{"id":2672,"date":"2023-11-17T12:23:02","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T12:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=2672"},"modified":"2025-04-26T16:08:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T16:08:05","slug":"games-and-play","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?page_id=2672","title":{"rendered":"Games and Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

Games and Play: On Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images,<\/em> 57-66 IN Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Mills, Rodrigo Martini, eds., London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury, 2022.<\/p>\n

To see the world as a set of games, and to see it as a \u00a0<\/em>player who knows he is playing, is to see aesthetically. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Vil\u00e9m Flusser, 1969<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThis discovery was like a rupture of dams,\u201d Flusser wrote of his recognition of games as a means of integrating his diverse thoughts about communication. \u00a0Writing in an autobiographical essay from 1969, he describes the experience as an event in the recent past that he expects to shape his thinking into the foreseeable future:<\/p>\n

Suddenly, I saw a whole new field of action extending before me: the field of critique and translation between games…in fact, critique as transcendence of games, that is, critique as metalanguage.[1]<\/a> The problem thus stated made the odd pieces of my previous phases fall into a pattern that, with discipline and imagination, might form a whole in the future.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

A contemporary reader might well wonder how a potential unity among such apparently disparate concepts — games, critique, translation, \u201cmetalanguage\u201d — could have appeared so abruptly, so clearly.\u00a0 The passage does not indicate any particular curiosity about the phenomenon \u201cgames\u201d as such. \u00a0Rather it speaks of games as a means to an end, a clearing away of obstructions to the accomplishment of a project already well underway.\u00a0 To put it differently, the passage suggests a turning point in the development of an artistic or architectural practice rather than a scientist\u2019s program of observation or experimentation. A reader is left wondering about the questions to which \u201cgames\u201d offered such an exciting answer. At one level Flusser, having focussed on language in all his previous work, makes this very clear: \u201cI was looking for a way out into nonlanguage within the loops and tissue of language.\u201d[3]<\/a> And yet the statement begs any number of additional questions:\u00a0 what had changed to make language seem unacceptably limited? \u00a0\u00a0What would the alternative do that language cannot? How do games<\/em> provide an escape from language? What is so desirable about the eventual pattern being \u201cwhole\u201d?<\/p>\n

Among the \u201codd pieces of my previous phases\u201d would certainly have been Wittgenstein\u2019s well-known characterization of language as a game and Johan Huizinga\u2019s study of play as a critical force in the development of human culture — more on this below.\u00a0 Flusser had studied formal logic with Leonidas Hegenberg, among the most prominent professors of the discipline in Brazil; he had listened to — and often refuted — his friend Vincente Ferreira da Silva enthusiastically welcoming new technology, specifically communications technology. \u00a0But it was his relatively recent encounter with decision theory and games theory[4]<\/a> that seems to have produced the \u201crupture of dams\u201d. Created to model human economic behaviour (and open prospects for controlling it), games theory generates mathematical models of decision-making among groups, human or not.\u00a0 Flusser\u2019s established sympathies with such thinkers as Wittgenstein and Huizinga would suddenly have come into view against the prospect that aspects of human cognition could soon be automated.<\/p>\n

Perhaps not coincidentally, \u201cIn Search of Meaning\u201d was first written in English, Flusser\u2019s third language[5]<\/a>.\u00a0 Elsewhere, he describes being drawn to one his four languages by the particular thought he wanted to express — although the reasons were not always clear even to him.[6]<\/a> Perhaps the attraction of English in this case concerned the clear distinction that can be made between \u201cgames\u201d and \u201cplay\u201d (in German and French, the words for \u201cgame\u201d and \u201cplay\u201d are the same; in Portuguese, there are two words for play, but they divide along different lines.)\u00a0 Or, if he had been familiar with recent research on play as an activity that cuts across logical levels (Russell) of communication, that is, with Gregory Bateson\u2019s work, he could have been drawn to the language in which it was published.[7]<\/a> \u00a0A more focussed discussion of games and play followed the paper Bateson read at the Macy Group Processes Conference for 1955, \u201cThe Message \u2018This is Play\u2019\u201d.[8]<\/a>\u00a0 The discussion hovered around an idea of \u201cgames\u201d as comparatively stable structures, and \u201cplay\u201d as a means of subverting, reinventing, changing them. One of the participants, the anthropologist Ray Birtwhistell, offered a strong conclusion: \u201cAt this point, if we were trying to make a definition of play, I would almost be willing to eliminate games as such from play, and state that those things which are games are not play.\u201d But, the participants continued, can there be games without play, or play without games?<\/p>\n

Flusser invariably discussed games<\/em> as objects, seen from the outside, a space for definitions and categorization.\u00a0 He usually described play, <\/em>by contrast, from the inside — the position of the player.\u00a0 Loosely, over various appearances of the pair in various texts, it can seem that Flusser treats a \u201cgame\u201d as a thing — a noun — and \u201cplay\u201d as a verb, ordinarily used in its intransitive form.\u00a0 This is, however, one of at least two significantly different understandings the relationship between the games and play that appear in his writing.\u00a0 The first, more familiar, forms the background against which the new one, characteristic of telematic society, comes into view.\u00a0 There is a particularly memorable example in a chapter entitled \u201cTo Create,\u201d in Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>[9]<\/a>: two people are absorbed in a game of chess, following its time-honoured rules in the expectation that it will conclude with one winner and one loser.\u00a0 In this case, however, \u201cunpredictable, improbable, exciting situations (i.e., informative situations)\u201d arise. Both players lose interest in winning or losing and begin to think, together, about the implications of the new situation. No longer opponents bound by the discursive structure of the game, they start to speak and listen to one another freely, dialogically, playfully.\u00a0 Both come away with something new.<\/p>\n

By the time he was writing about \u201ca rupture of dams\u201d in 1969, Flusser had already published \u201cGames,\u201d[10]<\/a> a very short essay outlining a new way of understanding communication itself as an infinity of games.\u00a0 It begins, significantly, not with a definition of the term \u2013 although there is one — but with a reflection on the best way to characterize human beings.\u00a0Flusser offers a series of possibilities likely to be familiar to his reader — homo sapiens<\/em> or homo faber<\/em> or animal laborans<\/em>— but he settles on homo ludens<\/em>. In sharing his the reasons for the choice he the sets out the essay\u2019s main purpose: the other terms designate ways human beings differ from animals, but he intends to identify human beings \u201cin comparison to their own apparatuses.\u201d[11]<\/a> Since apparatuses, too, can be creative, reflective or purposeful, he writes, the first three terms do not suit his purpose.\u00a0 Homo ludens<\/em> may not be the only animal capable of playing.\u00a0 He is, however, the one who needs this capacity to distinguish himself from apparatuses.<\/p>\n

The phrase homo ludens<\/em> inevitably acknowledges Johan Huizinga\u2019s ground-breaking study by that title from 1938[12]<\/a>.\u00a0 Flusser clearly knew the work, having included it in a list of sources for a book manuscript from 1958 (never published).[13]<\/a> \u00a0Huizinga\u2019s book has since become a founding text in the new and rapidly expanding academic field of games studies. In this context it is widely used to furnish a definition of \u201cplay\u201d: play is \u201cnot serious; utterly absorbing; not associated with material interest or profit; takes place in its own boundaries of time and space; proceeds according to rules; and creates social groups that separate themselves from the outside world.\u201d[14]<\/a> The authors of a prominent textbook in which the list appears go on to take issue with a few of the characteristics, notably the disassociation from profit, along with the absence of a clear statement about the relationship between \u201cgame\u201d and \u201cplay\u201d.\u00a0 But as Peter McDonald has pointed out in a revealing study of Homo Ludens\u2019s<\/em> reception,[15]<\/a> this use of Huzinga\u2019s work constitutes an \u201coverly formalist misreading.\u201d \u00a0The sheer breadth of Huizinga\u2019s study, embracing as it does law, war, philosophy, poetry, myth, art and more as forms of play, affected its many readers\u2019 thinking whatever disagreements they may have had with the book\u2019s conjectures and conclusions, and Flusser is unlikely to have been any exception. More specifically, McDonald proposes that Huizinga practiced a phenomenology<\/em> of play, and that an overemphasis on the formal definition obscures one of the book\u2019s key innovations, namely its insights into play from a player\u2019s point of view. One nice example is Huizinga\u2019s interest in play as fun<\/em>, a judgement that can be made by players alone. \u00a0Homo Ludens<\/em> describes the \u201cplay-spirit\u201d as crucial to the possibility of fiction — the conscious construction of a world.\u00a0 It recognises as aesthetic dimension.\u00a0 All of these aspects of play appear in Flusser\u2019s work as well.<\/p>\n

By contrast to Huizuinga\u2019s carefully assembled evidence bearing on a question<\/em> about the role of play, however, Flusser simply installed play at the beginning of \u201cGames\u201d as a premise: \u201cI will take human beings\u2019 capacity for play to be their defining characteristic\u201d. \u00a0The statement could almost be a paraphrase of the most famous sentence in Friedrich Schiller\u2019s On the Aesthetic Education of Man<\/em>: \u201cman only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.\u201d[16]<\/a> Schiller\u2019s book, written a few years after the shocking violence of the French Revolution, describes human beings as subject to two fundamentally opposing drives — one toward rationality, and other toward sensuality.\u00a0 In a healthy, happy person, these drives are in balance, each holding the other in check.\u00a0 With reference to his own contemporary society, in which he found excesses of both kinds much in evidence, Schiller identified aesthetic experience — at this point bound up with the arts and widely understood as an appreciation of beauty — as the way to achieve balance. Aesthetic education then emerges as the crucial element in the development of creative and responsible citizens.\u00a0 It seems most unlikely that Flusser would have been interested in innate drives or balanced personalities.\u00a0 But Schiller assigns play<\/em> a function that may have resonated deeply with Flusser\u2019s own experience.\u00a0 With the instincts of a phenomenologist before there was any such identity available, Schiller describes play from the standpoint of the player, the way a player feels, what the experience is like.\u00a0 At such moments, he says, a player senses his own humanity.<\/p>\n

From its opening reference to homo ludens, in any case, essay \u201cGames\u201d jumps to a formal description. \u00a0A game, Flusser writes, is \u201ca system of elements that regularly combine\u201d.\u00a0 Elements may be words in a language, pieces on a chessboard, people bound together in any sort of system — the possibilities are unlimited.\u00a0 Then comes a set of concepts that govern the way elements combine to constitute games:<\/p>\n

The sum total of the elements is the game\u2019s \u201crepertoire\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0The sum total of the rules is the game\u2019s \u201cstructure\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0The sum total of possible combinations from the repertoire within game\u2019s structure is the game\u2019s \u201ccompetence\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0And the sum total of the combinations from the repertoire that have been realized is the game\u2019s \u201cuniverse\u201d.[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

The essay goes on to distinguish between open and closed games, that is, between games like chess, that have a fixed repertoire and structure, or games that gain and lose elements and have no fixed ending, such as language.\u00a0 Open games are infinite, he writes, but not all-encompassing — each game has its specific competence and universe.<\/p>\n

A reader gets a strong sense that this theory relies on particular sources, but there is no specific information about them.\u00a0 Tracing Flusser\u2019s sources is always difficult and never entirely certain. \u00a0Rainer Guldin has provided a general description of the way Flusser used sources, taking the specific example of Anatol Rapoport as evidence.[18]<\/a> Among the many instances of Flusser\u2019s borrowing, adapting, compressing or omitting aspects of Rapoport\u2019s work, Guldin gives one particularly clear example. Rapoport is best-known for his work in game theory, having developed the concept and term \u201czero-sum\u201d game.\u00a0 This is a game in which one the gain among players is exactly equal to other players\u2019 losses, resulting in zero.\u00a0 Rapoport also recognized \u201cnon-zero-sum\u201d games, in which an overall gain or loss might be sustained.\u00a0 In \u201ctranslating\u201d Rapoport\u2019s English terms into German, Flusser also adapted them to his own theory, \u00a0keeping \u201czero-sum game\u201d and changing \u201cnon-zero-sum\u201d to \u201cplus-sum\u201d game.[19]<\/a>\u00a0 Eventually he added a \u201cminus-sum-game\u201d as well, in reference to entropy — a term from quantum physics referring to the universe\u2019s overall gradual loss of energy. \u00a0Almost as an aside, with no direct reference to Rapoport, Guldin remarks on the way Flusser\u2019s theory of games adapts terminology from linguistics — \u201cstructure\u201d and \u201crepertoire\u201d resembling syntax and semantics, competence and universe constituting established linguistic terms.[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cGames\u201d relies on just three examples — chess, language (he chose Portuguese), and the natural sciences — to extend the structure to virtually any kind of communication. A reader can hardly help but be startled by the sheer scope of the definition. If a system with the breadth and depth of a language or the highly abstract structures associated with natural science can be games, is there any kind of communication that is not?\u00a0 Flusser\u2019s answer is, in a word, no.\u00a0 And this \u201cno\u201d separates him from almost everyone else who has written about games in any capacity.\u00a0 For Flusser, there is no \u201coutside\u201d of games — Playing or being played, we are always engaged in some game — probably many simultaneously.\u00a0 Without them there is no meaning at all.<\/p>\n

As is often the case in Flusser\u2019s essays, \u201cGames\u201d ends by repeating and resolving the question or issue set out in the beginning.\u00a0 In this case, the conclusion quietly repeats the move from homo sapiens<\/em>, homo faber<\/em>, animal laborans<\/em> to homo ludens<\/em>.\u00a0 Now the specie is distinguished by its capacity to open games, to expand or reduce repertoires, alter structures, criticise — in short, to play:<\/p>\n

A human being as \u201chomo ludens\u201d is set apart from animals by the absence of seriousness.\u00a0\u00a0Play is his answer to the stolid seriousness of life and death.\u00a0\u00a0As a player he resists this stolidity.\u00a0\u00a0And he becomes more of a rebel the more games he plays and the more he cheats.\u00a0\u00a0He sets himself apart from the apparatuses he deceives in the course of his playing by means of his ability to open games.\u00a0\u00a0In other words: he sets himself apart from computers, government regulations and other visible and invisible monsters by means of poetry, philosophy and translation. That is his hope.\u00a0\u00a0As a subject of history, he may be liberated by these apparatuses.\u00a0\u00a0But history itself is only a game, and he can find others.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

When the theoretical terms Flusser introduced in \u201cGames\u201d resurface in Flusser\u2019s subsequent writing they refer broadly to the idea of infinitely many systems linking human beings meaningfully — if not always happily — together in some way.\u00a0 More specifically, they refer to the possibility of the aesthetic experience of playing with those systems or, conversely, to a failure to realize that possibility, a falling back into a position of \u201cbeing played\u201d.\u00a0 The term \u201cgame,\u201d as it appears in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, <\/em>for example, reminds the reader that the object in question has elements, a structure, a competence, and a universe, Most photographs and most photographers function in accordance with an established system — in the case of photography from design and marketing of cameras to education, exhibition, publishing and more.\u00a0 But this same system may be criticized, expanded, or translated into other discourses in new ways.\u00a0 In his published criticism of particular photographs and photographers, it is expressly the photographers who have recognized photography as a game and played with it who earn Flusser\u2019s praise. In 1985, for example, he wrote an introduction to a catalogue of Joan Fontcuberta\u2019s series \u201cHerbarium,\u201d an elaborate, and by now celebrated document recording the findings of a fictional botanist.\u00a0 Flusser credits Fontcuberta with having been able to play with both photography and botanical illustration, providing himself and us with a new insight into both.[22]<\/a><\/p>\n

In short, when Flusser identifies a communicative structure as a \u201cgame,\u201d and this is as likely to be a discipline, a technology or a discourse as it is to be something like chess or football, he is calling attention to its status as given \u2013 fixed, right, \u201ctrue\u201d– and inviting a challenge to this status;\u00a0 when he speaks of \u201cplay,\u201d he is referring to the activity that follows the question \u201cwhat if…\u201d What if we changed the rules, say, added elements (e.g., inserted an elephant between the knight and rook in chess[23]<\/a>), used one game to express information originally encoded for another?<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

Among the last essays Flusser wrote, \u201cDigitaler Schein\u201d[24]<\/a> (\u201cSchein\u201d sounds like the English \u201cshine\u201d and might be translated as \u201csemblance,\u201d \u201cappearance\u201d or possibly \u201cillusion\u201d) addresses the phenomenon of \u201calternative worlds\u201d that were just beginning to appear on computer screens at the time of writing. Anticipating that his readers would dismiss such worlds as empty and trivial simply because they were artificial, Flusser argues that on the contrary, since all meaning is constructed, alternative worlds are as \u201creal\u201d as any other and have just as much potential to generate meaning. \u00a0All are made up of whirling particles, and although at present the distribution of those particles tends to be much more dense in the world we have been given than they are in the alternative worlds, there is no technical reason the current imbalance should not gradually resolve into so many equally persuasive possibilities.\u00a0 \u201cDigitaler Schein\u201d does not mention videogames.\u00a0 He may have been thinking of something more like what we would call simulation software.\u00a0 In any case he sees such worlds as sites where elite practitioners of an unprecedented kind of communication are establishing themselves, learning to operate the controls.<\/p>\n

The reason he did not identify alternative worlds as games in this essay is, I think, is that the idea of a game was not of interest to Flusser if there was no possibility of playing — in the sense of experiencing one\u2019s own humanity, and he found the new worlds inaccessible. The essay casts both author and readers as on-lookers, their noses pressed up against a glass through which they watch others \u201cplay\u201d in, or with, the new alternative worlds. The \u201cglass,\u201d clearly, marks a boundary between those who write computer codes and those who do not. \u00a0In Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em> — and \u201cuniverse\u201d may now be understood as \u201cthe sum total of combinations\u201d of technical images — Flusser further projected a future world in which reading and writing have become exotic skills and people lead their lives in synthesized environments, tapping keyboards with their fingertips, so engrossed in what they are doing that they forget to eat and sleep.[25]<\/a>\u00a0 A contemporary reader will surely think of MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games) such as World of Warcraft or Fortnite.<\/p>\n

At the end of Does Writing have a Future?, <\/em>\u00a0first published in 1987, Flusser had already expressed such sense of exclusion, of regretting that he was too old, too deeply and durably shaped by language and print to adapt to the new devices.[26]<\/a> \u00a0Later, in \u201cDigitaler Schein,\u201d he reiterates his sense of exclusion, if anything with a more pointed effort to show us — readers of essays — that we are likely to be in the same position:<\/p>\n

…just those few people who have left this [historical] consciousness behind, who no longer experience, recognize and value the world as a chain of events but as a toss of the dice, whose thinking is no longer progressive and enlightened, but futurological and system-analytical or \u201cstructural\u201d, are producing the models the majority of people follow. They program advertising, films and political programs according to structural criteria, and cannot be called to account by those who are manipulated.[27]<\/a><\/p>\n

They also design digital games, we might add.<\/p>\n

To the extent what Flusser calls \u201calternative worlds\u201d resemble contemporary videogames, we are obliged to respect his very clear and consistent distinction between \u201cprogrammers\u201d and \u201cprogrammed\u201d, or, to stay with his language, between games and the possibility of actually playing<\/em>.\u00a0 We are perhaps particularly constrained to respect his definition of the capacity for play as the feature that distinguishes human beings from their apparatuses.\u00a0 In light of the astonishing recent expansion of the sheer numbers, diversity, subtlety, and popularity of computer games, along with proliferating claims for their value in helping users learn new skills, resolve old problems, and adapt to changes in their circumstances and identities, it may seem almost perverse to ask, in the interests of representing Flusser\u2019s sense of games and play, who is really playing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Some readers of this essay may agree that on-line video games seem alien, unapproachable: whatever they may be, they are not \u201cfun\u201d. \u00a0A few may further support Flusser\u2019s contention that \u201cthe alternative worlds that are now forming in computers must be understood as designs of the ruling elite.\u201d Flusser accepts, in fact welcomes the radical artificiality of such games, and sees no inherent limit to their potential to for engaging people in persuasive, attractive, satisfying, meaningful realities. \u00a0Only he can\u2019t play.\u00a0 Not only did he lack the technical skills to operate the game controls (He did not use a computer at all, not even a word processor.\u00a0 He wrote on a manual typewriter), he also resisted the kind of thinking that can calculate and compute imaginary worlds.\u00a0 He draws an analogy to the gradual implementation of writing into oral culture between 3500 B.C. and the early 19th<\/sup>-century, those centuries in which a literate elite could \u201cprogram\u201d an illiterate majority.<\/p>\n

In his book Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity<\/em>,[28]<\/a> Rob Gallagher lends support to the contention that \u201cgamers\u201d — loosely, people who invest a significant proportion of their time and energy in mastering and critiquing digital games — constitute an elite.\u00a0 Drawing on Graeme Kirkpatrick\u2019s study of gaming culture in the United Kingdom[29]<\/a>, Gallagher identifies gameplay<\/em> as the key feature around which gamer culture coalesces:<\/p>\n

In order to forge an image of \u201cgamers\u201d as \u201cyoung, male and cool\u201d, \u201csubjects who appreciate gameplay and are good at it\u201d, early gaming culture began to define itself in opposition to those who did not meet these criteria.\u00a0 If this meant jokes at the expense of women and older people, it also meant striving to differentiate gamers from enthusiasts next to whose truly nerdy hobbies (hobbies like trainspotting, stamp collecting or tabletop gaming) digital gaming could be considered exciting and subversive.\u00a0 More than that, though, it entailed mockery of insufficiently skilled would-be-gamers [who]… prize dazzling graphics or an absorbing plot over that ineffable but all-important criterion of compelling gameplay.[30]<\/a><\/p>\n

To return to the criteria introduced in the example of the chess game above, gamers can and do play, in Flusser\u2019s sense, when they step outside the game, play with it. \u00a0They may be critics — often outspoken, articulate and enthusiastic critics — of particular games or of tendencies or companies or particular designers.\u00a0 Such criticism — invariably written — may feed back to the companies or designers in question and may have some impact on the digital world in question — or not.\u00a0Some gamers meet outside the game as well. As in the earlier example of the chess game, their focus turns to one another.\u00a0 In this context, \u201cgameplay\u201d furnishes an aesthetic framework in which individuals perceive beauty, elegance, satisfaction — or above all, fun — in a given game differently. \u00a0In differing, they act themselves out, align themselves with the aesthetic values that make them the specific human beings they are.<\/p>\n

In his discovery, adaptation and projection of games, Flusser was playing.\u00a0 That is to say, he was engaging\u00a0 in games of mathematics, linguistics, anthropology, history, quantum theory, music, visual arts, and more, translating among them, criticizing and changing them without losing awareness that they are<\/em> games, that is, without surrendering his freedom to participate whenever and for whatever reasons he might choose, and to abandon the game at will. He endorsed cheating, jumping between games, inventing new ones on the spot.\u00a0 He encouraged others to do the same.\u00a0 But, as he once put it, \u201cwithout responsibility there is no freedom\u201d[31]<\/a>.\u00a0 The jumps and transformations and inventions are constrained by the need for meaning and a desire for the various pieces to \u201cform a whole,\u201d a constraint that can only be identified as aesthetic.<\/p>\n

Flusser\u2019s play with games seems in many ways to model what he calls, in his last book, a \u201cproject.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Vom Sujekt zum Projekt<\/em> [From Subjekt to Projekt][32]<\/a> begins with the question \u201cAre we really postmodern?\u201d\u00a0 It goes on to characterize the modern as a long shift in communicative codes — from alphabetic to numeric — a shift toward greater abstraction and precision, and from human subservience to God to a subservience to things–nature as the object of human knowledge. He marks the end of the modern as the point where there can be no further abstraction.\u00a0 Minds and mountains, planets and people have all dissolved into whirling particles, and a subject is left without an object, with no sense of a relationship to the world. In the course of learning to calculate the world, however, human also beings learned to compute new ones.\u00a0 Flusser, surely drawing on his own encounter with despair, speaks of a point where human beings can turn away from subjectivity and walk into the future as designers or artists, drafting, projecting worlds as they go, conferring rather than exposing meaning.\u00a0 Flusser\u2019s play with games may be a modest example of a project, relying as it does on alphabetic text, leaving readers to fill in much of the dialogue with other thinkers for themselves, making hardly any technical demands at all.\u00a0 But he insists that when we have really accepted the absence of any accessible common \u201creality,\u201d grasped the urgent need to generate meaning and begun to use technology to think and dream together, we will truly have become postmodern.<\/p>\n

Unless otherwise noted, translations from German are mine.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Flusser employs the prefix \u201cmeta\u201d with regularity. One of Gregory Bateson\u2019s innovations, it would have been relatively new in 1969, and its appearance here suggests that Flusser was familiar with Bateson\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (2002), \u201cIn Search of Meaning,\u201d 197- 207 in Writings<\/em>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 205.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> ibid 205.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> The book acknowledged to have founded game theory as a mathematical discipline is Johan von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern\u2019s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior<\/em>, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Flusser wrote for publication, in descending order of frequency, in German, Portuguese, English and French.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (2012)\u00a0\u201cThe Gesture of Writing,\u201d 25-41 in \u201cNew Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing\u00a0<\/em>9:1 (March).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Gregory Bateson (1972) [1955] \u201cA Theory of Play and Fantasy,\u201d 177-193 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Bateson, Gregory, \u201cThe message \u2018This is Play\u2019\u201d.\u00a0 Group discussion, 145-241 in Transactions of the Second Conference on Group Processes<\/em>, Bertram Schaffner, ed., Princeton: Josiah Macey Foundation, 1955.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (2011) [1985] Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 100.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser, \u201cJogos,\u201d O Estado de S\u00e3o Paulo, <\/em>1967, and \u201dDie Welt als Spiel,\u201d Frankfurter Allgemeine, <\/em>1968.\u00a0 The German text was reprinted as \u201cSpiele\u201d [Games] in Florian R\u00f6tzer, Ist das Leben ein Spiel?<\/em> Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag and the Vil\u00e9m_Flusser_Archive, Universit\u00e4t der K\u00fcnste, Berlin., 2013.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> ibid n.p..<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Johann Huizinga (1949) [1938] Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture<\/em>. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert. Versuch einer subjektiven Synthese<\/em> [The Twentieth Century. Attempt at a Subjective Synthesis, unpublished typescript, Vilem_Flusser_Archiv, Berlin.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals<\/em>, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2004, 75.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Peter McDonald (2019) \u201cHomo Ludens: A Renewed Reading,\u201d 247-267 in The American Journal of Play<\/em>, 11:2, (Winter) 247.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters<\/em>, trans., eds. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005 [1795]) \u201c15th Letter,\u201d 107.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Flusser 2013,\u201cSpiele,\u201d n.p.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Rainer Guldin \u201cVom Nullsummen- zum Plussummen Spiel: zur Bedeutung Anatol Rapoports in Vil\u00e9m Flussers Spieltheorie,\u201c 87-111 in \u201ePlay it Again, Vil\u00e9m! Medien und Spiel im Anschlu\u00df an Vil\u00e9m Flusser,<\/em> Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2015.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Guldin 2015 \u201cVom Nullsummen- 104-6, 108-9.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> ibid 101<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Flusser 2013 \u201cSpiele\u201d [Games] n.p.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (1998) [1985] \u201cEinf\u00fchrung \u201cHerbarium\u201d von Joan Fontcuberta, 113-116 in Standpunkte<\/em>, G\u00f6ttingen: European Photography.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> Flusser 2013 \u201cSpiele\u201d [Games], n.p.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> ___________ (2002) [1991] \u201cDigitaler Schein,\u201d 202-215 in Medienkultur<\/em>, 3rd<\/sup> ed., Frankfurt\/M: Fischer.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> _________ (2011) [1985] Into the Universe of Technical Images<\/em>, 104.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> __________ (2011) [1987] Does Writing Have a Future?<\/em> Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 157-161.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> Flusser 2002 \u201cDigitaler Schein,\u201d 207.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> Rob Gallagher (2017) Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity<\/em>, London: Routledge.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> Graeme Kirkpatrick (2012) \u201cConstitutive Tensions of Gaming\u2019s Field: UK Gaming Magazines and the Formation of Gaming Culture 1981-1995,\u201d Game Studies<\/em> 12 (1). Accessed 7 October 2019. http:\/\/gamestudies.org\/1201\/articles\/kirkpatrick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> Gallagher 2017, Videogames<\/em>, 9.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (2011) [1991] Gestures<\/em>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 136.<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> Vil\u00e9m Flusser (1994) Vom Subjekt zum Projekt<\/em> [From Subjekt to Project], Bensheim and D\u00fcsseldorf: Bollmann Verlag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Games and Play: On Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images, 57-66 IN Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Mills, Rodrigo Martini, eds., London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury, 2022. To...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1070,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2672","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2672"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2966,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2672\/revisions\/2966"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}