Plumbing Game Studies – Details, episodes & analysis

Board game designer Amabel Holland joins me to discuss her recent board game The City of Six Moons. City of Six Moons isn't an ordinary game - the game is presented as an alien object, and the rules are in an unknown language. Amabel joins me to talk about what this means for games, rules, systems, communication, and knowledge itself. Along the way we also discuss one of her key design influences: the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Checkout Amabel's video essay on rules as play: https://youtu.be/VDjK1jX93yM?si=RAWLAFzETNJpw7cM

You can see Amabel's games at her company's website, Hollandspiele: https://hollandspiele.com/

You can read the New Yorker profile of her here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-personal-political-art-of-board-game-design

And you can browse the Criterion Channel's collection of Fassbinder films here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-rainer-werner-fassbinder

This episode is co-hosted by David Hall, PhD Candidate in ECL at UNC. David and I are joined by Morgan Pitelka, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and of History at UNC - Chapel Hill, joins us to discuss representations of the early modern period in Japan, video games and otherwise. Over a discussion ranging from 8th century historiography through responses to the 3/11 disaster, we chart a broad historical outline of Japanese cultural production practices as the context out of which video games emerge in the latter part of the 20th century. 

How would you feel if you had to live life over and over again? Would it be like playing Slay the Spire? Or maybe Super Mario Bros?

This episode of How to Do Things with Games begins with Mary Midgley’s 1974 question: “Why do philosophers talk about games so much?” Well, why do they (she continues)? I’m not sure, but I’m sure there’s work that needs to be done on the philosophy of games, philosophical infrastructure that can, like plumbing, help ideas flow.

I also discuss the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, the way that philosophy itself is a game, and whether or not Ludwig Wittgenstein helps or hurts us to create some philosophical plumbing:

References:

•  “The Game Game” by Mary Midgley - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3750115 
• “Philosophical Plumbing” by Mary Midgley - https://philpapers.org/archive/MIDPP.pdf 
• “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” by Richard Rorty - https://muse.jhu.edu/article/901738 
• Games: Agency as Art by Thi Ngyuen - https://objectionable.net/games-agency-as-art/ 
• “The Final Foucault” by Michel Foucault - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/019145378701200202 
• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations 

Aris Politopoulos joins me to discuss David Graeber's essay "What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?"

We also discuss Aaron Trammel's recent book Repairing Play, which you can find here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545273/repairing-play/

For more from Aris and to learn about his work at Leiden University, you can check out his appearance on my other podcast: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/23e2e876-b682-4df1-906e-77d15129dbe2/

Martin Roth, of the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, joins me to discuss Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga's 1938 study of play and culture. Martin and I discuss the way that Homo Ludens can be considered the first "game studies" book, but also all of the ways that it is more complicated and surprising than its reputation as a game studies classic attests.

Historian David Potter joins me to discuss the concept of agon, or competitive play, and how it animated everything in ancient Greek society from sports to education to politics to art. And Plato's The Republic, often considered the foundation of Western philosophy, was an attempt to end the agonistic nature of society.

Miguel Sicart, author of Playing Software, joins me for a playful, even anarchist discussion which was supposed to be about the work of Maria Lugones but ended up being about Lugones, Graeber, Almodóvar, Maradona, and much more.

You can find Miguel's work here: https://miguelsicart.net/

Thi Nguyen joins me to discuss The Grasshopper, a work which takes up Wittgenstein's challenge to define a game and does so in a very productive way. Thi and I discuss the Suitsian definition of a game, how it can redefine not just our sense of games but also the meaning of life, and what this definition of games means for our understanding of agency.

We conclude by discussing María Lugones' theory of play, which will be the subject of my next episode with Miguel Sicart.

You can find more from Thi here: https://objectionable.net/

Why do you feel anxious, according to Schopenhauer?

Excess energy!

What should you do about it?

Play a game!