Playful Identities Playful Digital Media Technologies Increasingly Shape How People Relate to the Media World, to Other People and to Themselves
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Playful Identities Digital media technologies increasingly shape how people relate to the media world, to other people and to themselves. This prompts questions about matters present-day mediations of identity. This book explores the notion of play as a heuristic lens to look at changing media practices and identity construction. Playful media culture is analyzed far beyond its apparent manifestation in computer games. The central argument of the book is that play and games nowadays are not only appropriate metaphors to capture post-modern human identities, but also the very means by which P l a y f u l I d e n t i t i e s people reflexively construct their identity. The Ludification of Playful Identities presents academic research at the intersection of media jos de mul, joost raessens (eds.) raessens joost mul, de jos lange, de michiel lammes, sybille frissen, valerie theory, play and game studies, social sciences and philosophy. The book Digital Media Cultures carves out a cross-disciplinary domain that connects the most recent in- sights from play and game studies, media research, and identity studies. valerie frissen is ceo of the sidn Fund and professor of ict & Social Change at Erasmus University Rotterdam. sybille lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Inter disciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. michiel de lange is a part-time lecturer New Media Studies at Utrecht University. jos de mul is full professor of Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam. joost raessens is full professor of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University. “An illuminating study on the increasing complexity of ludic media and technologies of the self.” – Mathias Fuchs, professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg “What a brilliant, refreshing, and positively playful approach to the ludic imperative. These are the smartest, most articulate, and up-to-date essays on this subject, by the very people creating this field of study.” edited by valerie frissen, – Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Playing the Future sybille lammes, michiel de lange, jos de mul, joost raessens Amsterdam AUP.nl University 9789089 646392 Press Playful Identities MediaMatters is a series published by Amsterdam University Press on cur- rent debates about media technology and practices. International scholars critically analyze and theorize the materiality and performativity, as well as spatial practices of screen media in contributions that engage with today’s (digital) media culture. For more information about the series, please visit www.aup.nl Playful Identities The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures Edited by Valerie Frissen Sybille Lammes Michiel de Lange Jos de Mul Joost Raessens Amsterdam University Press This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org). OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe. This work is part of the Humanities research programme Transformations in Art and Culture, sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cover illustration: Photograph of the game I’d Hide You, Blast Theory, 2012 (courtesy of Blast Theory). Cover design: Suzan Beijer Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 639 2 e-isbn 978 90 4852 303 0 nur 670 Creative Commons License CC BY NC (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) All authors / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2015 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Contents 1. Homo ludens 2.0 : Play, media, and identity 9 Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul & Joost Raessens Part I Play Introduction to Part I 53 Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul & Joost Raessens 2. Playland : Technology, self, and cultural transformation 55 Kenneth J. Gergen 3. Spiritual play : Encountering the sacred in World of Warcraft 75 Stef Aupers 4. Playful computer interaction 93 Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath 5. Playful identity in game design and open-ended play 111 Menno Deen, Ben Schouten & Tilde Bekker 6. Breaking reality : Exploring pervasive cheating in Foursquare 131 René Glas 7. Playing with bits and bytes : The savage mind in the digital age 149 Valerie Frissen Part II Media Introduction to Part II 167 Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul & Joost Raessens 8. Location-based mobile games : Interfaces to urban spaces 169 Adriana de Souza e Silva & Jordan Frith 9. The playful use of mobile phones and its link to social cohesion 181 Rich Ling 10. Digital cartographies as playful practices 199 Sybille Lammes 11. Ludic identities and the magic circle 211 Gordon Calleja 12. Play (for) time 225 Patrick Crogan 13. Playful identity politics : How refugee games affect the player’s identity 245 Joost Raessens Part III Identity Introduction to Part III 263 Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul & Joost Raessens 14. Playing out identities and emotions 267 Jeroen Jansz 15. Playing with others : The identity paradoxes of the web as social network 281 Jeroen Timmermans 16. New media, play, and social identities 293 Leopoldina Fortunati 17. Playing life in the metropolis : Mobile media and identity in Jakarta 307 Michiel de Lange 18. The conflicts within the casual : The culture and identity of casual online play 321 Frans Mäyrä 19. Afterplay 337 Jos de Mul About the authors 347 Index of Names 353 Index of Subjects 359 1. Homo ludens 2.0 : Play, media, and identity Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul & Joost Raessens Immense est le domaine du jeu. Émile Benveniste Foreplay A playful specter is haunting the world. Since the 1960s, when the use of the word “ludic” became popular in both Europe and the US to designate playful behavior and artifacts, playfulness has become increasingly a mainstream characteristic of modern and postmodern culture. In the first decade of the 21st century we can even speak of the global “ludification of culture” (Raes- sens 2006; 2014). Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind in this context is the immense popularity of computer games, which, as far as global sales are concerned, have already outstripped Hollywood movies. In the US, 8- to 18-year-olds play on average an hour and a half daily on consoles, computers and handheld gaming devices, including mobile phones (Rideout et al. 2010, 2-3). This is by no means only a Western phenomenon. In South Korea, for example, about two-thirds of the country’s total population frequently plays online games, turning computer gaming into one of the fastest growing industries and a key driver for the Korean economy (Jin 2012).1 Although perhaps most visible, computer game culture is only one mani- festation of the process of ludification that seems to penetrate every cultural domain (Neitzel and Nohr 2006). In our present experience economy, for example, playfulness not only characterizes leisure time (fun shopping, game shows on television, amusement parks, playful computer, Internet, and smartphone use), but also those domains that used to be serious, such as work (which should above all be fun nowadays), education (serious gaming), politics (ludic campaigning), and even warfare (computer games like war simulators and interfaces). According to Jeremy Rifkin, “play is becoming as important in the cultural economy as work was in the industrial economy” (2000, 263).2 Postmodern culture has been described as “a game without an overall aim, a play without a transcendent destination” (Minnema 1998, 21). 10 FRISSEN, LAMMES, DE LANGE, DE MUL & RAESSENS Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman maintains that human identity has even become a playful phenomenon. In ludic culture, he argues, playfulness is no longer restricted to childhood, but has become a lifelong attitude: “The mark of postmodern adulthood is the willingness to embrace the game whole-heartedly, as children do” (Bauman 1995, 99). The focus of this volume is on the complex relationship between play, media, and identity in contemporary culture. The chapters in this book investigate, from different perspectives, the role that digital information and communication technologies play in the ludification of personal and cultural identity. The focus on (new) media is not only motivated by the dominant role that digital media play in our present culture, but also by the intuition that “play is central […] to media experience” (Silverstone 1999, 63; cf. Thimm 2010). In this introductory chapter, we analyze these three interconnected phenomena that constitute the subject of this volume, offering a conceptual background that enables the reader to situate the contributions to this volume. This introductory chapter consists of three main sections, which correspond to the three parts of this volume, devoted to play, media, and identity. With regard to the dimension of play in this triad, our starting point is the theory of play developed by Johan Huizinga in his famous 1938 book Homo ludens. It is not without reason that Homo ludens is regarded as a classic in the study of play. Although published more than seventy-five years ago, Huizinga’s central claim, that culture and civilization “arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (1955, 173), still offers a fruitful framework for the study of the ludification of human identity in our contemporary media landscape, or playland as Kenneth Gergen calls it in this book.