Название: Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture
Автор: Miguel Sicart
Издательство: The MIT Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 205
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 13.4 MB

The play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age.

Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing with software shapes every facet of our lives. In Playing Software, Miguel Sicart delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by malefactors using play to weaponize everything from conspiracy theories to extractive capitalism. Starting from the controversial idea that software is an essential agent in the information age, Sicart considers our culture in general—and our way of thinking about and creating digital technology in particular—as a consequence of interacting with software’s agency through play.

As Sicart shows, playing shapes software agency. In turn, software shapes our agency as we adapt and relate to it through play. That play drives the creation of new cultural, social, and political forms. Sicart also reveals the role of make-believe in driving our playful engagement with the digital sphere. From there, he discusses the cybernetic theory of digital play and what we can learn from combining it with the idea that playfulness can mean pleasurable interaction with human and nonhuman agents inside the boundaries of a computational system. Finally, he critiques the instrumentalization of play as a tool wielded by platform capitalism.

First, this book argues that digital play is significantly different from analog play. Digital play is a particular relation established between human and digital artificial agency. This argument is premised on the understanding of software as agent. From this premise, I propose that our way of thinking about and creating digital technology is a consequence of relating to the agency of software. Computer programs do things, that is, they act in the world, and we humans relate to these programs in specific ways. Playing is a form of relating to the agency of software.

A second argument of this book states that by playing, we shape software agency, and our agency becomes shaped by software. To design software is to design a form of agency and the ways it will relate to artificial agency. Similarly, playing is a form of experiencing the agency of software, adapting and relating to it. In doing so, new cultural, social, and political forms emerge.

Playing software can be a form of exploring the pleasures of relating to other agents, human and computational. More specifically, playing software can be about the liberatory fun of playing with and within the rules and boundaries of computational systems, together with software agents. That pleasure, however, can also have a dark side. Playing software can also be instrumentalization of the pleasure of relating to computational agents that reduces human agency to mere input for a cybernetic system of control.