One thing that struck me about Alice in Wonderland is that despite its playfulness, it is incredibly rigid. Wonderland is Wonderland, and Alice is Alice – neither will compromise. Carroll will play with conventions and expectations and scale, but his characters are resolute. They will not grow or change at heart (ironically), and that’s where his sense of play takes hold. Alice and Wonderland (both the place and its inhabitants) are the magic circle for the readers, so long as they are together. The White Rabbit is still the White Rabbit whether he reads the indictment or the Dada Manifestos, so long as his appearance is sharp and he fusses and frets over protocol. So, what’s the best way to show the reader the unchanging nature of the outcome and the inevitability of the plot? A Choose Your Own Adventure game, of course!

We were inspired by Murray’s concept of the kaleidoscopic narrative to intrigue the audience with their own entrances and exits, wondering what they had missed. To take it further, by keeping the overall plot the same but changing the specific words the character’s say or the specific actions they may take, we called upon the Lev Kuleshov technique, allowing the reader to juxtapose the same characters and plot with the differences from scene to scene. When faced with variations of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat”, does the original take on new meaning? What if Alice recites the words of Pink Floyd or Rush rather than the text You Are Old, Father William? We use this technique to ask: How can we keep the reader on their toes? How can we bar them from taking the text for granted? Furthermore, we sought to emulate her method of “Simulation and Destiny”, granting the player supposed agency and variation while having the end be inevitable.

In creating this game, we decided to host our own website (https://ahutnick.github.io/alice02/) powered by JavaScript (specifically JQuery) rather than use Twine or a similar software simply because Matthew and I were already familiar with web development and JS, and we wanted to make sure that we had every element of the game easily at our disposal. We each contributed our own chapter, adding our own forks in the road along the way (mine was Chapter VII). My other task was to assemble the backend of the website. I wrote the JQuery script to call the route that the player takes on the screen, bit by bit. Each screen has its own object in an attached JSON file, which contain: if the screen has a random event, the chapter name, the text (including HTML tags), and the corresponding choice or choices for that screen. The choice(s) would populate buttons at the bottom of the page.

If we were to have more time, I would personally love to add a chapter select menu as well as the ability for the player to randomize not only the chapter order, but the screen order, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Imagining hopping from Alice growing in the court room to Bill the Lizard being punted into the sky to the Hatter singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat. I feel like this would be an excellent way to open up the text, but unfortunately, with loading everything in, testing the JS, and deploying the site, I didn’t have the time. We definitely had to narrow scope over the course of this project. I personally had wanted to add in a mini-game of my own with the Dormouse’s story, but the existing structure made it more effort than it was worth. Instead, I looked for ways for the existing choice structure to break apart the storytelling experience.

I was impressed by how differently everyone’s chapter plays out. Melissa’s Chapter IV focuses on Alice primarily being Alice – there is a right and a wrong choice, and the player is mostly led to make the right choice after making the wrong one (so long as they didn’t pick that Alice woke up). Matthew’s Chapter V focuses on not only the advice that the Caterpillar gives Alice, but also Alice’s lack of control over what she can say (along with some amazing musical references). My Chapter VII focuses on the illusion of choice and replay-ability – there are a lot of silly variants and random text, but in the end, no matter what, the tea party will be a disaster. Wiktor’s Chapter 8 mini-game captures the frustration exactly. Wandi’s Chapter XI embraces the chaos of the courtroom with modern and meta references without upsetting the delicate balance of Alice or Wonderland. I genuinely enjoyed playing through everyone’s routes while testing the code.

When confronted with the prospect of turning Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a game, I was fascinated by the idea of the reader-as-player introduced by Upton in The Aesthetics of Play. As everyday readers and literary scholars alike have engaged Carroll’s text in their own analyses of feminism, Victorian culture, British imperialism, narrative lens, and various other interpretive angles, what sorts of reactions and observations might be opened up through an interactive telling of the story? How can a “game” version of a literary text reveal new modes of meaning-making? Like Upton, I was interested in using play to examine “how meaning-making play is not merely a feature of play, but permeates virtually every aspect of human culture — how understanding the structure of play helps us to understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even the structure of critical theory itself” (Upton, 12). Upon a second reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I thought about how the structure of the text might lend itself to a picking-apart and piecing-back-together in the form of an interactive game. In Derrida’s Writing and Difference, he presents (and subsequently rejects) a conception of structure that relies on its center: “The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure — one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure — but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure” (Derrida, 278). With this in mind, I wondered what the interpretive “center” of Carroll’s story might be; and could this center be revealed through a reconstruction of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? How might “play”, as experienced by the reader, contrast with the sort of “play” initiated through my group’s project?

My group determined that an interactive, decision-based game would be the best way to adapt Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To begin our project, my group decided to map out Carroll’s original text in order to determine where we could insert decisions points for the player while moving through the story’s plot. I read through the story, and plotted each of Alice’s most consequential decisions — like drinking and eating things that changed her size, initiating conversations with other characters, and asking questions that led to more information about the world she’d found herself in — in a flowchart. This schematic allowed us to read Alice’s story in almost a Borgesian way, as a “garden of forking paths”; and separated Alice’s actions from the chronology of the original text. Because of this, my group deemed the narrative sequence of the story less important as an organizing logic than the modular interactions Alice shares with the rest of the book’s characters. Typically, I think of time as a crucial element of narrative: things need to happen in a certain order and at a consistent (or justified) pace so that readers arrive soundly at a story’s conclusion. While other themes and symbols can be subject to various interpretations, I’ve always considered the linear structure of a work of fiction to be universal to the reading experience. However, I was thrilled to find that reading took on a new (and rather timeless) dimension through the playing of my group’s game. Depending on the choices a player/reader makes, one moves through the story at a unique pace. Some decisions will result in an abrupt end to the story; while others bring Alice towards new experiences and interactions, regardless of their order of appearance in the original text. 

Given the news of Robert Coover’s death last week, I was reminded of “The Babysitter”, his short story which elegantly toggles between past, present, and future while moving the reader through a turbulent narrative. Unlike my group’s retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Coover’s story is not actually interactive (although it sometimes feels this way, what with Coover’s repeated making and unmaking of his characters’ decisions); but I think that both our project and Coover’s story are good models for allowing the reader/player to respond to narrative time as it is liberated from the “center” of a story. As a result, players of my group’s game can respond to time as a variable in Alice’s narrative, interjecting their own hopes and expectations about the narrative’s pace into their experience with the game text. By understanding the structure of the game as independent of time — and instead centered around decision-making — I was able to better understand how time and linearity are used in Carroll’s original text.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlzrlzlH2QI?si=cUoN7lSgN0eY4U2G&w=560&h=315]

An overview of four popular series of detective games using Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” concepts and Roger Caillois’s aspects of game theory from “Man, Play and Games,” and an example of horror mystery gaming using Hunt-a-Killer’s Blair Witch: Season One game.

For Jeff Allred “Building, Playing, Thinking: Theory and Practice of Play in the Digital Humanities, Fall 2024,” CUNY Graduate Center, Sept. 26, 2024.

Clue/Cluedo:

Clue

Catch the culprit of a crime by identifying who did it, with what, and where.

Chronicles of Crime:

Chronicles of Crime

Lay out the case, interrogate suspects, and investigate crime scenes with your phone.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Collaborate in an FBI unit to solve cases using high-tech & traditional techniques.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases:

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases

The game is afoot as you and your irregular friends search Victorian London for clues

Hunt-a-Killer: Blair Witch

Hunt a Killer: Blair Witch

Detectives work together to solve an epic 6 episode case.

Video also excerpts clips from:

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

Check out the official The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer starring Heather Donahue! Let us know what you think in the comments below. ► Buy or Rent on FandangoNOW: https://www.fandangonow.com/details/movie/the-blair-witch-project-1999/MMV2F2ED0F3AA0D634B6AB62ED65FF8FC013?ele=searchresult&elc=the%20blair%20wi&eli=0&eci=movies&cmp=MCYT_YouTube_Desc Subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to stay up to date on all your favorite movies.

The Dice Tower: A Comprison of Chronicles of Crime & Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game with Chris Dias

A Comprison of Chronicles of Crime & Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game with Chris Dias

Chris from Dias Ex Machina takes a look at and compares Chronicles of Crime and Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game! Check out the friendliest conventions on Earth! Dice Tower East! – www.dicetowereast.com (July 1-5, 2020) Dice Tower West! – www.dicetowerwest.com (Feb 26 – Mar 1, 2020) Dice Tower Cruise!

The Dice Tower: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Review – with the Game Boy Geek

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Review – with the Game Boy Geek

Dan examines this deduction game 00:00 – Introduction 01:20 – Game overview 05:34 – Final thoughts Buy great games at https://www.gamenerdz.com/ Find more reviews and videos at http://www.dicetower.com

First, who knew that Alex had his finger on the pulse like that? The COMMENTS section following the article is a fascinating window into some of the issues we’re playing with this term (sorry): some commenters see an enjoyable and subversive “hustle”; some see a counterludic structure of gamified exploitation being exposed by canny performance artists; some see a fascinating metagame at work; others see what Huizinga calls the “spoil-sport” ruining the Bike Angels game in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” vein.

Second, as we look at Montfort and Strickland’s project, I wanted to alert you to an important precursor, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1960), a paper-based machine of sorts that generates 100 trillion sonnets and was the founding act, more or less of OULIPO, a collective of mostly French avant-garde writers (the acronym translates to “workshop for potential literature”) who experimented algorithmic and other hacks to play with words. Montfort and Strickland are quite aware of this legacy and I think the Spar project is an homage of sorts.

Here’s a cute early Web transposition of Queneau’s project (the Interwebs used to be fun, folks!). If anyone is interested in histories of the avant garde, there are lots of final project possibilities re: OULIPO, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc. etc.

Oh yeah: one more thing. I shared an open link to the NYT piece, but in case you don’t know, all CUNY folk get free digital access to the NYT! And the WSJ (Whomp whomp).

While examining some of the theories of play by Johan Huizinga, and Roger Caillois, there are various lenses through which to view the practice of playing board games. Board games, as an instance of structured and often communal play, show many of the theoretical principles of play that we use and discuss often, revealing how play operates both as a formalized system and as an escape into a different kind of reality.

Huizinga’s concept of the “magic circle” is a fitting way to begin this analysis. In Homo Ludens (1938), Huizinga argues that “play” takes place in a “magic circle,” a space separate from the real world where the rules of ordinary life are suspended, and new rules—those of the game—are enforced. Huizinga put it best when we choose to use the board game reality instead of the one we currently exist in. When engaging in a board game, players willingly enter this “magic circle,” agreeing to follow the game’s rules and inhabit the reality in the world that is manifested. Whether you’re playing chess, or your own Hide and Capture game, the game’s mechanics construct a separate realm of interaction, competition, and strategy. Within this space, actions that might be inconsequential or nonsensical outside the game gain importance. Rolling dice, collecting cards, or moving tokens becomes meaningful because all players agree that to progress, we must adhere to the game logic and rules accompanying the space.

The “magic circle” concept becomes especially potent in cooperative board games like Pandemic or Arkham Horror, where players must work together against the game’s mechanics. In these contexts, the boundary between the game and real life becomes more visible. While playing, participants temporarily inhabit roles like virus-fighting specialists or supernatural investigators, and the stakes of success or failure exist only within the game’s world. Yet, this play often has emotional or social significance outside of the circle, such as fostering teamwork or bonding among players.

Caillois’ structuralist divisions in Man, Play, and Games (1958) offer another useful perspective, particularly in classifying the types of play that manifest in board games. Caillois categorizes play into four main types: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (role-playing), and ilinx (disruption or dizziness). Most board games feature a combination of these elements, though some lean more heavily toward one category. Competitive games like Monopoly or Risk emphasize agon, where the primary drive is outwitting or outplaying opponents. In contrast, games like Candyland or Snakes and Ladders highlight alea, where success depends largely on chance. I enjoy games of agon more so than games based on chance purely for the competitiveness

Games like Dungeons & Dragons incorporate mimicry, as players assume roles and immerse themselves in narrative worlds. Ilinx might be less common in traditional board games, but certain party games, like Twister, introduce elements of physical disorientation and chaos that fit this category. Understanding how these categories of play intersect in a given game can offer insight into the player experience. For instance, Hide and Capture likely balances agon (through strategic decision-making) with mimicry (perhaps in the form of hidden roles or bluffing), creating a layered and dynamic play experience.

In conclusion, board games provide a rich site for examining various theories of play. Huizinga’s magic circle is seen in the way players step into the game’s world, and Caillois’ categories of play help break down the mechanics of different games, Ultimately, board games are not just a form of leisure but a structured way to experience alternative realities, practice problem-solving, and build social connections, all while navigating the fine line between play and the “real” world.

There’s an undeniable pleasure found in the act of creation within an enclosed system that elicits the fun in many famous games. To take a blank canvas and use only what’s available to you, to make whatever you can push the boundaries to allow yourself to make. To go about things one step at a time to eventually end up with a massive and satisfying end product. People are building entire cities or computers in Minecraft, vast interconnected narratives in D&D, or brand new games and experiences within Super Mario Maker.

“The structures, limits, and materials of the world are not enemies poised against human creativity and experience, but rather support creativity and experience,” as Ian Bogost claims, and it’s clear that this is particularly true when giving players any method of creation. They will take your rules and push them to the very limit, working within your framework to make things you never even considered possible, and this is fun for the players. Creation under strict limitations elicits clever problem-solving from the user, which makes this a game.

In this sense, can one consider a game engine such as Unity to be a game? In many ways, the act of development elicits the same pleasures found in these other games: chipping away at a product to eventually make something massive and grand, streamlining the efficiency and output of your code (akin to the programming-like pleasures derived from Factorio), and then taking the game objects you’ve created and placing them in interesting ways to make interesting levels or stories.

Though it’s clear why the general public has never considered a product like Unity to be the sandbox experience of their dreams. As Bogost states, “The pleasure of limits arises from the experience of deliberately working within them,” and in a product like Unity, there simply aren’t any limits or rules to constrain the user. You can make, literally, ANYTHING. That amount of freedom is daunting and paralyzing, leaving many who start game development overwhelmed and unsure of where to start.

Perhaps this is why the practice of “game-jams” (making a game based around a certain theme under a timeframe) is so common in the field, especially among beginners. Having full, unrestricted freedom is so paralyzing that the only way anyone can truly appreciate the game-like qualities of game development is by finding any kind of box to stay inside of

Understanding the daunting freedom of a game engine like Unity makes me wonder if this is truly the best place to start for those interested in game development, as many in the profession tend to recommend. Of course, once you get past the initial paralysis and understand how to self-impose your limits, you can eventually find the similar pleasures found in creative-building games like Minecraft. Still, I consistently see people on game dev forums who just started and have no clue what to do after learning the program, and many outright give up.

This thinking has brought my attention to the game development engine PICO-8. This program seems determined to provide an answer to the limitless freedom other popular engines offer, generating a “playful” alternative to game development.

PICO-8 is a “fantasy console,” a virtual system that mimics the limited graphics and audio of 8-bit systems of the 1980s. It forces the user to work with a 128×128-pixel display, 16 colors, 4-channel audio, an all-in-one development environment, 8192 maximum tokens of code, and many other limitations. 

I’ve yet to experiment with the engine myself, but writing this has made me grow more and more interested in trying it. Not only do its strict limitations allow for playful and creative problem-solving and a forced adherence to a smaller scope, but the “fantasy console” seems like it would elicit much of Caillois’ Mimicry, as you’re effectively role-playing as an 80s game developer who must make a game under the constraints of their technology of the era, adding an extra layer of playfulness to the development experience.

So, perhaps in the future, when someone asks me how to best start learning game development, I may tell them to save Unity for later and go straight to PICO-8, as the limitations and smaller scope it provides may help them find the playfulness in the hobby sooner than with Unity.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home to the game company that originally published Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is generally considered the definitive first tabletop role-playing game, though I imagine more people have only heard of it through media (the 1980s cartoon show, various movies, references in the Netflix show Stranger Things) or by its cultural reputation (ranging from the Satanic Panic to modern streaming web shows). I personally knew a few of the designers and artists involved with the company back then, and I ended up teaching the game to many people over the years.

Much of the scope Roger Caillois borrows from J. Huizinga (voluntary activity, not “real life,” limited in time and place, rules to create order) can be used to fit such types of role-playing games. The notion of exclusivity (“This is for us, not for the ‘others'” [Huizinga, p. 12]) echoes in the D&D player culture; the genre is full of people willing to argue over the “correct” way to pretend to be an elf or a wizard. Fitting such role-playing games into Caillois’ “Classification of Games” table is a bit more challenging.

For those unfamiliar with the game itself, one player in each game of D&D – the Dungeon Master, or DM – starts by describing a scene set in a fantasy world. Each other player takes a turn describing their own character’s responses to this scene, often relying on one of six abilities (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) and other quantified values (Armor Class, Hit Points, Speed, and so forth).

To determine the success or failure of a described action, players roll a 20-sided die (noted as d20 or 1d20) and add the value of one ability modifier and a character’s proficiency bonus (if skilled in the related task). Other modifiers may come from character features, special equipment, or magic spells. The higher the ability check total, the better the effort. The DM tracks minimum totals needed for successful results, including saving throws (rolls made to avoid character harm) and attack rolls (rolls made to hit and damage targets).

These descriptions and dice rolls continue back and forth between the DM and all the players as a narrative story grows. In this regard, it’s easy to place aspects of D&D in Caillois’ ALEA (chance) and MIMICRY (simulation) categories, using the different ability numbers assigned to each character and the results of dice rolls. However, I’m always grappling with the AGON (competition) aspect of D&D. The player characters are typically meant to be cooperating toward complementary story goals (loot the monsters’ treasure, or rescue a hostage, or do something about the latest MacGuffin). In this regard, the Dungeon Master – whose job in the game is to script or improvise obstacles, challenges, and complications – can too often be seen as the “competitor” in the experience, the person everyone else is “trying to beat.” The Dungeon Master player is actually trying to help the players craft their own characters’ stories, balanced with the necessary risk of failure (and even character death) to keep the experience engaging (the “tension” mentioned in the readings). “Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon denouement.” (Caillois, p. 7)

Many “fans” of D&D rarely play and instead focus on non-game aspects of Dungeons & Dragons (painting miniature figures, map making and world-building, theme-related home crafts). In this sense, how much of D&D is really “played as a game” versus what Caillois cites as “a special form of ludus,” just a hobby? And how do these aspects translate to single-player videogame versions of the D&D experience?

I grew up spending my summer weekends at a Japanese festival called “Obon” or “Bon Dance,” as it’s more colloquially referred to back home in Hawai’i. It’s an annual festival that happens between late July through the month of August, with a different Buddhist temple across the island hosting each weekend. Bon Dance celebrates and honors ancestors. But for a good majority of the folks back home on the islands, this festival is simply an annual gathering for the community to eat food, share culture, and dance together.

I bring up Bon Dance because I was shocked by how much of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens reading was focused on rituals and festivals. It was the oldest reading of the bunch (and it shows), but a lot of the concepts and frames were quite timeless, which in and of itself is an interesting quality of play. I’m primarily interested in this broader idea of “play as a social function,” as it pertains to cultural preservation and heritage.

My late grandmother was a dance leader, which meant she performed the folk dances in the innermost ring of several concentric lines of people, encircling the yagura (a wooden structure that sits in the center). In other words, my grandmother set the “order” and “rhythm” for the broader group, instructions on the movements to perform. It is the dance leaders that establish the rules, for lack of a better word.

But beyond the ideas that Huizinga expresses that directly conjure up a connection between dance and play, I was fascinated with his assertion that play is a form of world-building. He writes, “Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (10). Order in this sense is not only the rules of play, but a shared experience that allows for the suspension of time and space, the “pretend” or representational quality of play.

My grandmother was born on a sugar cane plantation in Maui. I think about what Bon Dance means to her as suspension of time and space — and I believe that this festival represents an opportunity for her to be grounded in a culture that she never fully experienced for herself. The kimonos she wore and the movements she knew by heart (the “order” of the experience) allowed her to embody a self that doesn’t exist outside of these festivals, a connection to culture that doesn’t exist so tangibly beyond those weekends in August. It’s both the suspension of reality and the order of play that is felt so strongly by an annual festival like Bon Dance.

But to wrap this up and perhaps, spend a bit more time reflecting on this experience for myself, I keep thinking about Huizinga’s notion of the “mask” or the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” (22). Without even getting into the religious or spiritual aspects of Bon Dance, I keep thinking about the circumstance of Bon Dance in Hawai’i as I experienced it growing up. It is not only a festival that has evolved over time (my grandma’s temple plays a lot of the music with CDs over speakers), but also across cultures. The food of the festival is different in Hawai’i than in Japan. Some of the simple choreography has taken on different moves, the folk dances remixed and reinvented by younger generations. Some people dance in full kimonos, others just in t-shirts and board shorts. Even the rusted, brown metal chairs that would be set out (in concentric circles mimicking the dancers) for non-dancers represents a dissonance between the festival in Japan and the festival in Hawai’i. One could argue that participating in this cultural festival requires an admission or acceptance of the illusion of it all — the performance of a tradition or ritual from Japan, a recreation of sorts that never perfectly succeeds. But that’s often just the experience of a diaspora and perhaps, that’s where play is most crucial. These rituals and festivals and games, with all their limitations and suspensions of reality, offer value to the collective and community. And as Huizinga writes, “But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again” (14).

This past spring my wife and I drove out to Long Island to see her family. On this trip my sister and her wife joined in the car to attend a party for a college friend happening nearby. My sister and I share the car, which means that all four of us share the car. We travel together a lot on trips that can involve 4+ hours of driving/being trapped in a car, so an hour and a half out on Long Island seemed like nothing. Regrettably, that day we were all kind of testy and antsy (we were going to a baby shower for my brother-in-law and his wife who were expecting the first nibling of the family, VERY EXCITING!) and inevitably there was traffic on the LIE. As tension in the car was rising my wife did something she had never done before – she suggested we play an alphabet game that she had played on car rides as a child. The rules were simple: you scanned the passing surroundings and called out when a word on a sign/car/billboard started with the letter of the alphabet we were on. Bogost said “play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do” (4). I have made this drive to Long Island a hundred times. It’s always boring, there’s almost always traffic, and we’re always mad about it. But actually surrendering ourselves to the situation and making a game out if it completely transformed our drive. All of the sudden, we went from being miserable and angry to actively engaging with each other and even observing our surroundings. It made the ride go by faster and being stuck in traffic actually gave us more opportunities to find what we were looking for. Rather than being stressed, frustrated, and angry about something we had no control over (traffic), we were able to play and even have fun together.

I try to surrender myself to things I cannot control, but as seen above I am a work in progress. When Bogost writes “adults also don’t live in a world designed for us” and “misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned with your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were” (3) it highlights all of the potential sites of play in everyday life if we can find them. Bogost later argues that play isn’t the goal, but the tool (12). To Bogost anything and everything can be play. I like the idea of thinking of play this way, its something I am using to entertain myself, not the thing entertaining me. Does this mean that there is possibility for play in something as mundane as packing the car for a vacation or going grocery shopping? Of course once I think about this I know its true. For example I hate the grocery store, but I hate cooking more, so I grocery shop and my wife cooks. The boundaries and contents are my budget, what we need for the week, and what is available in the store – voila! I think looking at it this way allows you to not fall into the David Foster Wallace trap where you have to somehow find empathy in every interaction in order to get through life. Maybe dodging other shoppers is a little bit more like Frogger than an exercise in imagining what is happening in the personal lives of the surrounding shoppers. To go into the other example, my wife loves the Tetris like challenge of packing the car for a long trip. As mentioned, I travel with an entourage, which typically means the trunk of our car is stuffed to the brim with duffle bags, suitcases, food, drinks, bags of board games, etc. In this case the boundaries and contents are the physical space available in the car and how to fit all of our stuff while still ideally being able to see a sliver of the rear window through the rearview mirror. These everyday instances of play do help ease the stress and mundanity of day to day life in late stage capitalism. I have found myself thinking a lot about this piece in the time since I finished it and how play can be freeing in a world where it feels like I’m always doing something I don’t want to.

I find myself perversely curious as to how Roger Caillois would have characterized modern video games. While his four categories and two axes are far from exclusive as he himself admits, I doubt that he would have been able to dream up just how intricate these games could be. Granted, Caillois died in 1978, considerably before mainstream adventure games took off. Pong and Space Invaders could firmly be categorized as an example of agôn (competition) with a dash of mimicry as the player clashes in a contest of agility and dexterity against a computer opponent.  Axes wise, I’d imagine he’d classify them as ludus (heavily rules-focused), perhaps giving Space Invaders a dash of paidia (childlike impulse) as players subject themselves to the artificial anxiety and fantasy of facing down unstoppable hordes of alien ships.

While early video games have simple mechanics and conceits which make them easy to categorize by Caillois’s standards, modern video games become much more complicated. For an example, let’s try to sort Kingdom Hearts (the original game, not the whole franchise).

For those who don’t know, Kingdom Hearts is a Playstation 2 era action role playing game in which the player controls Sora, a young boy who with his sword-like Keyblade must fight back the Heartless (and a number of Disney villains) to restore peace to the universe. Mechanically, it consists of button mashing and resource management to progress through various tasks and combat situations to earn more of the story’s plot. For the sake of brevity, I will omit the title’s several minigames.

To start broad and work our way in, the very premise of a role playing video game suggests ludic mimicry – the player is provided with a character and dropped into a new world that both thematically and mechanically has set rules that they must follow as that character. The player temporarily escapes their own identity and circumstances in order to take on the emotional and physical highs and lows of another entity. In Kingdom Hearts specifically, Sora has a set movement style, can only interact with his world in specified ways, and can’t behave in manners outside of his character – no whacking non enemy characters with the Keyblade, and unsurprisingly, no death. The story can’t continue on without Sora, so if he ever fails in his quest, the player is taken to a screen where they can choose to reload at an earlier point.

Interestingly, the player has very little choice in their control of Sora – his voice, appearance, and character growth exist independent of the player. The simulation occurs in the player’s ability to accept the conceit of the game and empathize with Sora, seeing the worlds of Kingdom Hearts through his eyes.

It would be easy to assume that since Kingdom Hearts is an action video game, it should also fall under agôn, or competition. After all, when we complete a video game, we tend to claim that we have “beaten the game”, winning a competition and emerging victorious. In the main storyline, one could argue that the player is competing against the various computer controlled Heartless Hordes and boss fights, leveling up until Sora bests the final form of the final boss. They are then rewarded with knowing how the (first installment) of the story ends, after which, they reboot the system to finish up any end game content that they’ve missed. The competition would hinge upon the player’s hand dexterity and reflexes.

However, one could also argue that the player is merely solving puzzles laid by the developers rather than competing against the computer. Just as Sora is limited in his movements, the game is programmed to spawn x number of y types of enemies at z time and b place. Each enemy has certain strategies that can be used to take them down. The game is designed to be finished, unlike Pong or Space Invaders, which are designed to be played until the player definitively wins or loses. As previously mentioned, Sora can’t definitively lose – he can only be sent back to a previous checkpoint or save state. Furthermore, unlike both arcade games, there is no chance of a high score in the original Kingdom Hearts, no official way to compete with your fellow video game enthusiasts.

The trickiest bit about definitively categorizing Kingdom Hearts is that it requires the player to subscribe to the game’s main conceit. In order to truly be mimicry, the player must empathize with and temporarily embody Sora rather than just puppet him. In order for the above agôn interpretation to be valid, the player must suspend their disbelief and believe that they are competing against the enemies that the game puts forward.

Or, the player can take the rules and constraints of the game and play their own way. Speedrunners can make the game purely agôn by choosing to ignore the story completely and compete with others in order to see who can complete the game the fastest. Imaginative players can indulge in pure mimicry by abandoning the plot progression to explore and role play their own stories in the existing locations. The video game itself can become the playground on which players formulate their own games. I would have loved to have heard Caillois’s thoughts on that.