April 2014

The Political Power of PlayAdeline Koh, Richard Stockton College

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Nota Bene

✤ This keynote was simultaneously published today as a peer reviewed article in the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Visit hybridpedagogy.com

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PLAY

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Play for Grown-Up Children

✤ Play as a new form of critical inquiry (Morris, Rorabaugh, Stommel)!

✤ Game mechanics should be used to reformulate K-12 and higher ed (Davidson)!

✤ Reality is broken, games are the solution to many of our problems; risking failure for epic win (McGonigal)!

✤ Serious Play Conference (UCSD)!

✤ Michigan State University: MA in Serious Games5

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Play is Serious Business.

BUT WHY AND HOW IS PLAY POLITICAL?

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Comics: Liberation and Subversion

“Everything about the enticing book of colored pictures, but specially its untidy, sprawling format, the colorful, riotous

extravagance of its pictures, the unrestrained passage between what the characters thought and said, the exotic creatures and adventures reported and depicted: all this made up for a hugely wonderful thrill, entirely unlike

anything I had hitherto known or experienced.”

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Comics as Political Play

✤ Blur boundaries with graphic, colorful excess!

✤ Provided the ability to imagine, create and live alternative realities!

✤ Imagining the Alternative=the most deeply political of acts

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Comics: Dangerous Play

“In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding — far more, say, than film

cartoon or funnies, neither of which mattered much to me — seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, perhaps what

wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and

reshaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. I knew nothing of this then, but I felt that comics

freed me to think and imagine and see differently.”10

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Imagining is Political

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“Play. Invent the World.”Salman Rushdie’s reading of Brazil

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The Location of Brazil represents: Imagination, Impulse, Play

Rushdie: “the true location of Brazil is the other great tradition in art, the one in which techniques of comedy,

metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy and so on are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties

about what the world is and has to be.”

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To Reimagine the World is to Create the Potential to Change It.

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Play is Serious Business.

Image Source

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Gameplay has a different rhetoric✤ Ian Bogost!

✤ procedural rhetoric: “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images or moving pictures.”!

✤ movements/outcomes as procedural!

✤ act of performing these procedures functions as rhetoric

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“To speak a language is to !

take on a world, a culture.”

–Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin, White Masks.”

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Creating “Native” Objects in Civilization/Colonization

✤ “Natives were created by consciously turning off individual characteristics of standard peoples in Civilization IV. That is to say, Native peoples are not a different kind of entity in the game; they are quite literally another kind of people.” Owens and Mir!

✤ Default human subject position=European colonizer. All other= nonhuman

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“War on Terror”: The Board Game

✤ Satirical board game based on 2003 US Invasion of Iraq!

✤ Goal of game: to create larger empires by “liberating” other territories through controlling oil production!

✤ Every empire that loses joins the terrorist group

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“War on Terror”: The Board Game

✤ Spinner decides on who is the “Axis of Evil”!

✤ “Evil” as random!

✤ Much of exchange=secret message boards

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Procedural Rhetoric in “War on Terror”

✤ Procedure: “liberation” often accompanied by covert funding of terrorism!

✤ Procedure: “Axis of Evil” as completely random, but players receive financial incentives to attack player designated as “evil”!

✤ Dispossessed become terrorists=nothing to lose

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Trading Races

✤ University of Michigan, 2003. Landmark cases on affirmative action!

✤ Real and imaginary characters, including Sandra Day O’ Connor, John Hope Franklin, bell hooks!

✤ Three factions:!

✤ color blind!

✤ color conscious!

✤ indeterminate!

✤ 3 stages to game: pre-game, gameplay, post-game debrief 27

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Trading Races

✤ Players win through demonstrating effective occupation of ideological positions!

✤ Real name of the game should be “Trading Ideological Positions”!

✤ Developed out of Reacting to the Past Games (reacting.barnard.edu)!

✤ Note reacting to and not re-enacting the Past28

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Results of Trading Races

✤ Better writing, better speaking by students!

✤ Game challenged students to consider opposing side much more carefully than they would otherwise!

✤ For more: visit tradingraces.adelinekoh.org and www.facebook.com/tradingraces

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Play is Serious Business.

Image Source

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