Source: <a href="http://ssrn.com/" target="_blank">SSRN</a><br />Title: Stopping Play:  A New Approach To Games (DRAFT)<br />Author: <a href="http://www.uwm.edu/~malaby/" target="_blank">Thomas Malaby</a><br /><br />Abstract:<br /><br /><blockquote>Games have intruded into popular awareness to an
unprecedented level, and scholars, policy makers, and the media alike are
beginning to consider how games might offer insight into fundamental questions
about human society. But in the midst of this opportunity for their ideas to be
heard, it is game scholars who are selling games short. In their rush to
highlight games' importance, they have tended toward an unsustainable exceptionalism,
seeing games as fundamentally set apart from everyday life. This view casts
gaming as a subset of play, and therefore - like play - as an activity that is
inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable. Before we can confront why games
are important, and make use of them to pursue the aims of policy and knowledge,
we must rescue games from this framework and develop an understanding of them
unburdened by the category of play, one that will both accord with the
experience of games by players themselves, and bear the weight of the new
questions being asked about them and about society. To that end, I offer here
an understanding of games that eschews exceptionalist, normatively-loaded
approaches in favor of one that stresses them as a characterized by process. In
short, I argue for seeing games as domains of contrived contingency, capable of
generating emergent practices and interpretations. This approach enables us to
understand how games are, rather than set apart from everyday life, instead
intimately connected with it. With this approach in place, I conclude by
discussing two key recent developments in games, persistence and complex,
implicit contingency, that together may account for why some online
games are now beginning to approach the texture of everyday life.
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Originally posted on unmediated by Rhizome
