Repairing Play by Aaron Trammell

Author:Aaron Trammell [Trammell, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Game Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Affect, Play, Race, Aesthetics
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

It is pleasurable but the pleasures it creates are not always submissive to enjoyment, happiness, or positive traits. Play can be pleasurable when it hurts, offends, challenges us and teases us, and even when we are not playing. Let’s not talk about play as fun but as pleasurable, opening us to the immense variations of pleasure in this world. (Sicart 2014, 3)

The comparison of pleasure and fun helps us understand how play exists in the world. If we look at play as pleasure as opposed to fun, we turn away from the rhetoric of play as progress that defines it as a positive activity. Some forms of play, such as BDSM, are often considered pleasurable as opposed to fun. What’s more, BDSM highlights how torture is commonly accepted as a pleasurable form of play. Following this line of reasoning, should brutal, disciplinary torture also be considered play? Traditional scholars of play would draw the line here. Yet, I feel these approaches to play are naive. Although there is a strong sentiment that the phenomenology of play is wholly positive, we know from the feminist accounts, such as Vossen’s noted earlier, that this is far from the truth. Thus, I argue that brutal, disciplinary torture is always (unfortunately) a form of play, and this definition is wholly consistent with Sicart’s understanding of the term. To argue this, I draw a distinction between the player and the played. This distinction is significant because it encourages us to rethink how we classify others in multiplayer games.

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