Miguel Sicart's Playthings (https://miguelsicart.net/playthings/)
QuotePlaything is a way of describing what happens to things when we play with them.
Similar to Bogost's stance on
playgrounds, which are the result of defining boundaries & playing them.
QuoteThe paper is dense and academic
RIP. I tried reading it but it really was
dense and academic. (It's linked, but costs $$$. I forget how I got access.)
Anyway, let's see Sicart's casual summary. I think I'm mostly here because of the word
Plaything.QuoteFor example, when Dear Esther was released, there was a massive discussion online regarding whether it was a "game" or not. That discussion has nothing to do with the nature of "games", but with what we want to culturally, socially, and economically accept as a "game".
QuoteThe tl;dr of this tl;dr is: use playthings to name the things we play with, and know that using "games" or "toys" implies using cultural, economic, and social concepts, tied to a specific culture and moment in time.
This is interesting. Basically we have the proposal to abandon 'game' as a technical term because it is a social one -- co-opted by the masses, it can never be defined because it has too much cultural capital. This seems like a slippery slope, but I suppose all language is.
All words are cultural, social, but it depends who
cares about them most. Is the goal to set up a walled garden and put Playthings in the middle, Only For Use By Designers? What if players start to seek out playthings and the term starts to become culturally relevant?