Keynote address for Re:Humanities digital humanities conference. Also published as a peer reviewed article in Hybrid Pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/political-power-of-play/

1. April 2014
The Political Power of Play
Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton College
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2. 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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5. 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 Games
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6. Play is Serious Business.
BUT WHY AND HOW IS PLAY POLITICAL?
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8. 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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9. 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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10. 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.”
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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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14. 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.
@adelinekoh

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Play is Serious Business.
Image Source
@adelinekoh

16. 01
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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17. “To speak a language is to !
take on a world, a culture.”
–Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin, White Masks.”
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21. 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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23. “War onTerror”: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 onTerror”:
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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25. 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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27. 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
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28. 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 Past
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29. Results ofTrading 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
@adelinekoh