UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Ludic mutation: the player’s power to change the game Schleiner, A.-M. Publication date 2012 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Schleiner, A-M. (2012). Ludic mutation: the player’s power to change the game. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:24 Sep 2021 i i LUDIC MUTATION: THE PLAYER’S POWER TO CHANGE THE GAME ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van der grad van doctor aan der University of Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van der Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woansdag 5 december 2012, te 10:00 uur door Anne-Marie Schleiner geboren te Providence, Rhode Island, Verenigde Staten ii Promotor: prof. dr. M. D. Rosello Overige leden: prof. dr. P. P. R.W. Pisters prof. dr. C. P. Lindner dr. J. W. Kooijman prof. dr. J. Raessens dr. S. Lammes Faculteit: Der Geesteswetenschappen iii Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of a few intersecting paths. I thank the artists, gamemakers, and activists around the globe, including former collaborators like Brody Condon, Joan Leandre, and Pierre Rahola, whose work originally inspired this project. I am grateful for the support of my husband, family, friends, and colleagues, for their feedback and empathy during the nomadic and often solitary reading and writing process, as I switched hats from artist to academic, forwarding the project at a long distance during carved out moments from my life in Southeast Asia. I thank the students of my Playable Worlds Module at the National University of Singapore, for their feedback on initial drafts of the chapters. And I am especially grateful to my insightful and intrepid supervisor, Prof. Dr. Mireille D. Rosello, who was ever able to discern the most salient points beneath the gamer-geek fixations and theoretical tangents, and for her offerings of new angles of analysis. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements...........................................................................................iii Table of Contents...............................................................................................iv Summary (English)............................................................................................vi Summary (Dutch)..............................................................................................vii Introduction: The Player’s Power to Change the Game ............................... 01 1. The Game vs. the Player ..................................................................... 04 2. Chapters .............................................................................................. 06 Chapter 1. Lightness of Digital Doll Play ..................................................... 12 1. The Changing Clothes Doll ................................................................. 12 2. Unfolding Games ................................................................................ 14 3. Doll Avatars ........................................................................................ 17 4. Theorizing Liberating Play .................................................................. 18 5. Ludic Mutation vs. Ludic Stasis .......................................................... 20 6. The Contagion of the Domestic ........................................................... 22 7. Backwards to the Aesthetic Space of Appearance .............................. 24 8. Gender, Identity Play, and the Active Disclosure of the Who ............. 25 9. Collaboration and Plurality in an Online Space of Appearance .......... 28 10. The Sensual Pleasure of the Divide ..................................................... 30 11. Beyond the Dollhouse ......................................................................... 31 Chapter 2. Modding: Cross-Over Mutation and Unwelcome Gifts ............ 34 1. The First Person Shooter and Game Modding .................................... 38 2. Customization, Interface Mods, and Creative Cheats ......................... 41 3. Artistic Noise in the System ................................................................ 44 4. Cross-Over Mutation ........................................................................... 49 5. Transmission of Play Material ............................................................ 52 6. Thieving Parasites ................................................................................ 54 7. A Common Sphere of Gifted Games ................................................... 58 8. Rejected Gifts ....................................................................................... 60 v Chapter 3. Clockwork Worlds: Activist Games, Harrowing Missions, and Broken Toys ........................................................................ 65 1. Overseers of Toy World Operations ................................................... 70 2. The Enchanting Ordinariness of Toy World Equipment .................... 78 3. Player vs. Game .................................................................................. 80 4. Harrowing Missions ............................................................................ 83 5. Broken Toys and the No Play Imperative ........................................... 88 Chapter 4. City as Military Playground: Contested Urban Terrain .............. 94 1. Military Playgrounds ........................................................................... 95 2. Military Theories of Civilian Occupation ........................................... 97 3. The Ludaform of Urban Terrain ....................................................... 1 01 4. From Deadly Play to Administrators of Life ................................... 1 02 5. The Artist’s Intervention as Situationist Game ................................. 1 06 6. Hacking the City ................................................................................ 111 7. Contesting the Terrain ....................................................................... 115 8. Funny Resistance ............................................................................... 119 9. Points of Détournement ...................................................................... 120 Chapter 5. Toys of Biopolis ........................................................................ 125 1. Biopolitics, Apparatus, Gadget ................................................... ...... 1 30 2. The Biocontrol Society ...................................................................... 138 3. Mixed Reality Urban Reality and Paidiaic Toys ............................... 143 4. A Children’s Biopolis ........................................................................ 149 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 154 1. Two Tactics of Ludic Mutation ........................................................ 154 2. Methodology: From Object to Theory .............................................. 163 Works Cited ................................................................................................. 169 vi Summary: Ludic Mutation: The Player's Power to Change the Game In recent decades we observe a closer relation between games and activism, between games and war, between games and the city, in other words, a gamification of certain regions of the world. What is the power of the game over life? Often the game imposes a kind of subjectification. The game’s rules demand reflexive acts from the player. The player engages with the game’s pre-programmed interactions, losing minutes and hours to the fascination of overcoming the challenge. And yet players also design and play their own games, thereby seizing back some of that which was lost to the game’s digital regime. My underlying research question of this project concerns this power grab from the game. I understand these acts as player-driven transformation of an existing game into another, as a transformative process I will refer to as ludic mutation. The remaker of games sees the world not as a given, fixed place composed of static objects, but as play material, to be tweaked, hacked, altered, and reconfigured. Over the course of this writing, I investigate these player- driven changes to the game at varied scales and points of intervention, across gaming culture, in unique online communities of players, among artists, activists, and situated within the city—both in the digital game city and the augmented city. Players modify and evolve game structures and genres, taking