Playful Materialities

Abstract

HANNS CHRISTIAN SCHMIDT/RAVEN RUSCHSince the beginnings of human civilization, game culture and material culture have been closely linked. In the act of free play-paidia, according to Caillois 1 -children, as well as adults, transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Analog forms of rule-based play-ludus 2 -would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. Digital play is no less suffused with materiality: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and attempts of dematerialization and rematerialization. Of course, these contentious processes do not only affect digital games. For over three decades, they have marked the marginalization of industrial methods and modes in favor of digital ones, in production and consumption, in work and culture-via buzzwords and practices such as 'ubiquitous computing,' 'augmented reality,' and more recently, to an increasing extent, 'metaverse.' 3 1 Caillois, Roger: Man, Play and Games, Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2001 (*1958), p. 13. 2 Ibid. 3 All three concepts originated in the pioneering days of digital networking, around 1990, which also saw the emergence of the World Wide Web. Mark Weiser coined the term 'ubiquitous computing' that today we associate with the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) already in 1988. Four years later, Thomas Caudell, for the first time, described the fusion of the real and the virtual as 'augmented reality.' In the same year, 1992, Neal Stephenson published his novel Snow Crash, in which he evoked a virtual reality variant of such a fusion as the 'metaverse.'-For 'ubiquitous computing' see Weiser,