“There is more to the world to playfully take over now,” writes Sicart in his final chapter (100). “There’s the world, the machines, and the way the machines make the world exist.” Out of all the passages in the reading for this week, this one was my favorite. At first I took ‘the world’ to be the world in a game. This could be our world, the real, physical world, or it could be a world inside of a video game: Rapture, the Pong Arena, and (soon) Alola Certainly, making these worlds exist can be seen as a form of play. Sicart hints that software development itself can be playful, and designing the worlds, creating stories behind them, and cooking up conflict is a classic playful activity.
But I really enjoyed the second meaning of the passage, which arises when you take ‘the world’ to mean, in all uses, our world. The real world. There is something to be said about the way the machines make our world exist. Or to be more specific, the way our world exists because of machines. We see the world much differently now than we would have twenty, ten, even five years ago. Machines have forever altered our way of life, and they will continue to do so. Sicart mentions that machines have already encouraged us to view the world as a collection of systems and subsystems, because that is how computers view the world. It goes beyond that.
Computers dictate how we view the world around us. They gather information, interpret it, and present it to us. They allow us to communicate with each other. Sometimes, they even communicate with us. We even have languages for interfacing with different types of computers. Text overflow at the bottom of a screen tells us to flow. We can usually tell what items in an application are able to be interacted with and how simply by looking at them.
I love when people play with these expectations. Take Clickhole, for example. It’s The Onion’s sister news site meant to parody the likes of Buzzfeed and other clickbait-fueled web sites. While it does an excellent job of this, it takes the playfulness to the next level with certain segments. A personal favorite was the sleepover, a series of Facebook posts where one clever Clickholer communicated with the site’s entire userbase. Clickhole asked users what they were bringing, what time they were going to bed, and what movies they should watch during the sleepover.
While it was essentially just a massively multiplayer text-based role play scenario, Clickhole employed many of the features of Facebook while simultaneously playing with the expectations of how a company or news source (even a fake one) interacts with the public. This sort of expectation would not have been possible of the context hadn’t already existed, if we hadn’t already witnessed countless news sources ask mundane questions via their social media platforms (“Who are you most looking forward to hearing in this Thursday’s debate?” “What would YOU have named Boaty McBoatface if it were up to you?” “Share and be sure to tell us your favorite moment from today’s show!”).
I just think it’s interesting, how many new expectations we can subvert now that computers exist.