Full Description
In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.
Contents
1. The playful citizen: An introduction, Part I. Ludo-literacies Introduction, 2. Engagement in play, engagement in politics: Playing political video games, 3. Analytical game design: Game-making as a cultural technique in a gamified society, 4. Re-thinking the social documentary, 5. Collapsus, or how to make players become ecological citizens, 6. The broken toy tactic: Clockwork worlds and activist games, 7. Video games and the engaged citizen: On the ambiguity of digital play, Part II. Ludo-epistemologies, Introduction, 8. Public laboratory: Play and civic engagement, 9. Sensing the air and experimenting with environmental citizenship, 10. Biohacking: Playing with technology, 11. Ludo-epistemology: Playing with the rules in citizen science games, 12. The playful scientist: Stimulating playful communities for science practice, 13. Laborious playgrounds: Citizen science games as new modes of work/play in the digital age, Part III. Ludo-politics, Introduction, 14. On participatory politics as a game changer and the politics of participation, 15. Playing with politics: Memory, orientation, and tactility, 16. Meaningful inefficiencies: Resisting the logic of technological efficiency in the design of civic systems, 17. Permanent revolution: Occupying democracy, 18. The playful city: Citizens making the smart city, 19. Dissent at a distance The Janissary Collective, 20. Playing with power: Casual politicking as a new frame for political analysis, About the authors, Index of names, Index of subjects
