Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy

1. Widescope

1 Widescope Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. . . . But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site. . . . Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. —Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” I am somewhat like an amphibian—one foot on land, one in the water— regarding my stance in relation to the rhetorical landscape on either side of the stream of game studies, itself flowing only by virtue of language, code, and embodied play—only by virtue of the bridge. This is a classical dilemma and one that has haunted our thinking since Plato. Steven Katz likens the split to a dream/nightmare in that “Plato’s dream of disembodied thought, the Pure Forms to which the Philosopher-King’s mind trends, tends ascends, apprehends, has been the un-over-stated project of the West, has been and is being realized, but in and through the very media—poetry, rhetoric, and its descendants—he distrusted if not despised” (Katz forthcoming ). But I am quite comfortable moving from dream to nightmare, river to rocky bank. It is the nature of being human, of playing the game of life. In my work I have consistently sought opportunities to integrate work and play in both industry and academia. Research has, however, always formed the foundation on which work and play coexisted for me. But play has also always been the mode with which I conducted research in this foundation. This means that foundationalism is countered by a playful antifoundationalism. But I do not mean to cast foundationalism as some basis for absolute truth. I think of the base on which work and play interact as more of a surface (and a porous one at that) than as some ground zero of truth. As Jacques Derrida explained in his classic essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” there is no center that 2 Chapter 1 functions as the absolute point of origin or reference. Structure, in other words, is destructured by the free play of language, which is nothing more than “a field of infinite substititions” (Derrida [1966] 1978, 289). Free play will denote both a metaphor and a practice of the inter/vention at work in this book. Although antifoundationalism might seem the obvious counteracting notion to foundationalism, as Patricia Bizzell defines it, “antifoundationalism is the belief that an absolute standard for the judgment of truth can never be found” (Bizzell 1986, 39). Yet the most essential part of her definition follows: such a standard can never be found “precisely because the individual mind can never transcend personal emotion, social circumstances, and historical conditions” (Bizzell 1986, 40). And this is why I begin this book with these three elements of the problem of academic treatments of the work/play dichotomy. My personal emotions, social circumstances , and historical conditions will have been my foundation, and my antifoundation, on the way to what I believe is a new and different contribution to humanities and technology studies in general and to digital game studies in specific. It is also an approach supported and exemplified by both Derrida’s theory of free play and Gregory Ulmer’s work on electracy, from which this book’s title takes its primary cue. To cross these various terrains, it is necessary to construct a series of bridges. This is a device we regularly expect from architecture and engineering , but bridges are also useful as conceptual strategies for moving thought from here to there. In this book, I am building a bridge that both connects and disconnects thought. Stuart Moulthrop rightly questions whether we “should be satisfied with a regime where play and reflection remain separate ” (Moulthrop 2005, 211). It is my aim to reconnect play and reflection by means of electracy but also (as Ulmer aims to do) to invent electracy by means of play. Ironically, a lot of ink has been spilled on pages such as these, and quite a few heated debates have occurred at conferences featuring game studies scholars and literary scholars. The debates over ludology versus narratology have dominated and shaped the field of game studies in the past decade. Yet as Terry Harpold wisely argues, “[understanding] the qualities of...