy.

TS is an unwieldy (conceptually) unlimited piece of writing and hints at the interconnectedness of all events and things. Our narrator, Tristram, finds more and more causal and temporal connections between his life and … everything else. And he willingly opens the door for everything else to enter; he invites the sprawl via digressions. (This is why even 20 volumes would not have been enough.) 

Faced with the task of making the TS sprawl playable, we had to make a decision (although, in the beginning, we didn’t know that this was the most consequential decision). We could go one of two ways: We could either tame and straighten the sprawl, and create a clear circle so the game would conform to the expectations of play as clearly bordered, or we could NOT do that. The NOT had no clear precedent.

In group discussions (and as Bri mentioned in her post), we found that all ideas pointing to the straightening of the narrative strands and leading to a more traditional game didn’t feel right. And so we trusted our instincts, which led us to imagine a play experience that re-creates and amplifies our reading experience of Tristram Shandy and would offer the player a digressive, tenuously bordered, and interconnected journey into the text.

In the game’s introduction (which the player has to traverse to enter the “actual game”), we tried to achieve something similar to the reading experience, namely, an opulent, fatiguing, but hopefully also entertaining dedication + training module/s. Here, the soon-to-be player has to read sequentially, and after accepting a dedication, they must acquire knowledge and skills that will let them play the game consciously. Each time a player completes a module via a checkmark, a new one opens. The modules lead the player into digressions on game theory, the maneuvers of clicking and scrolling, and the times and life of Lawrence Sterne, e.g.

Finally, once the player enters the actual game, disorientation rules. Instead of repeating the original’s horizontally sprawling nature and our introduction’s digressive nature, we aimed to create something vertical. I say vertical because the discovery of the text invites scrolling, which registers as a vertical activity and suggests a deepening.

By obscuring almost all (or large parts) of the texts, the player has to scroll and click through layers to finally reveal the whole text. In her blog post, Bri described the layers we developed. I would add that the layers unveiled themselves to us in layers. Meaning we didn’t make a list of layers and then implement them. We discovered them incrementally in conversations during the design process. Additionally, aspects of the text’s humor, which we had perhaps reduced in redaction, found new modes of integration: GIF popups tied to any mention of Hobby Horse, a Morse Code movie, and other Easter Eggs interrupt the vertical experience while re-capturing and momentarily foregrounding the humorous elements of TS.

As Bri described, the process was truly collaborative; everybody participated in the conversation, and we collectively felt our way toward what seemed right. During my first reading of the text, I was trying to untangle the plotlines and was especially intrigued by Tristram’s direct commands to his readers. I tried to lift out these commands. Initially, we thought that the commands could be player instructions (and we used some in our introduction), but as our concept of the game shifted, we realized that they would serve better as their own layer. In addition to lifting out the meta-discourse and commands, I wrote the introduction with Bri. As she explained, we initially divided up the task but ended up working simultaneously, inspiring each other to evermore Tristram-esque flourishes.

I am particularly proud of the way the game resists readers’ (myself included) desire for quick intellectual graspability and yet precisely offers Tristram Shandy’s essence. 

Thank you, team Tristram.

 

Playing (with) Tristram

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The first time I tried to read Tristram Shandy, I couldn’t get into it. I’d never even heard of it until I saw A Cock and Bull Story—the 2006 film adaptation. I went to the theater having no idea what it was about, but I loved it, and the next day went to the library to check the book out. But while the movie delighted, the book felt like such a slog! It was long-winded, and winding, and how could you be telling a story about your life and still not be born in it? Laurence Sterne was setting up quite challenge for his reader, and I just wasn’t ready for it then.

So when it was suggested in class for this project, I knew I wanted try again. Certainly it was motivating to finish the first book knowing that I had to. It also helped that we agreed to collectively annotate Book 1 with Hypothesis, so I could see as we were all reading along together the things that we were all being drawn, and seeing things my teammates were catching that I had missed.

Through group discussions inside and outside of class, we figured out what we were most drawn to in the story, and ways in which those would inform what a playable version of Tristram could look like. Dashes were one of the first things to come up—there are so many of them, and dashes within dashes within dashes. Punctuation and symbols in general are so visually prominent in the text. We also agreed it would be an interesting place to begin for two reasons: 1) Tristram is a story told through a more is more approach, so could we start from the least amount of the story and still be able to understand any of it? And 2) when you do text analysis one of the first steps is cleaning the text, which means removing punctuation, so we wanted to turn that expectation on its head.

We initially got caught up in trying to turn Tristram into an actual game, and we couldn’t quite figure what the premise or the goals would be, or how a player would win. But then we realized the challenge wasn’t to make a game, exactly, it was just to make the text playable. Which is when we started thinking about how to capture our experience of reading Tristram—equal parts thrilling and frustrating—and how we could help our player share in that experience.

We figured one reason someone might want to play Tristram would be to get through the story faster than just doing a straight read, so we leaned into the idea of trying to see what the least amount of the story is that we could give to players and still have them be able to understand the story. Is it the characters? Are there a few words in the story that are the most important? Is it the parts where the story talks about itself as a story? Or the parts where it commands the reader to do something?

Each time you click around, the amount of story that we give you expands, but the margins also expand, so the space for the text shrinks, and you have to work harder to scroll through to read the story. You have to be willing to work harder and stick around longer, which we thought captured the essence of Sterne’s many digressions. The story is one that resists coming to a point, or even coming to an end, and this is what we’re doing by increasing the margins each time we reveal more of the text. The digressions are the point, so stay awhile and get lost in them with us.

This was a very collaborative effort on the part of our team—Patricia, Maria, Kai, and myself. The user experience came about through our many conversations together, and we all QA’ed it and gave feedback at every step. For my own part, I created the “TLDR”/erasure poems for each chapter. I was inspired by Chapter 15, in which just a few words within the contract appear in bold. It felt like a funny little erasure poem. And then Sterne followed it with a summary “in three words” that was still longer than three words, so I thought, what if I made an erasure poem of each chapter of just “three” words. It was honestly a lot of fun, and it made me reflect one what I thought were the most interesting aspects of each chapter. I also had the idea that we create a long, digressive experience for the player before we even let them play the game. Maria and I worked on tweaking the dedication text that Sterne wrote together, and then we collaboratively wrote the introduction/instructions page together. At times we were writing in the Google doc at the same time, and we really played off of one another and were inspired by one another with our many different digressions along the way. In the end I think we wrote something here Sterne himself would be very proud of. And finally, I presented our project for the class.

This project overall was a lot of fun to work on, and I believe I speak for all of us when I say that it really enhanced our experience and appreciation of reading Tristram Shandy, and we think it will do so for our players as well.

Project link: https://patriciabelen.github.io/tristram-shady/web/00.html

McGonigal on TED

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I should’ve posted this earlier, but here’s a 20 min peek at McGonigal’s work at TED, where she’s a frequent contributer:

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Also, here’s a link to ChoreWars, discussed in chapter 7, and World Without Oil, one of McGonigal’s own games, just for fun.

electronic literature and digital preservation

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Having confronted our first frustrating broken object with Norman’s Window, I wanted to point anyone who’s interested to some of the critical literature within DH on the topic of digital preservation. As has been widely observed in DH circles in the past 10 years or so, DH erupted onto the scene in the 2000s amid a broad techno-utopianism that was fascinated with the new. More recently, the field has started to look back and consolidate its own history and discovered that … everything is broken.

I exaggerate, but the deprecation of Adobe’s Flash and the obsolescence of early experiments predicated on particular soft- and hardware configs means that countless projects, including projects that were very prominent and widely-discussed in their time, are largely unread and are being forgotten.

This is a dynamic area in DH, and if anyone’s interested would make a great final project topic. Here are a couple of books that will get you started.

 

Pathfinders: Pathfinders

Introduction to Pathfinders An introduction to Pathfinders with detailed information about the project Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger Judy Malloy’s Opening Page John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse John McDaid’s opening page for Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl This is the opening page of the Jackson Reading Path

Traversals

An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations.Many pioneering works of…

 

meet Nicole Cote, Student Advisor in the DH program

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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.

Blog #1_Acting & Play

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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?

*

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.

 

Initial Theory of Play and Journey: Blog Post #1

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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.

Play in Design

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This week’s readings emphasize play in contrast to work or “ordinary life”. They also leave open the possibility of these boundaries being blurred and it is within these boundaries that I can find many correlations with my work as a graphic designer. Design (as in “to designate, make a plan with intent, or solve a problem”) may sound different from the free and non-serious characteristics of play but many of the same factors go into each: competition, observation, improvisation, motivation, curiosity, skill, etc.

Huizinga describes the “rules of the game” as an important factor in holding the game together – break the rules and the whole game falls apart. Similarly, Bogost points out that the limitations within games are what actually makes them fun. With design work, the rules, restrictions or limitations placed on you (either by the client or yourself) are necessary: print publications must be a certain size, brand design must contain certain colors, advertising must show specific copy, layouts might use specific grids or the golden ratio. These restraints provide a designer the freedom to play, to develop creative solutions with meaning. My design students often misinterpret rules as stifling, not understanding that if they were presented with a blank sheet of paper and a project that had no rules, no purpose, they would be frozen with fear and confusion. Relating the design process to Caillois’ continuum, it would fall somewhere between paidia and ludus. The designer is spontaneous (paidia) within a structure (ludus).

In terms of Caillois’ classifications of games, design is perhaps most associated with alea and mimicry. Randomness and chance (alea) play a factor in design, although it is not a passive activity. Whether using computer tools or physical tools, “happy accidents” happen when you mean to do one thing but it ends up looking totally different but perhaps that result is better than anything you could have thought of intentionally. Too many times, I’ve played with an Illustrator tool I’m not familiar with and ended up with solutions that inspired new ideas, or made some mistakes with code that turned out to be the best thing that could happen.

With mimicry, it’s not a direct tie-in with design, it’s more conceptual. Designers don’t pretend to be someone else, however, the work can certainly mimic other or false worlds. An advertisement may be designed to convince a consumer that their beauty will be enhanced by using a certain skin product, highlighting images of models which have been manipulated by digital means. Sure, this may be unethical, as advertising often is, but it calls attention to a reality of design – it can be used to create illusions, to deceive. And this is certainly the case when design works in conjunction with technology. Huizinga also uses the word representation as the display of something. Representation needs an audience; while not quite a performance, there is no design without it being seen. In fact, the audience is an important consideration, a design can’t function for all demographics or cultures.

Lastly, I was thinking how Bogost’s magic circle relates to design. In order to be seen or experienced, design must exist in reality, in space and time, not outside of it. The magic circle might consist of the audience who is targeted by the design or the audience who is affected by it. But then, there are also multiple playgrounds a designer might use in the process. They might conceive of ideas in a mindspace, which is one type of playground, playing with concepts, scenarios. Then, the blank canvas on which they design is another type of playground, sketching, doodling, experimenting. In all of these playgrounds, the designer attempts to find order in the form of the design solution.

Katie Donia – Blog Post 1

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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.