Play’s Republic

(Updated)

Tomorrow’s conversation will be about games, public policy, political discourse, and so on. One of the interesting, motivating tensions I see here returns us to Huizinga and Caillois, and has all sorts of interesting echoes: If, per Caillois, we may read a culture by reading its games, then what are we to make of that culture’s discourse about games? If, per Huizinga, games are the foundation of “civilization” (and I use that term advisedly), what does it mean when the civilization wants to legislate its games out of existence? If, per Sutton-Smith, play represents adaptive variability, what does it mean to legislate & bureaucratize the ludic impulse?

Yesterday, I found that Castronova has posted the rules for “CONVENTION: A Game of Policy Formation,” designed by Studio Cypher LLC, to be used at his Ludium conference this summer (the subject of which: “Videogames and Public Policy”). I’m posting those rules here for your consideration. Since they were already online, I assume they’ve been released to the public domain (an interesting policy decision in-and-of-itself). This is the Internet, after all, and we all share the tube.

Read the rules for Convention: A Game of Policy Formation.

Relatedly, Scienza ludus:  Thanks to Craigslist founder, Birdwatching as MMOG starts this week.

And related to our conversation of several weeks’ ago: Groups are criticizing the Army’s game-oriented recruitment campaign. Paralleling several points from this semester’s conversations, one critic asks:

“If [the popular MMORPG “America’s Army”] is virtual reality, why don’t you see people screaming for their mother while they die?”