Two years ago, my boyfriend and I were about to embark on the six hour plane ride from Los Angeles back to New York City after an enjoyable and exhausting vacation in California. Since we had to go to LA separately due to our own personal obligations before the trip, this would be our first ever flight together as a couple. I always like to download at least five movies before going up in case I don’t like what the airplane offers, so I checked in with him with some options that I thought he would like. Josh is a huge horror movie lover, so I was pretty sure that he would go with something scary. His answer surprised me.

“Really?” I asked. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile? The Shawn Mendes crocodile film?”

“Oh c’mon, like you aren’t also curious.”

Admittedly, I was. However, I was also worried about feeling trapped with Lyle if the movie was bad. It was then when I came up with an idea.

“Alright, so let’s play bingo boards then while we watch.”

“Bingo boards?” Josh looked at me, slightly confused. “How so?”

Since neither of us knew anything about the movie or any lore behind Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, I suggested it might be fun to make wild predictions about fun things that could happen in the movie. We’d then take those predictions, put them on bingo boards, and then see how many of them became true. Josh agreed, and we ended up having so much fun that we played the game throughout the entire plane ride. In case you were wondering, the five squares that made BINGO for this movie were “Talent Show”, “Joke About Being Eaten”, “Disproportionately Very Tragic Backstory”, “Song Sung While Doing Chores”, and (my favorite one) “Car Chase”. Josh and I still play that game for new movies to this day.

Ian Bogost’s “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games” reminded me a lot of this game. The floor jumping game and our movie bingo are both born from creating enjoyment from limitations and rules. To quote Bogost, “To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don’t need to understand their motivations and inner lives – whatever knowing the inner life of a tangelo or a floor tile would mean. We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work – to discover what they obviously and truly are-and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways” (Bogost 9). In my above example, a lot of the fun of my bingo game with my boyfriend is due to us recognizing that a film like, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a genre piece that we can make predictions on and be amused when we get the plot correct and delighted when we’re surprised. We noticed that obvious and decided to fortify it with rules to make play. I’ve noticed a similar pattern when DM-ing for my campaign in “Dungeons and Dragons”. Oftentimes, my group has a lot more fun when there’s a set structure that allows them to figure out how to solve problems rather than if I just nebulously set them loose on a town. Specificity, structure, and commitment to the bit are what makes our adventures fun and lifelike!

This summer, as a result of moving, I reinvested in tending to my vinyl record collection. It had lapsed for a decade because I lacked the space necessary to accommodate the bulk of a record-playing setup — the player itself, the receiver, the speakers, a collection of records that threatens to overgrow whatever container holds it. But now I’d moved into a space that could better support the hobby.

Backing up a bit: I was born in the CD era, a few years after the medium had eclipsed tape cassettes as the way to own music. CDs could hold more songs and they were less fussy. But by the time I was really coming into my musical consciousness, the internet was taking over, and legally dubious digital spaces like Napster, Limewire, and The Pirate Bay offered ways to access a much wider range of music for a fraction of the cost. And from there: streaming. Pay a nominal fee each month, forget about questions of legality, and listen to (almost) anything.

So why vinyl? I believe it has to do with play, especially in the more expansive sense that authors like Bogost and Huizinga use in describing it.

The ritual of collecting and listening to records is highly ceremonial. It requires going to a record store (or perhaps a thrift store, stoop sale, or estate sale) and thumbing through overstuffed bins of faded album covers. This is one of the practice’s playgrounds. The other playground is at home, in front of the record player, where the ceremony culminates in sliding the record from its plastic or cardboard protector, taking pains not to get fingerprints on the grooves, placing it on the platter, and then delicately lifting and dropping the needle along the record’s edge.

These are signs of respect to a self-imposed order. As Bogost writes in Play Anything, “Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that imposes arbitrary, often boring, even cruel limitations on what you — or anyone — can do with them. Worldly limitations impose a new and welcome humility, for they force us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be” (13-14). The worldly limitations of listening to vinyl — the necessity of getting up from dinner to flip the record, for instance — stands in stark contrast to streaming, which eliminates nearly all friction.

Listening to vinyl is less about satisfying a momentary urge (“I want to hear this song this very instant!”). In fact, as Huizinga writes, play “interrupts the appetitive process” (Homo Ludens, 9). When I listen to vinyl, I am subordinating my own desires to the limits of the present moment. I feel closer to the things themselves, the materials of my game — approaching a greater sense of the “worldliness” that Bogost praises as a hallmark of play (7).

I think this inverse relationship — between fun and constraint — is partially responsible for the strength of the vinyl industry right now. Although diminished compared to streaming, record-buying has made a huge comeback, and this rebound has roughly tracked with the growth of streaming over the last decade. This tells me I’m not the only listener who, when given what they want without limits, opts for some anyways.

This feeds into one of the core debates of record-collecting: whether buying records that were recorded digitally (as opposed to using analog methods) counts as real record-collecting. I admit this is a myopic view and an attempt to keep people out of a hobby that should be enjoyed widely. But it speaks to the need for rules in maintaining the illusion of a game. Even after being pressed into vinyl, any trace of the digital starts to break the spell.

On Labor Day, I watched the Mets play the Red Sox at Citi Field. I’m told that Honus Wagner, legendary shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, once proclaimed: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer, if you’re a ballplayer.” Although I’m no ballplayer, I found that there ain’t much to being a ballplayer — that is, understanding the game of baseball — if you’ve read Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games. My first observation was that the baseball players themselves might not be considered “players” at all: instead, these professional athletes “who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title,” are more accurately identified as workers (Caillois, 6). With this in mind, I expanded my conception of the playground to include my fellow spectators. As soon as I finished my crackerjacks, I got to work parsing the great American pastime according to Caillois’s classification of games. 

Agôn: The players on the field were clearly engaged in a game of agôn, wherein their competitive match hinged “on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside assistance, in such a way that the winner appears to be better than the loser in a certain category of exploits” (Caillois, 14). Indeed, the Mets emerged victorious over the Red Sox and their success earned them accolades from fans and sports commentators alike (and maybe a wild card spot in the MLB postseason?). Since both teams played each other at the same time, on the same field, and under the same conditions, spectators could conclude that, under the rules applied equally to both teams, the Mets must possess more discipline and perseverance than the Red Sox in order to clinch their victory (Caillois, 15). 

Alea: If the ballfield was the site of legitimate competition, then the stands were where alea, or games of chance and destiny, thrived. In between each inning, announcers led the crowds through games like “Follow the Cap”, “Running for Dunkin’”, “8th Inning Karaoke”, and the infamous T-shirt cannon. Nestled into our seats, the spectators remained “entirely passive” throughout these games: we did not deploy “resources, skill, muscles, or intelligence” (Caillois, 17). Instead, when it was time to grasp for a lucky t-shirt or appear, triumphantly, on the big screen, all we could do was wait, “in hope and trembling, the cast of the die” (Caillois, 17). Even as we watched the baseball game play out below us, the spectators were immersed in an entirely separate world of play. Interestingly, the spectator play was bound by similar — if opposing — limits as the baseball play: our games in the realm of alea could only take place when the competitive play of agôn was at a standstill. The spectators’ play occupied the negative space left by the professionals’ play. 

Mimicry: Although I don’t own a blue and orange cap, hundreds of the baseball fans at Monday’s game sported Mets-themed (and Red Sox-themed) outfits and accessories. These fans proudly demonstrated their “identification with the champion” after the game was won, reenacting the bat-swinging motions of the players and acting out the tension of the final inning through sportscaster-like recollections of the game on the train ride home (Caillois, 22). Luckily, no one took their mimicry of the game so far as to wage a brawl between fans of the opposing teams (who, by engaging in such a clash, would be mimicking the stakes of agôn they’d just witnessed on the ballfield). 

Ilinx: Finally, the dizzying thrill of ilinx was apparent in the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Met. Laboring under the weight of their giant, baseball-shaped heads, this rowdy couple surrendered “to the intoxication of many kinds of dance”, unleashing a contagious frenzy of jumping, bobbing, and swaying across the stands (Caillois, 25). The pleasure of joining in on Mr. and Mrs. Met’s movement was heightened by the truly vertigo-inducing decision to set the stadium lights to strobe, creating the effect of being inside a Gravitron while the beat of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” propelled the spectators briefly away from the baseball field and into a new, imaginary playground, separate from the rest of reality but nonetheless grounded in a strong feeling of play (Caillois, 26).

Instead of meeting face-to-face this week, I’ve created a 15-minute video that introduces some of the nitty-gritty elements of the class (our Commons Group+Site, a Padlet “icebreaker,” and the basic assignments you’ll complete), plus the tiniest bit of introduction of the course’s themes:

DH780 Day 1

A brief introduction to our course this term.

A few links/notes:

• The Padlet you’ll use to introduce yourself is here
• You should have received an invitation to the Commons site (i.e. this site you’re on now) and Group. If you haven’t, email me
• Note that your readings for next week are available in .pdf in our Group Library

That’s it: see you in a week!

Fall 2024 students: I’m excited to meet you and work with you. Feel free to peruse what’s here, but know that the schedule is still a work in progress, so stay tuned.

Note that the first session, on August 29th, will be async/remote (the only such session: for all others we’ll be face to face at the good ol’ GC). I’ll post a video giving a brief intro to the course and ask you (by way of certifying “attendance”) to introduce yourselves in this space:

DH 780 Introduction: games people play

We’lll use this space to get to know each other a bit over the first couple of sessions. Please share your preferred pronouns and a pic or avatar if you like. And please tell us: a) the first game you remember playing, the most recent game you played, and your favorite game.

Note that I’ve left all the posts from prior students below: feel free to walk through it, since you can get some sense of the course’s themes that way as well.

All best and see you pretty soon!

I posted about this in October, but now that you’re working on final projects, know that you can schedule time with Nicole, our Student Advisor, and/or our GCDI team to talk through ideas. Here’s Nicole’s self-introduction, with contact info:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

Friends, it’s time to pass Go and collect $200! We’ve reached the end of the Syllabus Proper, and it’s time to flex some direct democratic muscle. I’ve created a Padlet that we’ll use to generate ideas for the final two sessions and vote for them as well:

People’s Choice: topics for the homestretch

Made with Padlet

Feel free to add new ideas or comment on the ones I’ve created. We’ll work on this in class, too. I believe I’ve configured the link properly to allow all to access it, but LMK if you have issues.

While giving away Bezos’s money, I thought back to the wonderful work of Bo Burnham. If you’re feeling sinister, check out the hilarious Bezos I and II here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/35qVMfUfBN6q2xzm9rZn5a?utm_source=generator

A bit late to the party, but this just in from the left-wing journal of politics and culture, Jacobin:

Gamification Is Exploitation

The trend of gamification – applying elements of game play to other areas of life – is the apex of the neoliberal fantasy, rendering both work and our leisure time outside of it into a series of games that we supposedly enjoy playing for their own sake.

Just wanted to alert you to two extremely helpful facets of our program:

1. You can consult with the simpatico and highly skilled/knowledgeable GC Digital Initiatives Fellows: they’re great for chatting through ideas for final projects, thesis topics, etc.

2. You can attend one of the many stimulating workshops on offer each semester from the GCDI, starting with tomorrow’s Intro to Python, Part 2.

See you Monday!