Full Description
Playing Politics in Digital Spaces offers a timely analysis of play and politics woven together to imagine and enact new worlds, democratic and reactionary alike.
Bringing together media and philosophical insights into the concepts of play, politics and worlding (or world-making), the book highlights the dual potential of play-politics for both oppression and liberation. Through theoretical and cultural historical perspectives on the emergence and repercussions of a post-digital "radical uncertainty", the book allows readers to understand how play has become a crucial component of contemporary politics. It examines this through an array of diverse cases, from different places and scale.
This book will interest scholars and students from media studies, philosophy, cultural studies, games and play studies, and political theory and philosophy, and will be valuable for other stakeholders including policy makers, politicians, journalists, game designers, activists and NGOs.
Contents
Introducing Play and Politics: Making Worlds through Platforms and Digital Media
Part I: Worlding Play and Politics
1. 'Cloud supervisors': COVID construction vehicles as playful cultural creation versus ludic governmentality
2. Playing with technology towards populist governmentality in Turkey
3. Politics in highly playful experiences
4. Ludologistics and the politics of playful military technologies
5. Humoring the norm: Politics of legal humor
Part II: Platforms, Dark Play, and Counterplay
6. Taken over by the trolls: Dark play, trolling, and absorption in Trumpism
7. Red Scare girlfriends: Language games with the Red Scare podcast, or the ludic logic of online contrarianism
8. THIS IS NOT A GAME, LEARN TO PLAY THE GAME: Huizinga's homo ludens, violence, and the QAnon conspiracy
9. Digital alchemy as play: Black women domestic workers on Brazilian social media
10. All the world's a stage: The ironic worlding of 'Birds Aren't Real'
Part III: Material Practices of Political Play
11. The promise of freedom in historical games: The politics of past-play
12. Games to put platforms in their place
13. (Ir)resistible bodies: Larp as sociocultural technology for building queer heterotopias
14. From playful protests to toy activism: Troubleshooting tweets of art activist Barbie
15. Sharing interspecies stories on social media: An exploration of Australian older adult's' pet image sharing practices
16. King of the Hill or the storming of the Capitol as double play: The multiplications of worlds through social media platforms
Index
