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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Play is really hard to categorize. Who's to say that the most serious prose isn't actually playful?
Tiffany Funk:I remember Mouse Trap as a kid. I don't think I once played the game. I think we set it up, played with the parts, and never even looked at what the actual rules were.
Chaz Evans:The fact that you haven't tried to say like, this is what this game means is then what allows you to connect Benjamin Patterson to SimCity.
Peter McDonald:Thank you all for being here. I'm Peter McDonald. I teach at the University of Wisconsin Madison in an area called design, informal and creative education. My background though is coming from more and more humanities, English y kind of position. I just recently released a book called The A History of How We Play.
Peter McDonald:And I'm in conversation today with Tiffany Funk and Chaz Evans, and I'll let them introduce themselves in just a minute. But I'd love to tell you just my vision of what this book is about. So this book began with two major provocations for me. The first is that I think play is often framed as a single kind of experience, or play and playfulness as a singular qualitative mode in which we engage with games as something festive, exuberant, joyful, fun. And I really wanted to challenge that.
Peter McDonald:This goes back to this whole book and this particular question goes back to my dissertation work where I was looking at Fluxus artists. Fluxus is a movement in the late 1950s, early 1960s, that's very experimental and fun and seeks to kind of make art that is engaged in the public sphere, that doesn't separate it off into a gallery space, that uses all sorts of experiential qualities of people's bodies. And that has a couple of specific genres that we might talk about in a little bit. And people often when they're writing about Fluxus, talk about it as playful, talk about specific artists as playful. And in my sort of dealing with that, I started to wonder what do they actually mean?
Peter McDonald:Because when I look at the work of someone like George Brecht, it doesn't feel at all like the work of someone like Yoko Ono, but both are often described as playful. So I want to start thinking about how can we get a better vocabulary to tease apart these different kinds of playfulness. So that's the first major goal for me with this book. And the second is building off of that, to stop thinking about play and playfulness as ahistorical things. So play is often framed as either a biological inheritance, something that we share with mammals and birds and going back far enough with reptiles and fish in the biological literature, or as a psychological universal, something that children start out with in their infancy and, continue to grow into, or as sometimes even, a philosophical universal, something that is equated with freedom or indeterminacy.
Peter McDonald:And that reduces play in my mind to a kind of flat, formal thing. And it makes it really hard to think about what changes historically in play. So the second goal of this work was to go back to Fluxus again, but now to think about it in its historical moment, to think about why Fluxus happened at that particular time and place, and to situate it against and within a number of other practices that made play culture in The United States in particular, but also a more international and transnational play culture different in that moment in the fifties and sixties. So before video games, right, this is, there are computer games at that moment, but there's not a public culture of playing and paying for video games. And yet, I wanna make the argument in this book that there is a huge shift even without that technological shift towards a new kind of play culture.
Peter McDonald:And that takes place through new developments in role playing, new ways of training managers with simulation games, all sorts of mechanical inventions, pinball sets, and so on. And that moment, that real renaissance, I think, of new forms of playfulness gets expressed as well through new vocabularies of design and new academic discourses about play. And so this book is trying to really think about that mixture, that cross pollination that makes play and playfulness start to mean something different than I think it did in the nineteenth century, and maybe different again than what it means for us today. So there's this like period of time that I am just fascinated by and really want to kind of dig into in a wide variety of ways.
Tiffany Funk:I'm Tiffany Funk. I teach at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I'm the co founder and I teach in a program called Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts with Hannah Higgins, who is cited a good deal in your book, which is great. And the program, it's kind of like yours, Peter, that it's interdisciplinary. And when people ask, what does that mean?
Tiffany Funk:I often have to go into the idea of intermedia, talking about games and play, art as research. We try to reach out to all the rest of the College of Art, Design and Architecture. My background's in art history more properly, but it was an interdisciplinary sort of degree of working with early computation and art and sound practices. I do my own work, new media centric writing, conceptual writing, film. My undergrad is at the University of Wisconsin in the film program, so I'm familiar with some of the the ethos there.
Chaz Evans:Hi. I'm Chaz Evans, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. I'm in the film and media area of the School of Visual Art and Design. I teach a number of new media art topics. I teach a lot of three d animation and video game related courses.
Chaz Evans:I teach other fun ways to be creative with your computer. And my research right now is about the history of three d animation and computer graphics framed by the history of the platform. Maya, that said, all of my studies about computer art are prefigured by experience in the world of performance and doing a lot of performances in my art practice of the past before I was spending more time as a scholar. So the Fluxus works and the way you have given new read to them in this book are well, there are artists that have been dear to me in the past that your reads have given a whole new way to enter their work, and especially because I have been invested in performance art as well as video games and always felt somewhere in the back of my mind they're connected somehow. But this is one of the first, if not the first, real assertions that the connection is 100% there.
Chaz Evans:So I'm really excited that it exists and also excited that we get to talk about it today. Outside of teaching, I've curated a lot of video game art exhibitions. So thinking about how there is a historically specific era of play starts postwar and coalesces around the time that video games are coming together, this is highly relevant and useful for anyone working in the video game art field right now, whether you're making art games that that are supposed to be played at home or played in an art gallery. I have so many questions I could ask. So if the epic of playfulness that you are talking about in this book, which sort of goes from postwar era to early nineties, If that is historically specific in its own form, how does it compare to the other epics of playfulness that were before it?
Chaz Evans:In other words, could we say, is it more playful than eras of playfulness that preceded it? Now that we have defined the time frame, can we also now make comparisons between other eras of playfulness?
Peter McDonald:So one of the great thinkers or at least germinal thinkers of playfulness, Johann Heisinger, asks sort of the same question. And for him, we're kind of in an era when he's writing in the nineteen forties, and probably he would say today too, are in an era of decreased playfulness. That like the Baroque and Rococo is the moment where at least European culture reaches its height of playfulness and he's writing in the shadow of Nazi Germany. And this is sort of a moment for him where we're engaged in false play. For me, I think about it in slightly different terms.
Peter McDonald:I don't think of it as a question of quantity, but rather as quality, different qualities of playfulness and different modes that we might mark these eras with. And I owe a lot of this to thinking about the nineteenth century because my partner, Amanda Schubert, was also writing a book where she was looking at optical toys from that era, in Victorian culture in particular. In her work, she talks a lot about rational recreations, ways that the toys like fenakistoscopes and stereoscopes, are meant to train the eye and to teach you that when you think you see a ghost, it might actually be an optical illusion. Right? To, take what are often seen as feminized and, racialized ways of over belief or non rational seeing and start to turn them into something more rational.
Peter McDonald:And so when I think about playfulness in the nineteenth century, I think about things like those toys, things like science kits, like chemistry sets, and the kinds of say combinatorial playfulness in those chemistry sets. What what do you keep you put together? What new discoveries can you make when you start combining an acid and a base or what have you? I talk about that very briefly in the book, but I think there's a lot more room for that kind of exploration across all sorts of historical moments. And when we start really digging into the qualities that make playfulness different from one kind of playfulness different from another, we get a whole new set of analytic tools that I really hope that like other grad students take up this, this challenge and like explore it in new ways.
Peter McDonald:I have a slightly different answer for what playfulness in our contemporary moment might look like. What the shift from the nineties to now might do. This period that I'm looking at is a moment where the canon of design principles around play and playfulness really gets formulated and set down. So that when we get into the nineties, we have ways of designing things that we were just trying to experiment with before. And now they can start being put to other uses.
Peter McDonald:Play and playfulness can be one element in a larger recipe where somebody might be trying to design an existential game or trying to make a blockbuster spectacle. Those pieces that were kind of hard won through experimental art and academic discourse and social practice are now put into a more means end relationship. They just become one one tool among others.
Tiffany Funk:A lot of what I was thinking of, especially when you're talking about that Victorian era of optical toys, which by the way, are my tattoos that I have. That was a lot of my master's work that I did with Barbara Stafford because she was very interested in teaching medicalized ways of thinking, even how like space pictures are in a way a form of play because they are edited so that we can see color because there's no color in like the James Webb telescope. Aside from all that, I'm thinking about these sets that you're talking about, like these chemistry sets, STEM education toys. It's like the thing that you get for, like, every Christmas for your kids. But what I really loved in the book, and I think this is even in just in the introduction, you talk about mousetrap.
Tiffany Funk:I remember mousetrap as a kid. I don't think I once played the game. I think we all set it up and did the Rube Goldberg thing and then played with the parts and never even looked at what the actual rules were. And I had so many games like that. And my kids have so many STEM games like that where they just tear the thing apart and do different things with it.
Tiffany Funk:It feels like the mode is the same regardless of the time period, which takes me through to COVID when I'm teaching a course with my students and I ask them what their favorite games are. And a student comes in and says, oh, I played GTA Online. I don't play the game. My friends and I, we detail cars together and talk. It's his favorite game because that's what they do.
Tiffany Funk:It just hit me the way that these open ended games, the Brecht, the Yoko Ono, they give us these tools, and then we answer the questions that are asked of us in a playful way. It gives us the opportunity. And I think that that's so nicely said in the text, like in different ways, you know, giving us examples, especially with the Yoko Ono piece Hide and Seek.
Chaz Evans:Do you feel comfortable calling Mouse Trap a STEM game sort of historically, retroactively, Peter?
Peter McDonald:Well, yes and. For folks who aren't in game studies, there might be some, like, disciplinary boundaries that might seem weird. One of those is that play studies and game studies are kind of different fields. Game studies get some of its prestige because video games in particular are such a massive cultural form today. The study of toys is a really niche kind of field that very rarely crosses over into game studies.
Peter McDonald:There's a few people doing really excellent work in this. Seth Giddings just had a book called Toy Theory that came out. But by and large, toys kind of get left by the wayside. And place studies itself tends to happen in anthropology departments, in education departments, where we're looking at young children in particular, folklore studies. But those pieces don't always cross into game studies.
Peter McDonald:And I think we miss a huge swath of what we're interested in when we don't make those interdisciplinary connections. So for me, like going back to Mousetrap, going back to these toys was really important, not only to think of them as toys, but to think of the way that they kind of cross that boundary, right? That Mousetrap is a game, but we use it as a toy. The way that we play with it has a kind of like cultural history that's separate from the cultural history of the game itself.
Chaz Evans:To the perspective of the impossible reversal, is the book a play studies book, a game studies book, or the rare book that manages to do both?
Peter McDonald:I mean, I hope that and more. I mean, I'm probably dangerously ambitious in this book.
Chaz Evans:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I had several notes in the margins that said something to that extent. Why is Peter making a scope this big?
Chaz Evans:And showing how there are these unique forms of playfulness that run through the military, the commercial sector, and the most fringe and avant garde of artists. And these ideas are connecting some areas of life that are often not associated with each other. And that's obviously very exciting and also very difficult to do. But while I was sort of marveling at that wideness of scope, it's still a narrower scope than what you were saying earlier, which is this broad idea that play is a historical. That's just like play is this idea that somehow is constant and theorizable for all of time.
Chaz Evans:That is so broad that it's often a conversation ender, right? Like, it's so broad you don't know where to start. So even as ambitious and as wide as your doors are open with this project, it still gives us more of a foothold on a larger conversation because at least it brings it down to an origin point in the twentieth century, right? What made you want to bite off that much? And the subtitle of the book is A History of How We Play.
Chaz Evans:Would you say that this book is a history of modern playfulness?
Tiffany Funk:Oh, can I give a little bit of flavor to that as well with just when when you're saying the ambitiousness of it, the thing that I thought right away was the you're you're either yes ending or but ending Fredrik Jamieson? And I loved that little bit because that is, like, the crux of being like, play is not possible in late stage capitalism.
Peter McDonald:Yeah.
Tiffany Funk:Done. Mark Fisher, end of history.
Chaz Evans:Sorry, everybody. No more play.
Tiffany Funk:And then you quickly do the, yeah, but.
Peter McDonald:Yeah. So part of the ambitiousness of a feeling like I needed to jump between all these different sites was that a lot of them do get taken up in their individuality. That there's rich discourses in these different disciplines that are talking about play, but not kind of cross contaminating, and that those limitations end up reproducing, I think, the same kind of arguments over and over again. But then, like, how do you actually do the work of bringing them together was a huge question for for me. Like how I didn't think that trying to necessarily like wrestle with the theoretical implications of each discipline and saying well you should probably look at each other was going to be like a productive way of actually creating that discipline.
Peter McDonald:There's, one of my advisors used to make fun of, a rhetorical gesture that academics do that I also do sometimes, which is like the call for more research. Right? Like, now that we know this is the thing that is true, somebody else should go and do the work. And I'm always I've learned that, like, I have to be the one to do the work. Like, nobody else is gonna do it.
Peter McDonald:It's gonna follow my call. And so this was just, a a challenge for myself to start doing the work of thinking across these different sites. And it's a very I wanna be, humble with this. I I hope that it there's moments in here that show the humbleness of, like, this is not meant to be exhaustive. The I could be wrong about a lot of like what these actual sort of aesthetic principles are because I'm, you know, starting from very individual works and trying to see what they have to tell us.
Peter McDonald:And this is my way of ultimately grounding this and not being too grandiose. It's like each aesthetic category really starts from a close looking at one Fluxus game and try to build out from there. And then the same goes for some of the other toys that I look at or some of the video games that I look at. In each case, I'm really trying to get deep into a single object in order to see what it has to tell us about how people play. And so that way of approaching things is ultimately like not going to tell us for sure that this is characteristic of all of the 1960s or whatnot.
Peter McDonald:But I think it starts to make those bridges between disciplinary positions in the sort of details, in the nitty gritty, by following where the archives lead sometimes, where the feelings lead.
Chaz Evans:I definitely recognize that. It's especially noticeable when you're talking about Benjamin Patterson's game, three capacities and one inhibition. You go so far as to say, it's like, this is a very complicated game, and it's the one I understand the least in the whole book. I think that's almost a direct quote. The fact that you're working in your own perspective makes it so we can try to figure that game out with you because your own sort of subject position is in the scholarship.
Chaz Evans:And then the fact that it's grounded on one person's perspective and you haven't tried to say like, This is what this game means, is then what allows you to do something as audacious as connect Benjamin Patterson to SimCity?
Peter McDonald:Well, let me start with reflecting on, how I actually did come to understand these games. It's not just an abstract process. This is a point that I try and make throughout that you can't just read the instructions for these games or look at the pieces of them and understand them, through that. You have to play them. And doing that with these pieces sometimes is hard because they are in an institutional archive or they no longer exist or it's just hard to get people to actually sit down and play them with you.
Peter McDonald:But again and again, that was my starting point. So I'm just on my way to Chicago for a conference today and I just finished building a replica of, or at least my version of, one of the pieces I write about in here, Shikoko Kubota's Video Chess, And I'm hoping to, you know, learn more about it by playing with some of the folks at the conference and keep thinking about these pieces. And so the the sense that, you know, that I don't totally know is true because it's coming from like, you have to play them with other people. You have to see what people do and how they make sense of them. You feel, you have to pay attention phenomenologically to what's going on in your body, what's going on in your strategies, what's going on in your social relationship to the person across the table from you.
Peter McDonald:But then there you also have to, you know, I'm not trained as an art historian, but there's, like, deep archival traces here that you really need to tease out to understand what was going on. So with Benjamin Patterson's three games or a game three capacities and one inhibition, that was a real source of, trying to understand the game was going and looking at copies at MoMA, seeing some of Benjamin Patterson's notes that were around the time of of the game, looking at what he was reading, like his his library notes and things like that, and try to reconstruct the situation in which the game would have made sense. And that's how I ended up getting to SimCity is that and this is still quite a speculative argument, I think. There's no concrete proof that Patterson read this essay that I claim he he read, by John Rawls about a theory of justice. But circumstantially, I'm pretty convinced that this is like that this game is almost a satirical work about Rawls' essay.
Peter McDonald:And that that's really crucial to understanding the way that we're supposed to play it, that it becomes this thought experiment on founding a society, founding a collective. And it does that through a number of capacities as the title says for stepping back and reflecting on, what makes a connection to another person, what makes it just, what would make it violent. SimCity does something totally different or uses different mechanisms, but I think it ultimately is like working in the same set of feelings. That's sort of the short version of like how I make that connection is like looking not at the specific genealogies of saying SimCity folks definitely knew Ben Patterson, because they certainly didn't, but trying to figure out why people are making games to create these feelings. What is the logic behind that?
Peter McDonald:And where does that logic go and show up in new places?
Chaz Evans:So even if someone really wants to press hard and contradict the idea that Rawls and Patterson had anything to do with each other, you'd say, well, even if they don't, putting them side by side and looking at the similarities helps us understand playfulness anyway.
Peter McDonald:Yeah. In a certain sense, if they didn't know each other, the coincidence of their making this kind of playfulness central to both of these projects is almost more interesting.
Tiffany Funk:I'd love that if you put this chapter directly in in conversation with the Yoko Ono chapter, chapter three, what's so nice about it is that you have the looking inward, the developmental side, and then a sudden outward, like building your world, like there are these stages and they don't work directly in that way necessarily, but they could be thought of in that way. I see these specifically as very fundamental modes of play that kids and teenagers use. Cause like SimCity 2,000 was so important to me at that time, but when I was younger and then like the idea of hide and seek and everything, you know. The beginning part of your book, could you see it as a parent's guide to raising children to play?
Peter McDonald:Give me a second to think through that.
Tiffany Funk:I mean, I I was thinking of that mode the whole time, but it's because I've been having these particularly long discussions recently with my husband about my kids playing too many video games and all the sort of doom and gloom that's come out about it. And the way in which you handle these first few chapters is just about like, oh, modes of play. The fact that it's like video game versus toy, we're gonna knock down those boundaries, like as you were saying before, disciplinary boundaries between talking about games and play seem so arbitrary when we're talking about certain subjects. The fact that, like I said before, GTA Online can be used as a place to hang out with your friends. Minecraft is building stuff, but it's nothing like Mario.
Tiffany Funk:And it's nothing like Mario, like level building. Like there's there's different sort of modes going on that kind of think more about developmentally what we're doing with our time and what sort of strictures are in our lives, and whether or not it kind of counts sometimes as even like activism within certain boundaries.
Peter McDonald:So one of the people that I, have written a little bit about and and continually sort of drawn to is the play theorist Brian Sutton Smith, who, has different phases of his career. And one of the earlier ones is he he worked in a psychology department, and he wrote a book called How to Play with Your Children and When Not To. It's a kind of pop psychology book about the different age phases of play and what each different kind of, developmental category speaks to in terms of game rules and mechanics and fun and and things like that. It's a it's a fascinating read. I think there's a lot there for game scholars to think about how childhood is framed through play in that book.
Peter McDonald:But later in his career, he sort of takes it back and says that way of thinking about play, that developmental logic, takes the play out of play. It makes play into an ends for something else, and it makes children, like, not fully developed adult like, they're going to be adults and they're not there yet. And when we stop looking at it like that and start seeing play as, already everything it needs to be, we start noticing lots of things about play that we otherwise might not. It's violent aspects, it's gross humor, it's like, all these things that are much more morally ambiguous or ethically ambiguous. And for me that is the territory I really wanted to be in in this book.
Peter McDonald:It's like there's a lot of writing that makes play into something inherently good, Right? Makes play into a politically progressive thing, that it subverts systems, that it is joyful, that it resists capital exploitation. And I didn't want to kind of move into that territory, especially working with an avant garde group like Fluxus. Like it's very easy to see Fluxus as fundamentally resistant, when I think that they're much more ambiguous. They themselves are interested in commodification.
Peter McDonald:They're interested in technologies and graphic design. They, have mixed politics. They have sometimes really, like, bold manifestos, and sometimes they don't show up to, like, a civil rights movement, and and it's, kinda pisses off some of their members. My hope is that I can explore some of the power dynamics of play. Some of the things that might make it rich for teenagers to take part in for, to like help them think through problems in their life, help them challenge authority maybe, but also that it has like gross aspects and dangerous aspects and that like we have to hold on to both of those simultaneously.
Peter McDonald:This is where, like, going back to the question earlier about, kinda an educational toy, I think this is one of the places where when we talk about educational toys or games, again, we wanna kinda scrape away all the stuff that might make them, you know, the dirty arcade version of video games, the gum on the underside of the table version of video games. And for me, I really wanna hold on to all of that, that stuff. That's part of what makes the texture of the aesthetic appealing to me.
Tiffany Funk:I love that so much because it glides over the fact that, like, kids can be fair little monsters. And it reminds me and I have the text sitting right here because I I teach it all the time. It's the the Heisinger book where the classic cover is children's games by Peter Brechtl. And that one, it goes back to like, they're playing games where they're like, they're whacking a kid against a piece of wood. Like, it's horseplay or like they're watching another kid peeing.
Tiffany Funk:And the thing is, like, when you take care of kids, that's part of the thing where everything is toilet humor. At a certain point, it's just that's all it is. And then you have to laugh because it is funny. It's like the fart in the elevator in your book where actually, it's funny. It made me think of Marjorie Allen.
Tiffany Funk:She was the proponent of adventure playgrounds after World War II. The whole idea of just letting kids play with hammers and sticks, because if we prescribe them to certain things too much, it can even be kind of dangerous because it doesn't allow them that freedom that they actually need, which, I mean, there's a lot of differing ideas about it, but it does give rise to more interesting playgrounds at the very least.
Peter McDonald:Yeah. And when this sort of goes back to the way that if we define play as universal and in broadly formal terms, often what we're getting rid of is some of that dangerous side of play that we're treating, for instance, play as inherently free. When that is removing a whole bunch of experiences of play that I think we still should be paying attention to where people feel like they're being forced into something that they're, they don't even know if they're able to make a decision. Again, going back to Brian Sutton Smith, he has another great example of initiation rituals, where when he was going to boarding school, kids would dip a pool noodle in the latrine and then act like they were knighting each other with it. Is that play?
Peter McDonald:Like, the uncertainty of it to me is the most fascinating part. Like, it it has all these things that you we might wanna exclude if we want play to be this pristine category that's inherently educational and and resistant, but it's always gonna be haunting it, always gonna be there in the background.
Tiffany Funk:I mean, it's in sports and everything too. I've been getting back into hockey and you go into it and it's like the amount of like, okay, we're just gonna let them fight for a while. Now we're gonna step in.
Chaz Evans:I knew that you could find more sordid and grungy examples of the dark side of play more so than a dirty arcade cabinet. So I mean, we can go so much more dubious than that. And when you mentioned, yeah, sort of instrumentalizing playfulness as an inherent virtue killing play, as like you said, with that sort of turnaround, Branson Smith, there reminded me of one question I wanted to ask you, which is sort of a devil's advocate question for the potential reader of your book about theorizing and explaining play and how playful that could be in the same way that people may complain that, oh, you know, artworks die, once you put them in the museum. What is the effect of theorizing, categorizing, and explaining play on playfulness?
Peter McDonald:Yeah. And, you know, a slightly different version of your question that I've also thought about is when you write about play, should you be playful? Like, do you have to capture it in in the writing? I think my answer is that especially when we go beyond play to playfulness, and so again, I can take this as an opportunity to just define for me what that means. Right?
Peter McDonald:So I make an argument in the book that play is really hard to categorize, and we can't give a general definition of it. And so instead, we need to rely on our historical sensibilities. Right? Like our way of recognizing play in the moment, in our community, situated in this particular context. And that's what I'm calling playfulness.
Peter McDonald:Right? Playfulness is not a character trait, not something that you can you're either a playful person or you're not, but rather the ways that we look at a playground and we're like, yeah, that's that looks like a fun place to play. Or we see our dog a dog running at us and we know that they're not going to bite us because they're playful. So we have these unconscious set of criteria that we use that ever all of us use at any given time to figure out if something is playful or not. And that is my way of thinking about what we're doing when we analyze play.
Peter McDonald:That thinking is itself often a way of being playful. When I jump between all these different things, I try and do this work that I'm not sure it's going to land, When I make a weird pun that is just like under the surface, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. There's a level of play there that doesn't have to be explicit. Play itself is never just playful in that festive, joyful, exuberant way. Right?
Peter McDonald:Play can be hidden. It can be stoic. It can be repetitive. And so who's to say that, like, the most serious prose isn't actually playful? Right?
Peter McDonald:Isn't actually the result of some game that's going on under the surface. And I try and at moments, like, queue the reader for that in the book. It might, if we were being entirely serious, undermine something. But the seriousness is not itself the mark of a lack of play.
Chaz Evans:Not all playfulness needs to be, trumpets and funny hats. Like, there's there's deadpan as well.
Peter McDonald:There's deadpan. There's one of my favorite categories here is with Yoko Ono. Yoko Ono's work that I talk about at length is called Hide and Seek Peace, and it reads, hide until everybody goes home, hide until everybody forgets you, hide until everybody dies. Right? Like, how do you play that in a way that's joyful?
Peter McDonald:How do you play that when everybody's dying around you without a deep sense of loss and seriousness? And I still think that Yoko Ono thinks this is a playful work, and so that's the real challenge, how to think that.
Tiffany Funk:I I love that chapter so much. So Hannah Higgins led a seminar last semester with a bunch of the graduate students where they all did a bunch of the performed a bunch of the Yoko Ono works. I don't know if anybody did hide and seek. I don't I don't think anybody did. Again, it goes to that feral place of like well, at least when I read it, I remember playing hide and seek as a kid.
Tiffany Funk:And there's always the kids who just like go home. They don't tell you. They just go. And then I remember very well a very traumatizing memory of everybody stopping playing and I didn't know. And I was there alone.
Tiffany Funk:And when you're a kid, you think everybody is gone. You think it's the apocalypse. You think everybody's dead, that you're the only one left out in the dark by yourself. And it's the way that that is it. It brings you into a place of like just mental play, like where you're constructing different types of narratives for yourself in a sort of lie in the witch in the wardrobe sort of way that goes back and forth between being funny.
Tiffany Funk:The moment, like when you're playing with the little kid in the closet and you say, where are you? Oh, I don't see you here. And the kid's laughing. But on the other flip side, they can suddenly get very scared because it's playing with that sort of perceptual leap Because it it is still playful when it's frightening. Just like a survival horror video game is fun even though sometimes you have to take off your headphones and go for a walk around the block because it's too much.
Tiffany Funk:I like that. I like the playing along those lines and the not being one or the other.
Peter McDonald:I think that's right. And this example in particular gets at something that's important about this book, which is while I argue that these are new styles of playfulness in the 1950s and 60s, they're not coming out of nowhere. The argument isn't these were invented for the first time, right, in Yoko Ono's work. Yoko Ono is picking up on something that children have experienced and played with for a long time. But by picking up on that and formalizing it and sharing it in a public venue and being part of a larger community of people who are picking up on that, it becomes something that's recognizable and that becomes institutionalized in a new way.
Peter McDonald:And that's sort of the core of the argument that these things that we have ignored in playfulness, these elements of danger, of quiet, of banality, suddenly take on a new life in this moment and get used for new ends. That that to me is the really fascinating part about what's changing in The US's relationship to play at that moment.
Chaz Evans:I wanted to have a chance to just mark the subject of chess specifically. You mentioned video chess and how you've recreated it, that's the subject of, one of the later chapters. But, there's a lot for the chess interested reader, I think, in the whole book between an introduction overview of this images of chess exhibition. There's a video chess towards the end. We got Yoko Ono's White Chess Play It by Trust in general.
Chaz Evans:And also, I mean, fact that chess as a game, of course, it is very present in your historical scope that we talked about earlier. It does not originate in this historical scope, and that's an important made in the introduction as well. I don't know how many times I've been in class and we're having that, you know, that age old, what is a game question, and some student is going to say, well, what about chess? And we're going to compare that to, you know, basically the other objects in the discussion are contemporary video games. Showing that the chess originates outside of this era of designed play is a refreshingly easy way to say, no, chess is not our best immediate point of comparison when we're trying to understand the boundaries of contemporary video games.
Chaz Evans:So I want to state that, that's a very useful tool that you don't even have to read past the introduction to get. But I wanted to give you the opportunity to think about the whole project through the lens of that one sort of enduring games topic and and what the chess interested reader can expect.
Peter McDonald:Yeah. I think that that's a nice point to bring up. And the way you bring it up is is exactly right, that it's in there partly because chess is such a standard for what a game is, right? When people try and define a general category of game, chess is inevitably one of the things they turn to. And the Fluxus relationship to chess is such an interesting transformation of that because all almost all of the Fluxus versions of chess are still playable as chess to some degree.
Peter McDonald:Not all of them. There's some that, like, make a point of not being playable. But in Yoko Ono's white chess set or Takako Saito's weight chess or smell chess, there's still a version of chess you can play. The way that they subvert chess is through all the elements that are make chess playful, right? That they are taking up the sights and sounds, the social element, our memories, all these elements that a classic definition of game would wanna exclude to really focus on the rules and the the board and all these, like, abstract elements.
Peter McDonald:And then that abstraction is not only key to game studies, but a much broader kind of modernist, philosophical commitment that also picks up chess as its primary example. And so chess has this, like, incredibly rich symbolic weight to it that I think the Fluxus folks just take apart in the most beautiful way. Thank you so much. This is a blast to talk about with y'all.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, The A History of How We Play by Peter D. MacDonald is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.