Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful (Playful Thinking)

204 Pages·2019·2.846 MB·English

by  John Sharp, David Thomas

Playful Thinking
Jesper Juul, Geoffrey Long, and William Uricchio, editors
The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, Jesper Juul,
2013
Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan, 2013
Play Matters, Miguel Sicart, 2014
Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art, John Sharp, 2015
How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, Katherine Isbister, 2016
Playing Smart: On Games, Intelligence, and Artificial Intelligence, Julian Togelius,
2018
Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise
Playful, John Sharp and David Thomas, 2019
Fun, Taste, & Games
An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and
Otherwise Playful
John Sharp and David Thomas
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Stone Serif by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed and
bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sharp, John, 1967- author. | Thomas, David (L. David), author.
Title: Fun, taste, & games : an aesthetics of the idle, unproductive, and otherwise
playful / John Sharp and David Thomas.
Other titles: Fun, taste, and games
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2019. | Series: Playful thinking |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018022651 | ISBN 9780262039352 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Games—Philosophy. | Amusements—Philosophy. | Play
(Philosophy)
Classification: LCC GV14 .S44 2019 | DDC 790.01—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022651
Contents
On Thinking Playfully
Preface
I      Finding the Fun
  1    The Search for Fun
II     Fun
  2    Reclaiming Fun
  3    The Problem with Fun
  4    Fun in the Age of Consumerism
  5    The Aesthetic of Meaningful Choice
  6    Electric Kool-Aid Playground
III    Taste
  7    Peeling Back the Layers of Taste
  8    Monopoly, Taste, and Games
  9    Duchamp + Chess
10    The Curious Case of Myst
11    We the Gamers
IV    Games
12    Fun in Games
13    Coming to Terms with Basketball
14    Making Friends in a Robot Playground
15    Go East (or West or North or South)
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Figure 0.1
Figure 1.1
Figure 2.1
Figure 7.1
Figure 12.1
On Thinking Playfully
Many people (we series editors included) find video games
exhilarating, but it can be just as interesting to ponder why that is so.
What do video games do? What can they be used for? How do they
work? How do they relate to the rest of the world? Why is play both
so important and so powerful?
Playful Thinking is a series of short, readable, and argumentative
books that share some playfulness and excitement with the games
that they are about. Each book in the series is small enough to fit in
a backpack or coat pocket, and combines depth with readability for
any reader interested in playing more thoughtfully or thinking more
playfully. This includes, but is by no means limited to, academics,
game makers, and curious players.
So, we are casting our net wide. Each book in our series provides
a blend of new insights and interesting arguments with overviews of
knowledge from game studies and other areas. You will see this
reflected not just in the range of titles in our series, but in the range
of authors creating them. Our basic assumption is simple: video
games are such a flourishing medium that any new perspective on
them is likely to show us something unseen or forgotten, including
those from such unconventional voices as artists, philosophers, or
specialists in other industries or fields of study. These books are
bridge builders, cross-pollinating both areas with new knowledge and
new ways of thinking.
At its heart, this is what Playful Thinking is all about: new ways of
thinking about games and new ways of using games to think about
the rest of the world.
Jesper Juul
Geoffrey Long
William Uricchio
Preface
The idea of fun is even more unpopular among us than the notion of beauty.
—E. H. Gombrich, Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition
Gombrich spoke the truth—fun really is an unpopular notion.
Accordingly, this book attempts to untangle the complicated
relationship between fun, taste, and games. More specifically, we
hope to reinvigorate fun as an aesthetic framework for making sense
of play and, by extension, games. In the spirit of colon-enriched
academic titles, the subtitle of this book, An Aesthetics of the Idle,
Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful, gets to the heart of the matter.
More than simply defining another aesthetics of games, we want to
confront the fact that we’re all pretty embarrassed by the idea of fun
and to reclaim it as a productive, meaningful tool for understanding
and appreciating play.
Leonard Koren’s book Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean? Ten
Definitions collects the most popular meanings assigned to the word
aesthetics: appearance, style, taste, philosophy of art, thesis or
exegesis, art, beauty, beautification, cognitive mode, and language.1
Fun, Taste, & Games is preoccupied with the fourth and ninth of
Koren’s definitions: a philosophy of art and the ways people
phenomenologically experience and understand the sensory and
emotional characteristics of an experience. In this light, we are also
concerned with Koren’s fifth definition of aesthetics, a thesis or
exegesis: “A coherent statement of opinion, belief, or attitude relating
to some of the underlying principles of art, beauty, and/or related
subjects.”2 For our purposes, let’s transpose Koren’s fifth definition to
focus on fun: a coherent statement relating to the underlying
principles of fun, taste, and games, with the focus on games as a
particularly popular form of contemporary play.
So what is fun, anyway? We return to this definition throughout the
book:
Fun describes when a person playfully engages with a situation or
object.
In this definition, play is the activity, games are the situation or
object, and fun is the experience of play. This suggests that fun,
rather than something else, might lie at the heart of our connection to
games and play. It also suggests that play and fun exist separate
from games, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
We come at fun from very different points of view. One of us, David,
a game journalist turned scholar of fun, saw the limits of not really
talking about fun in the press. He also saw fun as something
pervasive in life yet seldom discussed, let alone understood. The
other, John—an art historian by training and now a game studies
scholar, educator, and designer—saw a lack of historical and critical
discussions of fun, something he connected to the struggles in
establishing an aesthetics of play. Together, we saw an opportunity
to consider fun from two very different but complementary
approaches: we wanted to explore an aesthetics of play under the
rubric of fun.
The book is organized into four sections. It is anchored by the first,
“Finding the Fun.” It consists of a single essay that establishes a set
of conditions for experiencing fun: set-outsideness, or the
precondition necessary to experience fun; ludic forms, which create
the potential for a fun experience; and ambiguity as the enactment of
the fun experience. These three conditions build an aesthetic
framework that allows us to theorize, interrogate, and simply enjoy
play and games with a new clarity.
When it comes to locating a source of Western aesthetics, you
would be hard-pressed to find a better point of departure than