The Ecology of Distributed Play

• In Event: 4S at Play: Video Game Studies in STS - I

Abstract

Digital play is going through rapid changes, evolving in the rhythm of surrounding tools and technologies. And since technical things tend to have political qualities, “embodying specific forms of power and authority” (Langdon Winner 1980), play is also shaped by the ideologies and dispositifs of its current times. The concept of distributed play exemplifies this process particularly well. Drawing from the neo-capitalist logic of attention economy, it illustrates the distribution of playful activities across gaming platforms, places, contexts and time-scales. Nintendo’s Switch console, amongst others, is an illustrative example of this. One can play in a set time in the cosines of the living room, just to transform the game pad into a portable device and continue minutes later on the way to work. The deep attention, which used to characterise older media, has evolved into an intermittent hyper-attentive framework (Katherine Hayles 2011), in which every in-game and out-of-game moment is capitalised upon. In this paper I will argue for the ecology of distributed play as the most profound technogenetic (Hayles 2011) transformation of the ludic sphere. I will propose an angle to study distributed ludic infrastructures, combining the perspectives of games studies (close-reading a selection of game examples), media theory (thinking how media determine our situation and the way we play) with the more holistic STS perspective (connecting the variety of actors, as well as social, technological, economic and political conditions of their existence).

Author

• Sonia Fizek, Abertay University