User:Ssstephen/Reading/The Players Power to change the game

Introduction

Further reading:

Report on the Construction of Situations, Guy Debord.

Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed. It is work, it is serious, it is morality, it is necessity’ (McKenzie Wark).

Play as essentially separate to "real" life. But:

Huizinga’s search for the elements of play in funerary rites, deadly Sanskrit riddles and pre-juridical Arabian contests presupposes that before modernity relegated play to the magic circle, play was on the loose amidst culture, confusing the rational boundaries of life’s necessary activities with the ridiculous, competitive, and flighty contests of the ludic. As gamification and serious games attest to, in the early
twenty-first century, we may again be witness to a return to a similar savage confluence of the game with everyday life, a blurring of the boundaries between play and world.

What is the relationship between play and reality, or play and truth? Playing is something you can "really" do, but is at the same time often considered "not real".

[Games are often] not taken seriously enough (even as fiction)

Like fiction, or in particular the novel, games perhaps shouldnt always be taken seriously? Surely there is a scale of what is important, what is urgent, what is relatively inconsequencial and unimportant?