Full Description
Tracing the cultural history of play - from Fluxus to SimCity
Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults' lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.
Through examples ranging from experimental Fluxus games to corporate role-playing exercises and from the Easy Bake Oven to Tetris, The Impossible Reversal presents four styles of playfulness characteristic of the "era of designed play": the impossible reversal, which puts a player in a seemingly hopeless scenario they must upend with a tiny gesture; expending the secret, which involves silly rules that gain an obscure power and require players to embrace failure; simulated freedom, a satiric criticism of the ordinary world; and oblique repetition, a way of playing that stumbles toward unimaginable outcomes through simple, meaningless, and endlessly iterated acts.
A unique genealogical account of play as both concept and practice, The Impossible Reversal illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production in the United States.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Contents
Contents
Introduction: Interpreting Play
Part I. The Impossible Reversal
1. Play Without Rules: George Brecht and the Uncertainty of Judgment
2. Pinball Logics: From the EM Arcades to The Incredible Machine
Part II. Expending the Secret
3. Play Without Knowing: Yoko Ono and the Anthropology of Ritual
4. Act Natural: From Therapeutic Role-Play to Super Mario World
Part III. Simulated Freedom
5. Play Without End: Benjamin Patterson and Liberal Subjectivity
6. Model Citizens: From Management Training to SimCity
Part IV. Oblique Repetition
7. Play Without Meaning: Shigeko Kubota and the Semiotics of Chess
8. Adventures in Abstraction: From Media Panic to Tetris
Conclusion: Synthesizing Video Games
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
