Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society: The Ludic Century (SpringerBriefs in Education) 3031459067, 9783031459061

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SpringerBriefs in Education Fabian Arlt · Hans-Jürgen Arlt

Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society The Ludic Century

SpringerBriefs in Education

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Fabian Arlt • Hans-Jürgen Arlt

Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society The Ludic Century

Fabian Arlt University of the Arts Berlin, Germany

Hans-Jürgen Arlt University of the Arts Berlin, Germany

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Education ISBN 978-3-031-45906-1 ISBN 978-3-031-45907-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1

The Game in Real Life, Real Life in the Game: An Introduction . . 1.1 Rapid Expansion in Digital Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Questions and Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 The Aim of This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

1 2 3 5 6

2

The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Ludic Boundary Is a Boundary of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Beyond the Usual Horizon of Expectation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Prerequisites of Playing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Ludic Actions as Festivals of Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The Gaming Experience: Open to Any Drama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Variations and Close Relatives: Sport and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.1 Cognition, Emotion, Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 8 9 13 16 21 25 28 29

3

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Foundation of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 No Communication Without Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Reality of Signs, Fictionality of the Designated . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Pictures Don’t Lie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Ludic Communication Freedoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.5 Characteristics of the Message: Strategic, Factual, Entertaining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Development and Differentiation of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Evolution of Distribution Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Ludic Gala Thanks to Digital Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 The Great Advantage of Playing in Digital Times . . . . . . . 3.4 On the Development Dynamics of Video Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 A Computer on Computer Games. Interview with ChatGPT . . . . .

31 32 34 36 37 38 38 40 42 45 47 50 54 v

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Contents

Glossary of Types of Video Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67 78

4

Instrumentalizations of the Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 4.1 Gambling and Competitive Gaming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 4.1.1 Professionalization of E-Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 4.1.2 Commercialization of Competitive Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.2 Colonization: It’s the Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.2.1 Reach and Appeal Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4.3 Serious Games and Workification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 4.3.1 Workification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 4.4 Gamification: A (Too) Great Promise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

5

The Ludic Culture of Modern Life: The Ludic Century . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Freedom, Equality, and Decidability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 The Claim to Shape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.2 Decision-Making Profiled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Voluntary, the Unexpected, and the Non-committal of the Committed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 Voluntary Temporary Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Dealing with the Unexpected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Non-binding Nature of the Binding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.4 Bindings and Unbindings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Pretty Best Friends: The Digital and the Ludic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Fake News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Transformation Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 Affective Non-commitment of Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.4 Network Character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Unbroken Power of the Factual: Gaming Needs Free Time . . . . . . 5.4.1 Autonomy, Not Autarky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105 105 106 108 108 109 109 111 112 113 115 115 116 116 118 121 123

Chapter 1

The Game in Real Life, Real Life in the Game: An Introduction

Abstract Games have gained a new, previously unattained social significance in the twenty-first century. What was noticeable about digitization was that work can now be done anywhere and at any time. But it was soon noticed that thanks to the computer, it is also possible to play anywhere and at any time. First, digitization expands the possibilities of playing qualitatively and quantitatively to such an extraordinary extent that games have become an important economic factor. Secondly, practices of ludic action are being integrated into the normal world of action and experience more than ever before in order to improve relationships with members, customers, clients, audiences. Thirdly, everyday social life itself, forced by digitalization, is taking on ludic characteristics in its normal course. Describing and analyzing these three developments is the subject of this book. Keywords Digitization · Game studies · Game theory · Learning potential · Ludic culture In March 2022, during the Russian war against Ukraine, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense tweeted a YouTube video titled “Destruction of 4 K-52 helicopters of the Russian Air Force near Kherson”, proclaiming: “We are proud of our Ukrainian soldiers”. The tweet made its way into journalistic reporting on the war, until it turned out that the video was a fake, and the sequence was from the video game “Arma 3”. At the end of 2022, the Czech developer studio Bohemia Interactive appealed to the public with “Stop Using Our Game to Spread Fake News!” and warned of . . . the recent circulation of videos which were originally taken from their game Arma 3, and falsely used as footage from real-life conflicts, mainly from the current war in Ukraine. These user-made videos have the potential to go viral, and are massively shared by social media users; sometimes even by various mainstream media or official government institutions worldwide. (Bohemia, 2022)

It is a dramatic, but only one example of countless, how games in the twenty-first century have gained a new, previously unattained societal significance. This has been possible through the worldwide access to computers, of course, within a broader framework of the digitization of life. The first thing one notices about © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Arlt, H.-J. Arlt, Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8_1

1

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1 The Game in Real Life, Real Life in the Game: An Introduction

digitization is that work can now be done anywhere and at any time: production, service, trade, and consumption are possible day and night at any location thanks to the computer. The second is that thanks to the computer, games can also be played anywhere and at any time. The computer is not only a ubiquitous toy, but also a ready player at all times. The connection of the game with the basic technology of the twenty-first century—and the coupling of this technology to the game, which has an avantgarde function for digitization—is one of the most exciting constellations of the ludic century. Digital technology has given games a new relevance. The rise of computers has paralleled the resurgence of games in our culture. This is no accident. Games like Chess, Go, and Parcheesi are much like digital computers, machines for creating and storing numerical states. In this sense, computers didn’t create games; games created computers. (Zimmerman, 2015)

With digitization, the ancient dispute about the harmfulness or usefulness of playing is revived and reaches the next level. There is growing recognition of video games— not by all, but also not only by outsiders—as a cultural asset. They can be found in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Melbourne Australian Centre for Moving Image, the Huis Ten Bosch Game Museum in Nagasaki, the Berlin Computer Game Museum.

1.1

Rapid Expansion in Digital Times

In scientific research and teaching, digitization has led to a rapid expansion of empirical and theoretical engagement with the game. The history of science of the game is no exception: it spans the known three levels that reflection processes tend to take, with these levels not replacing each other, but adding to each other. On the first level, practitioners generalize their experiences, thus enabling an exchange of experiences that builds general knowledge in the respective field. The second level is characterized by already established individual sciences taking up the subject. For the game, these are primarily pedagogy and philosophy: pedagogy, because children and games are inseparable topics; philosophy, because the combination of extraordinariness and self-evidence that the game represents challenges every interpretation and explanation of human (co-)existence. “In fact, it seems that almost every well-known philosopher has theorized on play.” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2019, p. 41) Since the digital career leap of the game, it would almost be easier to list the scientific subjects that do not address the game in some way. Two different approaches can be distinguished. One approach uses selected phenomena of the game to illuminate its research subject. A typical example is economics. It refers to the fact that games regularly create decision-making situations, the outcome of which depends on several participants who decide independently of each other. Analyzing market events in this game-theoretical way and developing corresponding

1.2

Questions and Problems

3

calculation models has been common since the 1940s. Since politics is perceived as a process of checks and balances, science also investigates “power games”. The other approach attempts—and thus we are on the way to the third level—to trace the inherent logic of the game. To this day, the two milestones on this third level are the theories of Johan Huizinga (1998/1938) and Roger Callois (2001/1958), because they not only explain defining features but also establish the game in an original meaning for cultural studies or anthropology. Since then, further theoretical approaches have been developed, which, however, have not yet been able to reach the prominence of these two concepts from the mid-twentieth century. Huizinga was a cultural historian; Callois a sociologist and philosopher. Under the titles Game Studies and Ludology, game research is now being established and institutionalized in universities. The disparity of research questions and methods has not decreased, but expanded. The openness of the subject, which tends towards arbitrariness, is also reflected in demands such as: “Any student who is serious about gaining deeper expertise and understanding in the field of game needs to play a wide range of games.” (Mäyrä, 2008, p. 165) Can successful dentistry only be studied by those who constantly have toothaches?

1.2

Questions and Problems

We do not consider the problems of Game Studies to concentrate and consolidate as a deficit of the researchers, but see them as rooted in the research subject itself, in its infinite variations and the different perspectives that can be chosen. Interdisciplinarity seems to be the only option in the case of Game Studies, neither a temporary deficiency due to the initial stage nor a special virtue to be particularly praised. The research possibilities have three main directions, each of which differentiates into many questions and problems. The main directions can be characterized as follows: (a) Questions about the effects of playing on the participants and on society The list of suspected negative consequences of playing, which also receives scientific attention, is very long. It ranges from the risk of isolation and loss of reality to disease patterns of addiction such as digestive and circulatory problems, headaches and sleep disorders to deformations of brain structure. To determine effects of Internet gaming on brain structure, gaming-naive subjects were randomly assigned to 6 weeks of daily Internet gaming (training group) or a non-gaming condition (training control group). At study inclusion, excessive Internet gamers demonstrated lower right orbitofrontal gray matter volume compared with Internet gaming-naive subjects. Within the Internet gamers, a lower gray matter volume in this region was associated with higher online video gaming addiction severity. Longitudinal analysis revealed initial evidence that left orbitofrontal gray matter volume decreased during the training period in the training group as well as in the group of excessive gamers. Together, the present findings suggest an important role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the development of Internet addiction with a direct association between excessive engagement in online gaming and structural deficits in this brain region. (Zhou et al., 2017)

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The Game in Real Life, Real Life in the Game: An Introduction

The problem of gambling addiction moves into the center of everyday communication with the expansion of video games. Young people, sustained by the pizza delivery service, who play at game consoles day and night, have become a symbol of new gaming habits. On the other hand, there is a catalog of positive effects, which of course begins with the learning potential of playing. Cooperation training, development of strategic competencies and visionary future scenarios are mentioned among others. An overwhelming number of scientific and programmatic texts suggest that play is a source of intellectual, social, and economic evolution. Eric Zimmerman correctly suggested games ‘as models for learning and action in the real world’, claiming that game design concepts exactly represent the ‘new set of cognitive, creative, and social skills’ that support problem-solving in various future fields, but that are not yet part of traditional education. (Kuka, 2017, p. 523; Zimmerman, 2013, p. 156)

Statements that see humans and society achieving self-realization, their “true essence,” through play are well-known and often quoted: “In a genuinely humane civilization, human existence will be play rather than toil, and man will live in dis-play rather than need.” (Marcuse, 1955, p. 188) (b) Comparisons between play and normality The complexity of the interfaces between play and normality allows for approaches that emphasize the differences as well as observations and descriptions that highlight the similarities. From these two complementary perspectives, practically no question is conceivable that cannot be posed to play and examined with different methods. Oriented towards the observation categories of physicality, psyche, sociality, mediality, materiality, any topic is possible, including, “The representation of Greek mythology in computer games using the example of Zeus” (Uttenweiler, 2018) or “Bread, games ... and latrines? On the representation of Roman urban spaces in computer games” (Rollinger, 2015). (c) The view of the games themselves Jesse Schell refers to the four basic elements that make up a game as a tetrad of story, technology, aesthetics, and mechanics. The important thing to understand about the four elements is that they are all essential. No matter what game you design, you will make important decisions about all four elements. None is more important than the others, and each one powerfully influences each of the others. (Schell, 2008, p. 55)

This tetrad was formulated for digital games, but it can be generalized because, for example, analog card and board games can also be described under these four aspects. A major advantage of this analytical approach is that it opens up the view for both perspectives: the uniqueness of the game and the developments it drives forward from within itself, as well as the respective historical and societal conditions under which it is played. In terms of both how a game demarcates itself from real life and how it is embedded in real life, story, technology, aesthetics, and mechanics give information about it.

1.3

1.3

The Aim of This Book

5

The Aim of This Book

We see three general reasons for the increased contemporary relevance of play, or as we also like to say, ludic actions: • Digitization expands the possibilities of play qualitatively and quantitatively to an extraordinary extent. • Practices of ludic actions are integrated into the normal world of action and experience more than ever before. For example, organizations from different societal areas specifically reach for ludic components to improve their relationships with their audiences, their members, customers, and clients. • Social life itself, driven by digitization, takes on ludic characteristics in its normal course. The two classic questions of how much real life can be found in play and how much play in real life gain new relevance. The so-called game theory made this problem prominent in the mid-twentieth century. The strict boundaries that particularly feudal societies, but also the working societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were striving to draw for play are dissolving. This book aims to describe and analyze these three developments. In the roughly sorted mixture of research directions mentioned above, we methodologically orient ourselves towards the system-theoretical guiding idea that every observable social object, including play, functions as both closed and open. That is, it forms a delimited object, a self, otherwise it would not be identifiable, but it exists as an identifiable object only because it is embedded in its current state in an environment: The state of a social object must be understood as a unity of the difference between object and circumstances. Or, expressed at the level of abstraction of Niklas Luhmann, “. . . a new paradigm is necessary. The difference between identity and difference serves for this” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 65). “The point from which all further investigations in systems theory must begin is therefore not identity but difference.” (p. 232) Practically speaking, this means that a game is not an autonomous action, but draws information and resources from its environment—and within its functional conditions, does “what it wants”. We are guided by this paradigm of the difference between identity and difference, but strive to avoid the system-theoretical vocabulary in favor of a more understandable, action-oriented language. In doing so, we see ourselves in line with Luhmann’s finding, “action is the elemental unit of social systems’ self-observation and self-description” (ibid., 230). In Chap. 2, we develop a general concept of the game, which gains the understanding of the game from the difference to societal normality, presents it as free dealing with the unexpected, and describes the prerequisites and the experiential qualities of playing. The unstoppable rise of video games, enabled by the computer, is the topic of Chap. 3, for a deeper understanding of which the communicative foundations of digitization are also described.

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The Game in Real Life, Real Life in the Game: An Introduction

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the wide field of instrumentalizations of the game in the everyday practices of modern societies. We categorize the ways and methods of instrumentalization under the keywords gambling and performance game, colonization, serious games, and gamification. The concluding chapter, Chap. 5, shows to what extent modern societal structures themselves have affinities to the game process and how much such analogies are reinforced by digitization: the boundaries between societal normalities and ludic practices are opening up. Overlooking the nevertheless persisting fundamental differences would be a great misunderstanding, which is promoted in the general public, but also in scientific discussion for various reasons. In contrast, we are interested in seeing and capturing the crossover effects, but at the same time working on the analytical sharpness. The wealth of modern society appears not only as an “enormous collection of commodities” (this is how Karl Marx begins his capital analysis), it also manifests itself in new, very unevenly distributed opportunities to shape one’s own life. The option to play is becoming increasingly important in life design in the context of computerization. To do justice to the contemporary diversity of the game as much as possible is the ambitious intention of this book.

References Bohemia (2022). Arma 3 footage being used as Fake News. https://www.bohemia.net/blog/arma-3footage-being-used-as-fake-news. Caillois, R. (2001/1958) Man, play, and games. : University of Illinois Press. https://voidnetwork. gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Man-Play-and-Games-by-Roger-Caillois.pdf. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J. H., & Tosca, S. P. (2019). Understanding video games. Routledge. Huizinga, J. (1998/1938). Homo Ludens. A study of the play-element in culture. Routledge. Kuka, D. (2017). Games as a source of future memory - a typology. In Clash of Realities (Ed.), Clash of realities 2015/16: On the art, technology and theory of digital games. Proceedings of the 6th and 7th conference (pp. 523–546). Bielefeld. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783839440315-036 Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford University Press. Mäyrä, F. (2008). An introduction to game studies. Games in culture. Sage Publications. Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and civilisation. A philosophical inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press. Rollinger, C. (2015). Bread, games ... and latrines? On the representation of roman urban spaces in computer games. In C. Walde & C. Stoffel (Eds.), Caesar’s salad: Reception of antiquity in the 20th and 21st century (pp. 1–45) Thersites 1. Schell, J. (2008). The art of game design. A book of lenses. Morgan Kaufmann. Uttenweiler, S. (2018). The representation of Greek mythology in computer games using the example of Zeus. Term Paper University of Leipzig. https://www.academia.edu/38926829/ The_Representation_of_Greek_Myth. Zhou, F., Montag, C., Sariyska, R., et al. (2017). Orbitofrontal gray matter deficits as marker of Internet gaming disorder: Converging evidence from a cross-sectional and prospective longitudinal design. Addiction Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/adb.12570 Zimmerman, E. (2013).Gaming literacy: Game design as a model for literacy in the twenty-first century. https://www.neliufpe.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/08.pdf. Zimmerman, E. (2015). Manifesto for a ludic century. In S. P. Walz & S. Deterding (Eds.), The gameful world. Approaches, issues, applications. MIT Press.

Chapter 2

The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected

Abstract Those who play demonstrate that more and different things are possible than the execution of the normal and necessary. This demonstration can be accused of being a loss of reality or positively attributed as the creation of new possibilities. A clearly marked boundary of meaning, the freedom and equality of the players, and the non-binding act as if as an operating mode create the typical ludic dimension of reality. Since the game is constituted from the difference to social normality, which is dominated by the expected, the meaning of the game is to be found in dealing with the unexpected, both with the threats and the allure of the unexpected. From this, the game gains its appeal. This appeal culminates in success. Keywords Normality · Boundary of meaning · Freedom space · Unexpected · Act as if It’s just a game! This often-heard statement expresses a difference, separates the game from something else. But to this day, there is no scientific consensus on what exactly the other side of the distinction is (seriousness? work? real life?), nor what exactly this difference consists of. It can be said with certainty that the distinction draws a boundary - which none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein, the analyst of language games, denies: How would we explain to someone what a game is? I think that we’d describe games to him, and we might add to the description: “This and similar things are called ‘games’.” And do we know any more ourselves? Is it just that we can’t tell others exactly what a game is? a But this is not ignorance. We don’t know the boundaries because none have been drawn. (Wittgenstein, 2009/1953, p. 37)

However, every game must draw a boundary, precisely because it has so many connections to what happens outside the game. The everyday language use of the term boundary emphasizes the aspect of separation and neglects the fact that no boundary drawing is needed where no connections exist. If there is no continuation beyond the boundary, it is superfluous. Only the possibility of crossing it gives the boundary a function. Understanding the boundary behind which the game begins, and understanding the peculiarity, the special features of the game, is the task of this chapter. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Arlt, H.-J. Arlt, Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8_2

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2.1

The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected

The Ludic Boundary Is a Boundary of Meaning

The game is in many ways connected to everything that is not a game. But at the same time, it distinguishes itself, it draws a boundary - otherwise one could not recognize that it is a game. Now, games do not have natural boundaries, no gorges that separate mountain walls, no shores that divide land and water; also no physical boundaries like skins, furs or feathers. Even if sometimes the mere appearance is enough to be sure that it is a game - sensory perception is not reliable, it does not provide reliable information about where the game begins and ends; too often games show actions and behaviors that also occur outside of games. The difficulties in recognizing the boundaries of the game are related to the fact that they are boundaries of meaning. Meaning, here we follow Niklas Luhmann (2012a, 2012b, p. 23), is “the universal medium of all psychic and social systems, all consciously and communicatively operating systems”. Meaning can also be described as the form of order in which human experience takes place. In this form, the currently intended meaning and other possible meanings appear together in the foreground and background. A specific observer may insist on unambiguity in the concrete case, but semantically we always deal with actuality and potentiality at the same time. This means that the currently intended meaning is context-dependent, and depends on the situational framework. In a different factual, social or temporal context, in a different frame, it must be taken into account that what is perceived means something else. The same fish has a different meaning in the river and in the cooking pot. Meaning-making is directly linked to expectation formation. Depending on the meaning seen in a thing or action, certain expectations are associated with it. Every expectation, one could say, is based on a selected meaning. Anyone who interprets the smile of their counterpart not as cynical condescension, but as a declaration of sympathy, will not expect an unfriendly rejection. It is—at least at first glance—not the actions themselves that make the difference between playing and not playing, but it is the meaning of the actions. This ties in with Gregory Bateson’s consideration, as summarized by Bo Kampmann Walther, “that play is not the name of some empirical behaviour, but rather the name of a certain framing of actions” (Walther, 2003). Gregory Bateson has particularly thoroughly analyzed and reformulated this transformation that occurs in play. What is said and done in the game functions as a sign that stands for something specific and at the same time does not stand, because the designated is not understood as it is usually understood: Pretend biting is both biting and not biting. ... in the expanded definition of play, the result is: ‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite. (Bateson, 2000/1972, p. 180)

In games, what one could call a pragmatic paradox arises. Fritz B. Simon has explained the concept of the pragmatic paradox:

2.2

Beyond the Usual Horizon of Expectation

9

A paradox arises when a sentence is true just when it is false, and false just when it is true. A pragmatic paradox arises when this sentence is a call to action. It is followed just when it is not followed, and not followed when it is followed. (Simon, 2007, p. 70)

In ludic communication, the invitation to kiss means at the same time to kiss and not to kiss; by executing the invitation, it is not executed, and by not executing it, it is executed. The players have no problem with the paradox, they solve it using time, by defining a period during which paradoxical behavior is considered normal. Instead of considering only an either-or possible, to kiss or not to kiss, or to retreat into a neither-nor attitude and freeze in inaction, they create a framework in which both, to kiss and not to kiss, are the same, and this framework is called: we play. For actors, pragmatic paradoxes are everyday life: The passionate kissing scene they perform on stage was none as soon as the curtain falls. With the help of the game frame, the difference, which usually only allows an either-or or a neither-nor, is abolished. Anyone who does not distinguish between left and right, but categorizes both as direction, will have no difficulty when told to go right and left at the same time. What appears to others as a contradiction, he understands as a tautology: ‘Go in one direction and go in one direction at the same time.’ (Simon, 2007, p. 73)

If the difference between right and left is abolished, both are simply one direction. For us a hard to imagine thought, because the difference between right and left seems self-evident, almost natural to us. Pragmatic paradoxes, which are so difficult for observers of the game and so easy for players, are likely one of the reasons why the game is often described as an “inbetween”, as “a holding oneself in the between” (Plessner, 1961, p. 104). Jesper Juul (2005) has made do with the term “Half-Real”. The pragmatic paradox is also the point at which the devil comes into play. He is a “super player”, “he is the necessary chance in the divine plan of salvation, the organized chaos, which moves in all speeds in all directions - and in no direction.” (Villeneuve, 1991, p. 93). What we “wish at the devil”, “to these things that we cannot properly grasp and therefore sometimes want to get rid of (especially when we are confronted with them), belong the vicissitudes of chance, the contingency.” (p. 83)

2.2

Beyond the Usual Horizon of Expectation

Starting from a boundary does not yet say anything about what is in front of and what is behind the boundary. How can one approach the game scientifically in such a way that its timeless presence and infinite diversity are taken into account? A theoreticalconceptual approach to the game is also made difficult by the fact that the game is one of the most popular metaphors and occurs in all possible and impossible contexts. Whether, for example, one can actually speak of a game of waves and wind, or whether it is just a metaphorical use of language, cannot be answered at the beginning of our systematic considerations.

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The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected

The universality of the game in the social life of humans and animals cannot be denied. To understand the game, it therefore suggests itself to take sociality as a starting point. As a primary form of sociality, the social sciences agree, interaction is considered, understood as an encounter in which living beings are perceptible to each other and communicate with each other[1]1. From Paul Watzlawick (1921–2007) we know that one cannot not communicate in interaction (Watzlawick et al., 1967). In the broad field of interaction research, the term “expecting expectations”, created by Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), is fundamental. Simply put, it can be said that it is an indispensable facilitation of living together if I can not only expect the behavior of the people I meet with a certain reliability; such a purely behavioristic perspective cannot explain social order (Parsons, 1967/1937). To make the smoothness of mutual behavior probable, it must be added that I also have certain ideas about what others expect in turn, so that I can “automatically” adjust my behavior to it (if I want to); if I do not have to think anew at each encounter what is now expected of me and what I have to expect from others. Not knowing this makes it difficult to deal with foreign cultures. Expectations can be fulfilled, but also disappointed. In interactions, both sides check to what extent the mutual expectations prove themselves. If the tests of endurance are repeatedly passed, I naturally assume over time that the encounters will also go tomorrow as I experienced them yesterday and the day before. A normality has been established that I can orient myself by. An order is created in which I can arrange myself. Stable expectations, which are shared by all participants and which many, most, sometimes even all, orient themselves by, are called structures in sociology. The fact that customers pay at the supermarket checkout is such a structural requirement that affects every single customer, regardless of whether they are young or old, poor or rich, male or female. In sociology, even in everyday political conversation, the concept of structure is used in many ways. To illustrate it, the image of a rope is suitable. Interestingly, in French, the rope and the contract share the same root. Le terme contrat signifie originellement le trait qui serre et tire: un jeu de cordes assure, sans langage, ce système souple de contraintes et des libertés par lequel chaque élément lié recoit de l’information sur chacun et sur le système, ainsi que de la sécurité des tous (Serres, 1990, p. 162).2

A rope woven from expectations is the metaphor that is well suited to illustrate the differences in the effect of structures: A rope can, for example, provide support, facilitate mutual security, its absence can be experienced as a deficit of security and orientation, but it can also serve as a barrier and be used as a fetter. In such different

1

We do not need to intervene in the great debate about the differences between animals and humans here. Our research interest is in human play. We only refer to animals for the purposes of illustration and demonstration. 2 The term contract originally meant the line that tightens and pulls: a set of strings ensures, without language, this flexible system of constraints and freedoms by which each linked element receives information about each other and about the system, as well as security for all (Serres, 1990, p. 162).

2.2

Beyond the Usual Horizon of Expectation

11

ways, a structure can assert itself and it often happens that the same structure has different effects from the perspective of individual actors. A good example from the world of work is job protection. The better it is structurally anchored, i.e., the stronger the rope is, the more it is seen by dependent employees as a contribution to their social security, but by entrepreneurs as an obstacle, as a restriction of their decision-making and freedom of action. In coexistence, expectations of different quality emerge, including those that are anchored as disappointment-proof as possible and are sanctioned if they are violated. These are the legally regulated expectations that follow conditional programs: If this is the case, then that happens. If you break the property right and steal, you will— provided you are convicted—be punished. The law extends beyond individual interactions, it also applies to organizations, even to an entire country. Its classic form is the law. Expectations can also be distinguished by whether they normatively apply and, like laws, retain their validity regardless of whether they are violated. Or whether they only cognitively apply and are corrected if they repeatedly do not fulfill; in this case, learning processes take place. A trader who unexpectedly finds no customers for his goods on the market will lower the price or offer a different range. He has learned from this. In social life, whether in the family, in economic or ecclesiastical organizations, in a tribe or in a state, a multitude of generally accepted expectations develop in everyday life. They not only condense into laws, but also into rules and roles, programs, institutions, values, and not least into people who exhibit habits and thereby make their behavior predictable. We want to refer to the sum of known and recognized expectations as societal normality, because it suggests a normal behavior that everyone assumes and according to which everyone, some more, others less, directs their own behavior. Everyone knows, in general and often even in every detail, what behaviors are expected of them and what consequences deviant behavior can have.3 Normality, as it is lived and experienced in a society, is the sum of the expected and the expectable. As a “signal, orientation and control level” (Link, 2013, p. 359) on the societal user interface, an idea of normality, a certain order, is indispensable, because otherwise no complementary expectation expectations can build up and stabilize. Without realistic assumptions about what others expect in specific social situations (at the weekly market, in the classroom, in the nightclub, etc.), one’s own behavior towards others would be very uncertain or ignorant. Having no idea or not caring at all whether one provokes positive or negative reactions, whether one encounters acceptance, rejection or indifference, is always possible for individuals, but as generalized behavior of many, it is a sure way to make interactions frustrating experiences in the long run and ultimately to create chaotic conditions. We see the key to understanding the game in this: At all times, normal social life has created the opportunity to disregard prevailing expectations and to nullify the

3 Among the numerous analyses dealing with the complexity of expectation management, the studies of Ervin Goffman (e.g., 1959 and 1967) are among the most prominent.

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consequences that usually occur as a result. This opportunity arises quite naturally because no living being is born fully socialized. Everyone has to learn normal social interaction first. It would be absurd to expect newborns to already behave as the social order dictates: That they already know who “one” greets, how “one” eats, when “one” is silent. Being in society initially still outside the social order is a natural state for all adolescents. Being able to move in society with one’s thinking, speaking, and acting outside the societal norm, without having to expect negative consequences, is the offer that the game makes. The entry into normal life is achieved playfully, and the exit from normal life is always possible in a playful way. The game is the free space in which the normality of the expected and expectable is nullified. To what extent it is applied in individual game moves is decided by the game development and game practice. The finding that the game forms a separate social space is widely shared. For example, Michel de Certeau (1988, p. 23) describes in his often-cited study The Practice of Everyday Life the game as “a space outside of and isolated from daily competition”. To nullify normal expectations—expectation formation and meaning-making are closely interconnected—means to produce ludic obstinacy, both in the factual dimension that distinguishes one thing from another, and in the social dimension that distinguishes this person from that one, as well as in the time dimension that distinguishes after from before. The game’s meaning production is characterized by the fact that each individual game constitutes its own contexts of meaning, which must first be learned if one wants to participate or understand the game as a spectator. Already at this early stage of the analysis, it can be stated: The game forms a separate social space, whose participants can create their own, self-determined reality, without losing connection to societal normality, to which they can return at any time, “as if nothing had happened”. Those who play demonstrate that more and different things are possible than the execution of the normal and necessary. This demonstration can be criticized as a loss of reality for the players or positively credited as the creation of new possibilities. The ludic space of possibilities does not dictate or determine what use is made of it. This openness for any use invites to functionalize ludic actions, because the possibility to simulate societal normalities is also given. There can be very different, even contrary tasks associated with the game. This 360-degree use of the game becomes particularly apparent when one realizes that the children’s game is primarily attributed the purpose of supporting socialization in the sense of increasing integration into societal normality. On the other hand, the game is offered as an experimental field in which societal change, the departure from previous normalities, can be practiced. The spectrum of instrumentalizations of the game is the topic of Chap. 3.

2.3

2.3

Prerequisites of Playing

13

Prerequisites of Playing

Social life encompasses a ludic space of possibilities, which is both excluded from the normality of society and excluded under special conditions, but nevertheless remains connected with this normality in many ways. Under what conditions can this unlikely constellation occur with great self-evidence? The norms of society not only include the structures, techniques, and habits that provide disappointment-proof securities to everyday life and contribute to its processes being largely controllable and manageable for individuals. Normality also includes the fulfillment of people’s basic natural needs, the satisfaction of which makes survival possible in the first place. The necessities of food, housing, and clothing, and at more advanced stages of supply with energy, healthcare, educational opportunities, mobility, etc., must be taken into account. It requires work to ensure all these supply services. The ludic space of possibilities forms an autonomy zone that releases from the obligation to fulfill normal expectations and do the necessary. Here, the original close connection between childhood and play becomes apparent, because it becomes clear that such an autonomy zone must exist simply because no child can do the necessary and know the normal. As a natural-elementary action form of the early socialization process, the game takes place without the players being aware of the difference between normality and play. The exciting question of intra-societal boundary drawing, how the boundaries of the game are marked and secured, only arises when individuals are capable of distinguishing normalities and necessities here, ludic actions there. We have identified the ludic boundary (in Sect. 2.1) as a boundary of meaning and want to deepen our understanding of it in the following. One can experience daily that both actions and experiences are not unambiguous. Around the same event, there are often very different views on how it should be understood. On the one hand, there are cultural differences, such as those listed in tourist guides, for example, in which countries nodding or shaking the head expresses a yes or a no. Or whether, as in India and Pakistan, the head is swayed back and forth to say yes, while in Japan the hand is waved in front of the face like a windscreen wiper to say no, which elsewhere can mean that one considers something or someone to be crazy. On the other hand, we also perceive that the same event can have a different meaning in a legal, economic, religious, etc. perspective. Paying attention to such functional boundaries of meaning happens almost automatically. In both cases, both cultural and functional boundaries of meaning, one deals with fluid boundaries, one can cross boundaries without initially noticing it. However, we will see in Chap. 5 that this so-called functional differentiation in modern society acquires a particularly sensitive quality for demarcations. Nevertheless, in this semantic dimension, transitions are generally smooth. In the supermarket, for example, one meets a distant relative and switches from an economic to a familial context, a reporting team films the encounter for a report on a special sales promotion of the business, or the store

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The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected

detective finds the encounter suspicious, and suddenly one finds oneself in public or legal contexts. If semantic boundaries are to be strictly observed, they must be marked and fortified. • The boundaries between the ludic and the normal have a different quality than cultural or functional differences in meaning. The first noticeable thing is that games are temporally, socially, and often also spatially clearly marked. This provides clarity on when a game begins and when it ends, who participates and who does not, what belongs to the playing field and what does not. These obvious demarcations reduce the risk of confusion between play and normality and indicate that the difference—for whatever reasons, remains unanswered here— is apparently taken very seriously. To isolate and mark the “play space”, to create distance from the normal world of life is a condition sine qua non for games to occur. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) relativize the boundaries between the ludic and the normal in terms of content and time. The play space they offer has a visual reality potential (one speaks of hyperrealism or photorealism), which does not abolish the boundary, but invites us to forget it. This forgetting is facilitated above all by the fact that MMOGs create a virtual persistent world that does not end the game for weeks, months, sometimes years. This means that the players must decide for themselves, so to speak on their own, to leave the game (temporarily). It does not require a degree in psychology to understand that there is a risk of addiction here. • As difficult as it may be to quit, the entry, the crossing of the border does not happen accidentally. One does not suddenly find oneself on the side of the game without having decided to play. The duration and location of the game also depend on the nature of the game itself, the players decide on their participation. They do not play randomly or unintentionally,4 but they have decided to do so. The concept of decision implies that alternative options are available and that the choice for one of them is not based on necessities, but on free will. Certainly, there can be external occasions to participate, such as the pleading and urging of others, but ultimately participation remains a voluntary, self-determined step. This binding of participation to one’s own decision makes it non-binding, because decisions are revocable. • There are many reasons to interrupt the course of normal everyday life, good and bad, desired and compelling. For the game, as long as it is not itself subject to external constraints (but then it is no longer one), such as educational, economic, political, sports, and as long as players are not addicted, the voluntariness of participation applies. This voluntariness makes the players equal. With the step across the ludic border, the participants of a game do not lose their personal physical and psychological characteristics, but they shed their social determinations, are no longer teacher or student, rich or poor, local or foreigner, and enter the playing field as equals—no matter how hierarchical the roles may be that they 4

Colloquially, one says that someone is being played foully, expressing that others are playing their game with this person. Here, the term game is used metaphorically.

2.3

Prerequisites of Playing

15

then take on during the game. This practical freedom and factual equality, which are constitutive for playing, form the basis for social experiences that strengthen feelings of belonging even when a game favors more competitive than cooperative action. • Not only is participation based on free decision, but the execution of the game also depends—within the rules—on free decision. We can only speak of a game when the player has autonomous decision-making freedom. He and only he alone [or she; note by the author] decides which card he plays, which game character he moves where or on which number he places his bet. (Buland, 2008, p. 10)

• Therefore, one cannot know how it proceeds and how it ends, therefore, from the same action pattern, a different game event can emerge each time. • The clarity of the demarcations between normality and play guarantees—and this is another constitutive characteristic—that the ludic actions are without consequences for social life outside the game. Despite all connections to societal normalities, the game event takes place non-bindingly. What happened before the game, what happens during it, and what will happen afterwards, remains unaffected by the ludic actions - with the exception that the players themselves may have changed through their game and may behave differently after the game than before. Games that are played or even designed with such change motives, such as serious games, are already subject to an instrumentalization that affects the nature of the game. They primarily operate with the method of simulation (see Sect. 4.2). • How can the non-binding nature of the game be ensured? The strict boundary of meaning would not suffice if the game actions and the game characters were the same as usual, if the shot from the gun was actually deadly and the doll was actually a child. The non-binding nature of the game is primarily made possible by the fact that ludic actions take place in the mode of As if. This does not mean that every action in the game is carried out in this way. The chess move that takes the rook, the card that is drawn, are factual actions, they are not acted as if. But as far as speech and action patterns occur in the self-created zone of abnormality, which are also known and practiced as normal behavior, they should preferably have no consequences beyond the game.5 Therefore, they must be carried out in the mode of acting as if. Otherwise, the known consequences of such behavior would occur, a bite for example would actually injure. The acting as if forms the peculiar ludic mode of operation. Non-bindingness and As if together create a lightness that is atypical for normal behavior. When one says that something happens “playfully”, this lightness, which is characteristic of the nature of the game, is often meant. • The sum of delimited social space, free decision to play and non-binding acting as if opens up the option for the game to develop and practice ideas that do not need to take into account the difference between reality and fiction. Fictional things 5 Here we see the difference to sport, because injuries sustained during sport are not healed at the end of the sporting event.

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naturally occur in the game (c. f. Harvey, 2015). The ludic eliminates the difference between real, imaginative and fictitious. Ludic communication is characterized by the fact that it cannot be grasped with the simple opposition of reality and fiction. Play refers to realities, but allows itself the freedom to associate other ideas with them, for example, to see and use a chair as a railway carriage. Play refers to fictions but takes the freedom to see and treat them as realistic ideas. (Arlt & Arlt, 2023, p. 51)

• What makes a serious difference outside the game does not have to, but can be treated as indifferent in the game—and vice versa. The game can reintroduce familiar differences, but on a different, a ludic basis. • Digitization has a special significance for playing because it extends the normal living conditions beyond the real, imaginative and fictitious to the reality dimension of virtuality, with which new capacities also arise in the game space. If we summarize the conditions under which the game can establish itself as a peculiar social space, they are: the clearly marked boundary of meaning; the freedom and equality of the players; as well as the non-binding acting as if as an operating mode; which creates the typically ludic reality dimension.

2.4

Ludic Actions as Festivals of Decision-Making

If these are the framework conditions, what is the peculiarity of the game, what is the pivot of playing? From the outside, the game, as we have seen, can be attributed to very different purposes such as entertainment, distraction, relaxation, learning, and experimenting. What is the intrinsic value of the game that underlies playing before all derived purposes? Since the game is constituted from the difference to social normality, which can primarily be characterized as dealing with the expected, the meaning of the game is to be found in dealing with the unexpected. Playing reacts to, seeks and produces unexpected things. For example, good jump scares in film and computer games are characterized by the fact that they occur very unexpectedly: The floor plate, for example, which looks like all the others, suddenly turns out to be a trap. How many pins will fall, which card with how many trumps will I hold in my hand, what moves can be expected... it is always the open, the uncertain, the unexpected around which the ludic action revolves. This dealing with the unexpected predisposes the transformation of the game into a game of chance, the constant companion of the game (see Sect. 4.1). The step from game to game of chance is small and easy to take. All external purposes attributed to the game and towards which it may be directed, are based on the inherent value of the game, the dealing with the unexpected. The unexpected appears in a negative and a positive form, as a threat, which is its dark side, and as a joyful surprise, which is its enticing side. The game

2.4

Ludic Actions as Festivals of Decision-Making

17

cultivates dealing with both sides, gaining its appeal from both the threats and the enticements of the unexpected. This appeal culminates in success. As much as it is true that purposes are external to the game: Within the game itself, dealing with the unexpected is shaped by an intention of success. Successful/ unsuccessful, dramatized as won/lost, is a distinction that accompanies the course of the game. Therefore, the game needs criteria of success, which it has to fulfill more or less. Because success is constitutive for the game, it can be observed who plays better and who plays worse. This possibility of evaluation is fundamentally inherent in the game. How much it unfolds is a cultural question. In a competitive society, it can be expected that the difference between better or worse comes strongly to the fore. Like competitive sports, there is also competitive gaming. For example, Backgammon World Championships have been held annually since 1967 and Skat World Championships every 2 years since 1978. The component of success can be extended to professionalization and professional roles, as can be seen in many variations in modern sports. As soon as professional sports take over the game, success in the binary code of winning and losing intensifies and dramatizes. The playful is subordinated to avoiding defeat and achieving victory. The game becomes a performance game (see Sect. 4.1) just as dealing with the unexpected can be transformed into a game of chance. However, success does not need to take the pointed form of victory. It can also be expressed in the fact that the ball was caught, the right number was rolled, the move was perfectly executed. In the unexpected, tension and excitement are inherently present. The fact that it takes an unpredictable course, holds surprising twists, that the same game, when it happens again and again, is nevertheless a different game each time, is due to the game’s own way of dealing with the unexpected. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) puts it this way: “Thus the cat at play chooses the ball of wool because it responds to play, and ball games will be with us forever because the ball is freely mobile in every direction, appearing to do surprising things of its own accord.” (Gadamer, 2004/1975, p. 106) It is the uncertainty of success—“we are motivated to play when something is at stake” (Juul, 2013, p. 13), —that makes repetitions so appealing. Repetition is, next to movement, the constitutive characteristic of the game and in repetition the phenomenon of the game perhaps shows itself most strongly [...] it is astonishing that there is actually no game without repetition. (Plaice, 2009, p. 364)

It only seems astonishing if we overlook that the characteristic of ludic repetition is variation. Despite all repetitions, every game is a new game; no reproduction without variation. A game that is mastered so well that failure is largely excluded, loses its appeal. It’s easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams ‘I hate it. I hate it. I hate it’, then I know he will finish it and buy version two. If he doesn’t say this, he’ll put it down in an hour. (Lazzaro, 2008, cit. Juul, 2013, p. 13)

Therefore, Greg Costikyan (2013, p. 2) can assert, “that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to the appeal of

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2 The Peculiarity of the Game: Successful Handling of the Unexpected

games.” The non-binding nature of the game ensures that failure is not a drama, but an invitation to repeat. Children, who do not yet make a (big) difference between normality and play, have more problems with failure. The fact that success remains an open question makes games attractive to spectators as well. The competitive mode ensures that winners and losers emerge from the game so that both success and failure can be observed; unless a draw is also recognized as a game outcome. But initially, it is open with regard to who wins and who loses. This makes the course of the game interesting for the audience regardless of the quality level. At this point, we can introduce our concept of the game: Playing means dealing with the unexpected again and again in the mode of a non-binding acting as if voluntarily, temporally, often also spatially marked, with the aim of success. This concept of play awakens understanding for Johan Huizinga’s far-reaching statement, “that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning” (Huizinga, 1998/1938, p. 46). Andreas Reckwitz (2020, p. 72) has reformulated this fundamental idea as follows: “In short, play is the practice par excellence in which culture demonstrates its ostensibly useless excess in opposition to the rational world.” Now the circumstances are not so simple that only the expected occurs on the side of normality and only the unexpected on the side of the game. In fact, it is about precedence, not exclusivity. It is immediately clear that in the vicissitudes of daily life one always has to deal with the unexpected, but the surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant, are given the status of an exception, of the unusual. Such exceptions may appear as apparent miracles, as breakdowns, accidents, even as crises, but they are always considered abnormal. It will be shown later in the analysis, in Chap. 5, that the digital modern age is reconfiguring itself in this respect. It shows changes that affect the relationship between the expected and the unexpected in a special way, changes that condense in the demand “expect the unexpected”. To illustrate the peculiarity of the game, technology is particularly suitable because it distances itself from social norms in a different, opposite way. Both, the game and the technology, isolate themselves, should and want to operate closed, without disturbances - the game on the adventurous path of the unexpected, the technology on the perfectionist path of the expected. The experience quality of the game includes having to make new decisions continuously; the ludic action is a festival of decision-making. The functionality of technology includes that once set in motion, it runs without decision. This applies to both mechanical and social techniques. While the course of the game revolves around the unexpected, with technology, as long as it works, we deal with fulfilled expectations: Monocausally, a defined cause should produce a defined effect (cf. Luhmann, 2018, pp. 299–315). The causeeffect chain builds up in a simple if-then logic and thereby transforms each effect into a cause for the next expected effect. Maximum process boredom is preprogrammed. Technically, the appeal of repetition lies in the reliability with

2.4

Ludic Actions as Festivals of Decision-Making

19

which the same result is achieved. Ludically, the appeal of repetition lies in the openness of the result, the uncertainty of the outcome. The experiential qualities of technology lie in its development. Experimental setups, risky experiments, accidental discoveries, self-experiments - researchers have exciting stories to tell. The risks of technological development and the experiences of gameplay lead directly into the unexpected in the search for success. Even analog technological developments were often compared to the game, about programming Jay David Bolter (2014, p. 186f.) says: “The computer encourages a kind of playful trial and error, a manipulation of electronic possibilities, so that it becomes almost irresistible to view programming as the ultimate sort of game. [...] Each program is a game-within-a-game.” Every ludic action must answer the question, what is played with, and the answer is, there is nothing that could not be played with. The own body, natural objects outside the own body, living beings of all kinds, artifacts of every sort, the psyche and its abundance of thoughts, communications in all forms, social relationships always much of it is “in play”. What is played with is vividly manifested in toys and thus we encounter again technology and its development. From the handwork with which individual pieces were made of stone, wood or clay, over the beginning rise of the toy industry in the fifteenth century to the development studios of computer games, the state of technology, i.e. the history of work, influences the history of the game (see Chap. 3). Now it would be inaccurate to describe ludic actions as completely unregulated compared to strictly regulated technical processes. Against the background of the open space of possibilities of the game, it is sometimes noted with some surprise that most games also have rules. The freedom-restricting binding to and through rules appears remarkable to some observers. But game rules lose their conspicuousness when one also sees the game as a field of meaningful experience and action. From the aspect of rules, the range of ludic actions is so large that between the two poles “not or only weakly regulated” and “relatively strictly regulated” with “Paida” and “Ludus” even own designations have emerged. In English, the distinction between Play and Game largely corresponds to them. “At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrollable fantasy that can be designated by the term paideia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complimentary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature [...] I call this second component ludus.” (Caillois, 2001, p. 13) The word formation gameplay tells us that with game and play not simply two different ways to play are named. The ludic dimension of Play, the free design as a unit of deciding and executing, is contained in every game and has tight and strict rules. A game that knows no rule cannot anchor expectations intersubjectively; it is basically only playable by a single person. Even when two people play with a ball without any rule, it becomes difficult and probably soon frustrating, because no

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person can expect from the other what they will do with the ball. The word rule can mean both a descriptive meaning, i.e., describing regularities, and a prescriptive meaning, i.e., prescribing commands and prohibitions. Ludus can thus be seen as being a synonym for the explicit rules of a game, which include the rules by which play proceeds (or rather, the limits of what is allowed), the rules that define the goals of the game (or any scoring mechanism, which is merely a more complicated form of goal structure) and the rules which dictate the allowable properties of the components of play (the size and weight of a ball, or the dimensions of the playing field). (Bateman, 2006)

The big difference between Play and Game lies in the fact that the Game takes place on the basis of a predetermined game model. It is about a specific game, the basic structures of which are known in advance. In the mode of Play, the game arises within the game. A Game, on the other hand, is executed. To say that it does not arise during play is both right and wrong, because it exists as a pattern, but each individual execution is different. Ludic interactions, if they are to succeed in the long term, cannot remain structureless, they cannot do without a skeleton of stable expectations. Even in the game, the expectations of the actors must be coordinated, there must be decisionmaking and action orientations. However, it can also be said about game rules that they do not lead the game, but only regulate it, “that they do not prescribe essential parts of the playful action. They do not define the game.” (Gebauer, 2002, p. 90) They allow not only a lot of room for the unexpected, but they are often designed in such a way that they create space for the unexpected create or set up an obstacle course that provides additional drama. It would be a big misunderstanding to evaluate game rules only as restrictions. Their ludic function is precisely to make challenges more exciting and the paths to the goal more interesting and thrilling. If chess pieces did not have their special movement rules, but could be moved arbitrarily on the board, the game would be over almost as soon as it had begun. It is not the rules that make the difference to normality, but the principally—but by no means always practically—possible sovereign handling of rules and their validity. This sovereignty goes so far—one can play with everything, even with the game rules—that from the possibility to change the rules of a game, a separate ludic action can be created. Under the name Nomic games, a genre of games was created which, based on the distinction between changeable and unchangeable rules, plays with the rules. The idea behind Nomic is to change the rules of Nomic. The game can be completely different at the end than it was at the start. The basic play is explained in rule 202: a player proposes a rule change, all the players vote on it, and if the vote succeeds, the change is immediately incorporated into the game. (Vreeswijk, 1995, p. 2)

There is also a variant Nomic to play, where the game starts without rules and the participants only give themselves first rules during the course of the game. The basic idea of this genre of games was theoretically developed by Peter Suber (1990) in the book The Paradox of Self-Amendment.

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Nomic games realize what we had noted as a theoretical insight: The players can agree together to play differently; to modify rules. The commonality is what matters, otherwise one becomes a spoilsport or a cheater. However, computer games in particular set limits to this sovereignty, because with its programmed rules, the computer does not allow “play” (c. f. Sect. 3.3). The common sovereign handling of the game also allows a game to be interrupted or ended in the middle; unless the game is subject to external purposes, which would be disregarded by this. A game in front of paying spectators cannot be canceled without consequences—the game can, the paid performance cannot. In order for it to take place, a game is fixed in many respects. Like all actions, ludic actions can only occur selectively. If they are to be repeatable, this selection must be known and defined, temporal, factual, and social questions must be clarified such as: When and how should it start? How does it end? Where and with what is played in which way? Who can participate? On these questions, individuals decide on their participation and the quality of experience determines whether they want to play this game again.

2.5

The Gaming Experience: Open to Any Drama

From the perspective of the typical characteristics of the game, a paradoxical basic structure of the gaming experience emerges: On the one hand, the players experience their self-efficacy. It is their own decisions which moves they make, and it is their own abilities how they execute these moves. On the other hand, the game opens the door to chance, constantly generating unpredictable and surprising situations that make luck and misfortune omnipresent to players. In this way, the contradictory experience of acting self-determinedly and exerting a decisive influence on the course of the game arises - everyone seems to be the architect of their own fortune - while also being at the mercy of and tossed back and forth in the ups and downs of the game - so to speak, being the “plaything” of the ludic actions. We had identified success and its uncertainty as constitutive of playing and now see the inner conflict: Success is both dependent and independent of the players’ self-activity. It is open to interpretations and attributions in the specific case. Is success due to the effort and skill of the players or to the fortunate coincidence of randomly occurring circumstances? This contradiction can be experienced in a good sense as exciting, breathtaking, because it occurs in the mode of the non-binding As if. The experience of self-efficacy also enhances the quality of experience insofar as the players experience themselves as individual participants who make a difference to the course of the game: Another participant would have chosen a different move and would have executed it differently. With other participants, it would have been a different game. Participation in the game creates a moment of subjectification that prevents what often happens in normal life: Seeing oneself as an arbitrarily replaceable figure who only participates in the events without involvement or looks at the events with distance and indifference.

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To design something, i.e., to be able to decide and execute oneself, is generally considered a particularly desirable, ambitious way of acting. Not coincidentally, design is primarily spoken of in the creative field. Designing something usually has a higher quality of experience than applying something finished. No matter how banal a move may be in a specific case, the unity of deciding and executing lifts it out of habitual action and routine activities. Therefore, even the simplest game has a higher experiential value than the normal course of “everyday life”. If one wants to explain the attractiveness of games, and the captivating nature of playing in more detail, then one needs to depend on the ratio of fulfilling expectations, surprises, and disappointments. The possibility of freeing oneself from social ties without giving them up, of switching off expectations, demands, and impositions of others and then re-engaging without anything—except the past time— having changed, this invitation of the game can be quite promising in itself. But temporary exclusion is also known under other names such as break, time out, and vacation. The aspect of exclusion alone, even though it is often strongly emphasized by critics of the game, cannot explain the attractiveness of the ludic. The turning away from the normal state alone is not sufficient for this. Nobody turns their back on the normal course of things without expecting more from it than normality has to offer. Gaming experiences are very often described and these descriptions are usually based on information from the players. However, it is also possible to “read” the experiential qualities of playing, without psychologizing, from the structural elements of the game that we have developed. Then, dimensions of experience also become apparent that may not be addressed by individual surveyed game participants, but still deserve attention. The systematic analysis becomes independent of the statements of individual participants but must be empirically verified. The starting point is undisputed. The gaming experience is sought voluntarily. The special thing about ludic freedom is that it has a triple dimension, namely the freedoms of “whether”, “what” and “how”. Participants are free to decide whether they want to play at all, as well as which game they choose, and how they play the game: within the given rules or those they have jointly modified. “Playing is freedom,” writes Miguel Sicart (2017, p. 18). Such a triple freedom is not given in most normal life contexts, simply because the “whether” is often without alternative. In the background, there are often necessities, no matter how large the selection of food, clothing, sleeping accommodations, communication options, sources of income, etc. may be, no matter how many alternatives the “what” and “how” may offer. The special quality of ludic freedom, it should be noted in anticipation, is lost, for example, in serious games and in gamification (see Sects. 4.2 and 4.3). The triple dimension of ludic freedom justifies the statement that participants play with the expectation of a positive, a desired experience. The science of experience, as founded by the Austrian natural scientist and philosopher Gerhard Frank, informs us that emotions are at the center of human experience and interact with other components:

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Our analysis of human experience has provided strong evidence for the existence of 5 different domains that closely interact with and reciprocally affect each other [...]: our perception, our mental imagery, our train of thoughts, our communication process and last but not least our emotional being. We refer to these phenomenologically different categories as the 5 domains of human experiencing. (Frank, 2012a, 2012b, p. 36f.)

The complexity of the integrated processes taking place in the experience cannot be described in more detail here, not least because there can be no talk of consensuscapable scientific clarity about these processes. With its focus on experience, the game, together with its non-binding nature, fulfills basic characteristics of entertainment but significantly surpasses them. Playing is not entertainment in the sense of being entertained, because it implies active participation beyond psychological involvement. Players are observers and active participants, they experience the game not only as a performance but also as an execution, a production, in which they participate. At the same time, (not all, but also not few) games attract an audience, which seeks the entertainment experience of a ludic performance in the form of being entertained. Experience orientation means the search for (positive) experiences as opposed to (sad) experiences that happen to one. Experience orientation is the most immediate form of the search for happiness. As a type of action, the pattern of deferred gratification is opposed, characteristic for example of saving, long-term courtship, tenacious political struggle, preventive behavior of all kinds, hard training, a work-rich life, renunciation and asceticism. In actions of this type, the hope for happiness is projected into a distant future, while in experience-oriented action, the claim is directed without time delay to the current action situation. (Schulze, 1993, p. 14)

What makes the special quality of the game’s experience? First, we make the surprising observation that the basic patterns of experiences in the game and in normality do not differ. The conditions under which a certain period of time is not only experienced but becomes an experience, are no different in and outside of games. It is always a matter of an interaction between person (body and consciousness) and situation. What is a beautiful or a sad experience for some can be just a not worth mentioning experience for others. The way a person processes impressions is part of the experience. An understanding of the experience that makes only the impressive situation responsible for the quality of the experience falls short. Nevertheless, situational characteristics can be named that are generally known to intensify the experience so that it becomes an experience, such as tension, surprise, danger, risk, victory, defeat, success, failure, gain, loss, fear, hope, love, separation, reunion, rescue, tragedy, comedy, crime, birth, death. Where, given such fundamental similarities, do the differences lie? Optimal conditions prevail in the game for high-quality experiences, especially in these six respects: • All formats of communication, to which the mode of non-binding ‘as if’ action is available, create rich experiential situations. This applies to literature, theater, and film, as well as to the game. The decisive advantage of the game is that it not only shows experiences to spectators, but actively involves the participants in the

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creation of the experiences. Players are not only emotionally involved like spectators, but they are actors comparable to the actresses and actors of the theater and film. Involvement and self-efficacy are central terms in this context. Janet Murray has described involvement metaphorically: Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move within it. (Murray, 1999, p. 98f.)

• The mode of non-binding ‘As if’ action allows the full potential of experience to be exploited, because in this mode, the quality of experience of normally negative situations such as failure, crime, and death does not need to be avoided, but can be integrated. The dramatic potential of every (conceivable) life situation, including death, can be utilized. • The goal, by which success is determined, can be placed in the game within the framework of a grand narrative that charges every single move with the highest significance. Very often, something or someone must be saved from doom at the last second: “only you can save mankind”. • The game eliminates the barrier between perception and communication. Where something is not really present, perception has no chance, it can see, hear, smell nothing, etc. Communication can handle everything, living beings, events, and things both in a yes and a no version. “No cat” can be as much a topic as “this cat”. To make a non-existent cat an existing one, to conjure up a cat’s body where none is perceptible far and wide, is also not possible for communication - unless it takes place as a game. Then, it can be pretended as if a cat suddenly appears among us and we have to pay attention to how it behaves. The game can freely decide what it considers realities and what not. The game can not only say yes to everything and no to everything but also transform the dwarf poodle into a man-eating monster, land cyclists on the moon, bring the dead back to life or let the “undead” participate. • Despite the opening of a nothing-is-impossible space, the game does not lose itself in boundlessness. No matter how inscrutable individual situations in the game may be, with its rule-based nature, every game provides a framework that gives more or less clear instructions for action, and ensures orientation and decision-making ability. All players know: The game has an order that will assert itself, whenever and however. It is this simultaneity, this interlocking of freedom and order, that characterizes the “play space”. The usual meaning of the word play space misses this interlocking because it sets the aspect of freedom against the regulated because it illuminates the former so strongly that the latter remains in the dark. All players know that they are moving in a context of action that has been thought through and designed. The difference from societal normality can be made clear using Adam Ferguson’s (1723–1816) famous quote:

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Variations and Close Relatives: Sport and Art

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Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” (Ferguson, 1767, Part Third, Sect. II).

Every game, no matter how many coincidences may arise, no matter how much unpredictability may befall the players, is the result of human design. The basic voluntariness and equality of participants in a game create the prerequisite for ludic actions to be experienced collectively. The probability is relatively high of experiencing a sense of belonging and developing feelings of community. In summary, it can be said about the quality of experience of playing: Voluntary participants and self-determined actors practice in an open horizon of possibilities a regulated, non-binding action as if. The game is, assuming the consent of the co-players, open to everything for which the players are mentally, communicatively, and operationally capable.6 But each individual game is also closed at the same time and offers with its internal structure guidelines that protect from getting lost in nowhere. Within the rules, the participants can shape the ludic action, make and execute their decisions. The operation mode of the non-binding action as if allows any drama that can make the game an exciting experience. These prerequisites enable immersion, the complete absorption in the game, the often-cited flow experience (c. f. Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Playing offers the best conditions for the flow experience, but the idea of immersion is not exclusively tied to the ludic action. For example, André Breton advocates in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” a free realm of fantasy and calls for complete immersion in it. He celebrates art as a purposeless game of thought: “Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d’associations négligées jusque’á lui, á la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désinteressé de la pensée.” (Breton, 1924, p. 37)7

2.6

Variations and Close Relatives: Sport and Art

The sum of games known from America to Australia on every continent tends towards infinity. This abundance points to two things. Firstly: Whoever plays, plays with something, and this something can be anything that is accessible to the players (c. f. Beil et al., 2022). There is no need for specially made toys, in principle, not always practically, any body movement, any word, any object, any living thing, any person, any social relationship, any medium, any symbol, any fiction can be

The “elementary surplus character” of the game is particularly pointed out by Hans-Georg Gadamer (2012, p. 38). The game as a space of possibility (for the child) has been elaborated in particular detail by Donald Winnicott (1971). 7 “Surrealism rests on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected until then, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought.” (Breton, 1924, p. 37) 6

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played with. Classifying games and arranging them in a comprehensive typology proves to be a Herculean task that is repeatedly tackled anew (see Adams & Dormans, 2012, pp. 6–8; Elverdam & Aarseth, 2007). We refrain from making our own proposal here and instead take a closer look at the close relatives of the game, because that is the second thing that the multitude and variety of games point to: That there are zones of autonomy in every society, in which—however temporally, factually and socially limited—the ties to normalities and necessities are lifted. The prominence of the game as an opportunity for free design is unsurpassed. But playing is not the only activity where each person can decide for themselves whether they want to do it at all, and if so, which specific variant they want to choose and how they want to execute it. Sport and art offer comparable design options. They have, this is a first noticeable thing, unlike the game, made it to subjects in schools. This is a clear indication that they are more closely tied to societal normalities than the game, yet they are its closest relatives. Sport can only be discussed when the normal use of the body in the ordinary practice of various activities—such as running, carrying, throwing, climbing, jumping, pulling, etc., but also fighting—allows for the thought of and time for physical activities beyond that. The desire for and enjoyment of physical movement and exertion beyond necessary activities are not a given and require a free space. The term sport emerged in the eighteenth century, at the transition from a primarily agricultural to an industrial way of working, which forces the body into specialized, often sedentary activities. The name “sport” is based on the Latin word disportare, which means “to distract oneself.” Sport—hiking and gymnastics were early popular forms—gets relatively few chances to unfold as a distraction, because it is often subjected to health or military purposes. Above all, it is often practiced under the incentive of competitive comparison. The athletic competition—the ancient Olympiad is exemplary for this— comes particularly close to the game because, compared to the violent physical effort of an actual fight, it represents a pretend action. Even if the rivalry leads to the formation of camps among the audience and fan groups confront each other aggressively, it remains a “peaceful” competition. Language sometimes takes it very precisely, for example when on the one hand we talk about football game and on the other hand about art gymnastics. In the case of football, the closeness of competitive sports to the game is emphasized; in the case of gymnastics, the particularly acrobatic-artificial body control, which turns the physical exercise into an artful act. The connotation of the word art already reveals that we are not dealing with the ordinary. “That’s no art” means, anyone can do it. Is the ludic action the popular version of artistic creation? That would be too simplistic. The horizon of meaning of art initially sets it in contrast to nature. Terms like plastic and artificial respiration point to this. But it’s about more than the normal skill required by work processes, but about a special—intellectual, craft, design—ability. Beyond the basic commonality of having their own autonomy zone, which allows possibilities to be realized that societal normality excludes, the close relationship

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between play and art is also related to this: The artistic design of something like playing with something knows no limit of what can be used for it. The classic art genres give an impression of this: Literature as dealing with language, visual art as the use of shapes, colors, and materials, music as the use of tones, sounds, and instruments, and performing art as dramaturgy of events and social relationships. Artists are aware of their proximity to play and thematize it again and again. A few examples must suffice. “Play Objects – The Art of Possibilities” was the title of an exhibition at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2014. Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) makes the statement “Playing is art—as a result I play” (Rytz, 2014). An exhibition catalog by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) bears the title “Play with me”. The “Museum of Play and Art” in Melbourne presents itself as “A truly wondrous space for our children to play, create and learn together” (Melbourne, 2023). The composer John Cage (1912–1992) was the godfather of “Play it anew, man! A GameTheoretical Quartet about Relational Composing”, a conversation between the four ghosts of the computer game Pac-Man. “This text defines a playground of different applications of game theory and concepts of play in composed music.” (Roth, 2021, p. 5) Everything can be offered as art. It remains open whether it will also be recognized as art. Art presents itself as a work that risks the rejection of the recipients, sometimes even provokes it. No matter how many playful allusions artistic activities may have, the fact that a work is created that confronts the audience as a challenge marks a decisive difference to the game. This difference becomes clear when one realizes that whoever speaks of artists always addresses both, a production process and a work. Whoever speaks of players usually assumes a given game model that is being executed. The players do not create the game, they execute it—in a creative way. The playful characteristics of art occur in the production process, which is not a game, but aims at an original product of special quality, beyond necessities and norms. This difference explains why it is much less problematic (as we will see in Chap. 4) to economize the development, production, and distribution of games compared to artistic activities, i.e., to integrate them into societal norms. No matter how much art becomes a business, more precisely: its product becomes a commodity, its production process is discredited if it allows its autonomy to be influenced, corrupted by external purposes. This leads to very controversial debates about commercial interests and political engagements of artists. Empirically evident are the differentiation and specialization processes that result in a tremendous expansion of each of the three autonomy zones of the game, sports, and art. More games, more sports, more artistic activities than ever before in the twenty-first century have been seen on this planet. And not only because more people have lived at the same time than ever before, but because new variations are constantly being developed in each area. What is this an indication of? Does it speak for the expansion of societal autonomy zones, for more free time and for growing individual development opportunities? Or does it express the opposite, how much game, sport, and art are integrated into societal necessities and norms and subordinated to them? Our thesis, which we will present in more detail in Chap. 5, is:

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The correct answer is not an either/or, but a both/and, because polarizations, simultaneous opposing developments of great dynamics, are among the outstanding characteristics of modern societal conditions.

2.6.1

Cognition, Emotion, Morality

The high attractiveness of the experiential qualities of game, sport, and art—both for players, athletes, and artists as well as for the audiences—has, in our opinion, an even deeper reason under the conditions of modern living conditions, which we have not yet addressed and will systematically pick up in Sect. 3.1, where we justify the devaluation of entertainment compared to other forms of communication. Beyond all contrary representations and explanations, the social sciences consistently highlight this one aspect: Modernization processes take place as rationalization processes; at least they are flagged as such. “Modernity should be understood first and foremost as a process of formal rationalization” (Reckwitz, 2020, p. 26). From the classical modernity of the eighteenth century to the digital modernity of the twenty-first century, this goal remains the same, “a standardization, formalization, and generalization of all units of the social” (ibid.) is being driven forward. The unit of communication, which is equally open to rational, emotional, and moral messages, dissolves into an asymmetry with a preference for rationality. As accompanying phenomena of the spreading rationalization, cognition and factual information come to the fore, they receive the highest appreciation. At the same time, feeling and morality are downgraded, they are considered obstacles that stand in the way of the enforcement of reason. A vivid example of the primacy of rationality is the distinction between formal and informal organizational communication. It assigns the rational order to the formal side and the emotional and moral coping to the informal side - which only comes second, and only then when major problems disrupt the smooth processes. Social expectations and personal motivation diverge, communication is primarily expected to provide information, attempts at motivation are made when the effect of information proves too weak. But the modern prioritization of cognition does not change the fact that human action and experience “are affectively and morally charged” (Schmidt, 2016, p. 7). Right and wrong, knowledge and ignorance compete in the human world with feelings of pleasure and discomfort, joy and disappointment, as well as with moral judgments about respect and disrespect, good and evil. Modern everyday life demands a rational basic orientation as normal behavior. Everyone knows that they are expected to be able to explain their behavior with rational reasons. In contrast, the autonomy zones of play, sports, and art offer opportunities to live out emotionality and morality, to give free rein to enthusiasm, indignation, and sorrow. The “excesses” are then regularly criticized and reprimanded by the mainstream public. Not participating in the modern asymmetry of communication styles, but being open to emotional and moralizing communication behavior without discrimination, gives play, sport, and art additional appeal.

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Plessner, H. (1961). Laughing and crying. An investigation into the limits of human behavior. Francke. Reckwitz, R. (2020). Society of singularities. Polity Press. Roth M. (2021). Play it anew, man! A game-theoretical quartet about relational composing. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 59, nr. 1, pp. 5–31. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846590/pdf. Rytz, P. E. (2014). Tinguely’s conviction that “play is art”: The exhibition “Play Objects - The Art of Possibilities” in Basel makes it playfully tangible. https://erpery.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/ tinguelys-uberzeugung-spielen-ist-kunst-die-ausstellung-spielobjekte-die-kunst-dermoglichkeiten-in-basel-macht-sie-spielerisch-erfahrbar/. Schmidt, S. J. (2016). Histories and discourses. Rewriting constructivism. Imprint Academic. Schulze, G. (1993). The experience society. Cultural sociology of the present. Campus. Serres, M. (1990). The natural contract. Édition Francois Bourin. Sicart, M. (2017). Play matters. MIT Press. Simon, F. B. (2007). Management of paradoxes. In Review for post-heroic management 1/07, (pp. 68–75). Suber, P. (1990). The paradox of self-amendment: A study of law, logic, omnipotence, and change. Peter Lang. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10243418 Villeneuve, J. (1991). The devil is a player or: How does a polar bear get to the Adriatic? In H. U. Gumbrecht & K. K. Pfeiffer (Eds.), Paradoxes, dissonances, collapses. Situations of open epistemology (pp. 83–95). Suhrkamp. Vreeswijk, G. A. W. (1995). Formalizing Nomic: Working on a theory of communication with modifiable rules of procedure. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf& doi=83475934d5647eb220b9f08bc1877bf466a4d227. Walther, B. K. (2003). Playing and gaming. Reflections and classifications. Games Studies, 3(1) http://gamestudies.org/0301/walther/. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication. A study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. W. W. Norton & Company. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications. Wittgenstein, L. (2009/1953). Philosophical investigations. Blackwell Publishing.

Chapter 3

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

Abstract The computer has triggered a global boom in gaming. The historicalsystematic starting point was the genesis of a sign-based reality, at the core of language, with the dimensions of imagination, fiction, and lie. The modern media of dissemination and the inflation of signs up to their virtualization result in a flood of images. Because it can ignore normalities and necessities, the game makes the best use of these communication potentials. The speed at which computer games have spread in a large “variety of species” makes it clear. However, the computer game is not only a dependent variable of digitization, it is also considered a driver of technology. Digital technology inspires the game, the game inspires digital technology. Keywords Signs · Media of dissemination · Virtuality · Flood of images · Variety of games Just move the cursor to any object, click on it, explore and have fun. (Turkle, 1995, p. 20)

Humans think and communicate in the medium of meaning. In the twentieth century, they expanded their possibilities of thinking and communicating (with sounds, texts, and images) in a way previously only imaginable in science fiction, by creating a communication participant that operates without meaning, based on a binary code, and also functions as a networked distribution medium. All previous distribution media depend on receiving the content they distribute as input. The computer, on the other hand, is capable of producing its own content. It has a kind of consciousness of its own,1 known under the - misleading - name “Artificial Intelligence”; misleading because computers can learn, but they remain electronic calculators and therefore can only do what is possible on the basis of programmed computing operations obviously a lot. To understand the ludic potential of digitization and to be able to trace the evolutionary leap of digital games, it is necessary to reconstruct the media-technical

In his book “Petite Poucette”, Michel Serres (2013) impressively illustrated this thought using the “Golden Legend” by Jacques de Voragine.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Arlt, H.-J. Arlt, Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8_3

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and communication-practical prerequisites of playing. Readers who are only interested in the digital games themselves, not in the conditions of their possibility, can skip Sects. 3.1 and 3.2. It is legitimate not to be interested in the path to the mountain peak, but only in the panorama that the peak offers. But now we are embarking on the difficult ascent to reconstruct the functional logic and program structure (Sect. 3.1) as well as the evolutionary stages (Sect. 3.2) of communication in basic terms. To highlight connections, we will repeatedly draw longer lines spanning the history of communication at intermediate stations. Only after that do we want to analyze the boom in gaming, the ludic gala, triggered by the computer.

3.1

The Foundation of Communication

Playing is possible without communication. Catching the ball that the wall as an “opponent” throws back is a popular game. But every more developed ludic form and video games are the most developed so far - is a communication event and the means of communication, together with the means of production for toys and the behavioral potentials of the participants, determine the possibilities of play. What do the possibilities of communication depend on? Our question is not directed at external prerequisites for communication, such as the ground not breaking away under our feet, people being conscious, or machines working, but at the conditions of communication itself. Our understanding of communication is largely based on the analysis by Niklas Luhmann in his book “Social Systems” (1995, pp. 193–230). However, for better understanding, we use an action-oriented language, not a systemic one. For communication to occur, at least one recipient must be reachable; that is, the message someone makes must be perceptible to another. We are fundamentally dealing with the triad of sender, message, and recipient. A communication act thus consists of the sender’s action, which conveys something, and the recipient’s experience, which receives the message. Important further questions, such as how senders experience their communication action and what actions result from the recipient’s reception, point beyond the individual communication act. It now depends on analyzing the message as the core of communication more precisely. We have already established that it must overcome the path between sender and recipient. It travels this path with the help of a dissemination medium. The dissemination medium carries the message, for example, the air carries the sound, the book carries the writing, the film projector carries the moving image, from here to there.2 Thus, its content and its dissemination medium can be distinguished in the message. With the development and differentiation of communication, the production of content and the development and production of dissemination media

2 The transport metaphor is not appropriate for the communication process, but it is helpful in the first step of explanation.

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become their own elaborate performance fields, organized by publishers and broadcasters. But what is it that is “transported” by media?3 They are signs. What recipients perceive in communication is not the house that is being talked about, nor the storm that is being warned about, but the spoken, written, or pictorial signs for “house” or “storm”. Despite the absence of the tangible real, realities can be made a topic of communication by creating a second - communicative - reality, the reality of signs. It is always assumed that the use of the respective sign is practiced and known, what it stands for: The sign must be understood. This is already evident from the fact that every language must be learned, otherwise “Maison”, “Hus” or “Casa” remain incomprehensible. The complexity of sign usage has given rise to its own science, the Semiotics. Communication creates a second, a communicative reality, based on the use of signs, beyond the tangible, material reality of sensory perception.4 Before we turn to the communicative reality in more detail, it should be briefly noted that even a world of life without the use of signs does not present itself as clearly and unambiguously as backward-looking dreams of a simple, original life suggest. Thanks to their senses, living beings have access to the world. They hear, see, smell, touch, taste, feel; some worse, others more differentiated. If humans, mushrooms, ants, bears, and anteaters could argue about which world they live in, no consensus would be possible because the quantity and quality of their sensory organs and thus their perceptions differ. The selectivity of perception is crucial, as only something specific - as opposed to something else - is always perceived; and even that only within one’s own action radius, which is particularly small in mushrooms, much larger in eagles, and varies in humans depending on physical constitution. Even at the level of mere sensory perception, life does not take place in the same reality. “Even the most hardnosed biologist, however, would have to admit that there are many ways that the world is – indeed even many different worlds of experience – depending on the structure of the being involved and the kinds of distinctions it is able to make. And even if we restrict our attention to human cognition, there are many various ways the world can be taken to be.” (Varela et al., 1993, p. 9) Only present things are perceived. Humans (animals can do it too, but not as well) have developed the ability to also bring absent things into their experiential and 3

A common answer to this question is that media transmit information. The concept of information is one of the most difficult scientific topics. We adopt the understanding that Gregory Bateson (2000/1972, p. 315) has laid the foundation for: “A ‘bit’ of information is definable as a difference which makes a difference.” All perception is based on making a difference, distinguishing something, for example a chair, from everything else or from something very specific, for example from an armchair. Whether the difference, apart from being perceived, is also informative depends on whether it is new, somehow surprising or important for whatever reason in the respective situation; if the difference is already known, a mere repetition, its informational quality is questioned. In any case, it is only the reception that decides whether the message is experienced as information. The fact that a repetition can also be a desired experience is another topic that we will have to consider. 4 The fact that it is only the signs endowed with meaning that enable us to distinguish not only the moment from eternity, but also the past, present and future, is only mentioned in passing.

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perceptual world. How do they do this? We have already clarified this, they use signs and in this way create a second level of reality. The two - so far identified - levels of reality correspond to two different modes of action and experience. On the level of objective reality, we further speak of executive action and accepting experience. For the objective reality, it is useful to use the distinction between subject and object; the subject carries out the action, the object experiences it. For communication, however, the distinction between subject and object is inappropriate, insofar as reception does not merely mean accepting the message, but an active understanding that can give the signs of the message a different meaning than the intended one of the sender. Above all, however, messages can be accepted or rejected by recipients, that is, recipients can basically decide whether or not to take into account the information they have taken from the message in their further actions. From the sender’s perspective, it means the difference between whether the message was successful or not. This introduces the three improbabilities of communication as discussed by Niklas Luhmann: 1. That beyond the narrow circle of those present, other addressees are reached. 2. That the meaning of the message is understood. 3. That the understood information is accepted. “The three types of improbability are mutually reinforcing. They cannot be dealt with and changed into probabilities one after another. The solution of one problem makes it that much more difficult to solve the others. The better one’s understanding of a communication, the more grounds one has to reject it. When communication extends beyond the circle of those immediately present, understanding becomes more difficult and rejection again easier.” (Luhmann, 1981, p. 124) On the level of communicative reality, we are dealing with the communicative actions of the senders and the reception experience of the addressees. The communication relations sensitize us to how inappropriate it is to treat people as objects who should simply accept the actions of others. Of the immense consequences that arise from the emergence of a sign-based reality, three are initially highlighted: imagination, fiction, and lying. Virtuality adds another dimension later, but it is based on the possibility of meaningless information.

3.1.1

No Communication Without Imagination

The use of an analog sign is bound to the necessity of forming an idea of its meaning (Semantics). The ability to take the immediately perceived as an occasion for further ideas and to give these a real meaning is originally a characteristic of myth. For communication, signs are found that take a representative position for the designated. However, it should be emphasized again, the connection between the sign and the designated must be present in the memory of the communicators. Only if the word “house” evokes an idea of a house, will the sender and addressees understand each other “somehow”.

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For the understanding of the game, we are already at a key point here, because we recognize that there is no necessary connection between the (tangible or intangible) object that is designated and the sign that is chosen for it, but only a habit has prevailed: Another sign could have been associated with the idea of a house. There are the two principal possibilities of connecting the same object with a different sign or the same sign with a different meaning. Communicatively, there is therefore nothing to prevent players from agreeing to give a small branch the meaning of a lightsaber for the duration of their game, to align their handling of it with this meaning, and in this way to create a ludic reality in which this piece of wood is a deadly weapon. But, and this is the crucial point, this transformation is only possible communicatively, it needs the agreement on what meaning this piece of wood should have in the game. Another (in this case ludic) meaning allows and requires a corresponding different handling of the piece of wood. The access to realities presented here, which can only be achieved through (also differently possible) meaning, is a typically modern view. We will return to this in Sect. 5.2. The world of imagination, which is necessarily connected with the use of signs, has further characteristics. The sign “house” is a generalization, an abstraction. Taken by itself, it can stand for any house, it does not yet say anything about which house is being talked about. In scientific discourse, we speak of a “symbol” as opposed to a signal, which is fixed to a very specific practical meaning: The red traffic light, for example, means stop and nothing else. The symbol “house” is only made ready for practical use with the help of specifications, such as a precise address. Such steps towards clarity are context-dependent. Only a specific context turns any house into a specific type of house or even this exact house. The abstraction, often perceived as an obstacle to understanding, offers possibilities for orientation without which communication would constantly lose itself in details. Communication unfolds its great drama by the fact that the ideas associated with the signs are “at home” in (at least two) different minds. Precisely because the meanings of the signs must have a certain level of abstraction, they offer room for different specifications. The meaning intended by the sender and the meaning understood by the recipient fundamentally run the risk of differing more or less from each other. Understanding usually also involves elements of misunderstanding, which can even predominate. Such misunderstandings can usually be clarified communicatively, provided they become relevant for experiencing or acting and the parties involved want this. As the use of signs develops into language, the signs are linked together according to certain grammatical rules (syntax). Above all, a kind of storage chamber for shared meaning emerges, a semantic household, in which one must be familiar in order to participate in the conversation. Beyond individual ideas, narratives can emerge; “grand narratives” that present a comprehensive worldview, and many small stories that circulate in everyday life - including those that form a guide for games. Narratives and stories enrich the world of imagination, “the best” - whatever that means - anchor themselves in memory. With the connections they establish and the interpretations they offer, they provide support and orientations. At the same

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time, the concept of narrative reveals an ambivalence that points to how low the threshold between imagination and fiction can be. In contrast to the use of signs in language, painting, as long as it does not itself choose the possibility of abstraction, commits itself to a specific idea, which it fixes as an image. Because it takes a visualized form, what is really absent can be perceived visually, more or less accurately. In all historical phases before digitalization, the image is a highly impractical means in everyday communication compared to language; especially when it does not come to the recipients, but has to be sought out by them. But already with photography, the image gains a higher status in both private and public communication, even outside the realm of art. The “flood of images” begins with the moving image, the film, to then flood the distribution medium computer in digital communication - with video games as the avant-garde.

3.1.2

Reality of Signs, Fictionality of the Designated

Because communication only works in conjunction with imagination, the path is clear for fiction. The reality of signs - scientifically, the materiality of signs is also discussed, for example the material from which written characters or images are made or on which they are depicted (cf. Gumbrecht & Pfeiffer, 1994) - offers no guarantee that the designated object is something that really exists. The idea of a house does not have to refer to something that can be perceived in reality, it can also imagine a fantasy construct. Of course, in this case too, the meaning of the signs must be known and shared. Meaning is a collective phenomenon. (Of course, one can agree on secret signs that are only understandable for certain recipients and exclude all others.) The fact that imagination separates from perception can become a social phenomenon with the help of signs, metaphysics steps alongside physics. Not only the absent, but also the not at all real existing now plays a role in human coexistence. Negation becomes normal, nothingness can become a topic and a problem. From here, the interesting constellation of fictional narration becomes conceivable and practicable. That is, signs are connected in such a way that a story emerges that does not want to be a description of real events, but lets imagination run free. When the printing press, originally intended for the reproduction of the Bible, allowed novels to be popularized along with literacy, the excitement about so much fictionality was great and the complaints about “loss of reality” loud. The history of communication is overall characterized by the fact that the difference between the self-made experiences of everyday dealings on the one hand and the increasing use of signs detached from personal experiences on the other hand triggers dissent. While some see this as a negative development leading to disorientation and loss of reality, others consider it very positive because it expands the horizon of imagination and thus also increases the possibilities for thinking and information.

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The message, it should be noted at this point, even if it appears as an unmentionable matter of course, does not only have to consist of a word, a sentence or an image, it can take very elaborate formats up to hours-long compositions of texts, sounds and images. Just as architecture builds villas, palaces and skyscrapers from individual building blocks, communication builds large-format works from individual messages. Within such large formats of messages, such as novels, operas, television series, communications take place again, dialogues, commands, declarations of love. The virtual game worlds in which several thousand players interact with and against each other at the same time (cf. Filiciak, 2003) represent technically particularly advanced formats in this respect.

3.1.3

Pictures Don’t Lie

A completely different case than imagination and fiction is the lie, which also comes into the world with the use of signs. To lie means to use signs for the message that suggest to the recipients ideas of a reality that the senders assume is not true. Not the information or knowledge of the senders is communicated, but signs are used that are intended to generate other, false information or other, incorrect knowledge in the recipients: The holiday card says, “the sun is shining,” although it is raining. “Pictures don’t lie” is a common saying. The photographic representation replaces the communicative necessity of making an idea with a direct visual impression. The difference between the information that the senders have and the message seems to be abolished, because the picture shows the recipients what the senders see - but not everything. Photography sensitizes in a special way to a basic problem of communication: All communication is selection. More obvious than sound or written characters, photography points out that its message, the picture, is a picture section, spatially from a non-visible context, temporally a snapshot. How easily the choice of section and timing of a photograph can create misleading information in recipients is a wellknown phenomenon. At the latest with the possibilities of digital image editing, the optimism that pictures do not lie has definitely ended. What is exposed as a lie may only have been a mistake, so it may have been shared sincerely, but unfortunately was wrong. Senders may have mistakenly believed the information they shared to be true. From a historical perspective, there is a pronounced tendency among contemporaries to disqualify the ideas that previous generations had about God and the world as errors. However, the question of sincerity raises an insoluble communication problem, because sincerity is not communicable. Senders can swear up and down that they didn’t know something, that they fell for a mistake, but apart from themselves, no one else can reliably know if that is actually the case. Communication only exists thanks to the difference between what is communicated and the ideas (the information, the knowledge) of the senders. Because we cannot look into each other’s heads, we depend on communication (and communication depends on trust). “The

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differentiation of a society that uses language and employs signs gives rise to the problem of error and deception, of the unintentional and intentional abuse of signs. [...] With this in mind, it is understandable that society morally appreciates sincerity, truthfulness, and the like, and in the communication process has to rely on trust. But this only confirms that what nevertheless remains possible should not occur.” (Luhmann, 2012, p. 135)

3.1.4

Ludic Communication Freedoms

What do such insights into the communication process say about the game? Games are capable - in the mode of non-binding doing as if - of exploiting all possibilities of communication; which also means that they are bound to the respective historically given media-technical conditions of communication (see Sect. 3.2). While in societal normality the differences within the triad of reality, imagination, fiction are taken very seriously - even though and precisely because they are often not easy to determine - and lying is treated as a special, often quite serious case, the ludic mode of operation of non-binding doing as if allows a general “mix-up” with arbitrary mixing ratios. This gives rise to freedoms that no one has under normal communication conditions, because resistance arises when fictitious is treated as realistic or a lie becomes obvious. The game action gains its attractiveness not only, but also from this fact that its communication conditions allow it to play with imaginations, fictions, and lies alike. Within the rules of a game, lies are not a moral question, they can be normal moves. “Are you looking for a board game that requires lying and/or bluffing? We have created an overview of the 30 best bluffing games. Bluffing games encourage players to resort to deception or even lies to achieve their goals.” (boardgame.tips, 2023) The theoretical option to abolish the barriers between realities, imaginations, and fictions in the game gets practical application possibilities with digitization that go far beyond the possibilities of the past. Much that was previously only possible in thought and verbalized can now appear as moving images and in virtual action contexts (see Sect. 3.3).

3.1.5

Characteristics of the Message: Strategic, Factual, Entertaining

The next step in the analysis asks about the program structures of communication (cf. Luhmann, 2000) and aims to assign the game to it. Within the triad of sender, message, recipient, the selection is made of what is communicated to whom, when, and how, and what is received by whom, when, and how. Communication takes place as the interaction of these three components, none can be dispensed with, but

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the lead changes, shifts in emphasis are common. The influence of each component can be greater or smaller in individual cases. The everyday understanding of communication is very much oriented towards attributing the leadership to the sender’s side. This was also the approach that communication research initially favored. It is obvious, because clearly the senders decide on the message (whether, when, what, how, to whom they communicate something). But a message does not yet make communication, it depends on the recipients which message they receive and which they do not, and thus they ultimately decide whether communication takes place. But also the topic and the medium affect the character of the message. Even if the senders execute the message, so to speak: If communication is to take place, it is by no means self-evident that the leadership lies with them. Somewhat simplified, a message, oriented towards the triadic constellation of the communication act, can exhibit the three programmatic basic properties of being strategic, factual, entertaining: Strategic messages are primarily oriented towards the goals and purposes of the senders; well-known formats are propaganda, advertising, and selfpresentation (PR). Factual messages are primarily intended to do justice to their topic; well-known formats are the news, analysis, and documentation, as well as teaching and learning. Entertaining messages are primarily intended to provide recipients with a desired experience; well-known formats are jokes, entertainment novels, music, shows, and games of all kinds. In the self-understanding of modern society, a clear hierarchy of evaluation of these three programs has emerged. Without being able to unfold the line of argumentation here, it can be summarized that rationality, behavior based on reasons, has replaced traditional ties to religious beliefs in the societal hierarchy of values. Communicatively, rationality means a topic-focused, factual-argumentative communication behavior. This is how modernity wants the communication of its actors and characterizes corresponding messages as “objective”, “independent”, “impartial”, “prejudice-free”, “understanding-oriented”. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1984, 1987) has detailed this program of communicative action and summarized it as follows: “The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining general assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments.” (Habermas, 1984, p. 26)

Strategic communication ranks second in the value scale. The modern concept of rationality operationally includes pursuing one’s own purposes and goals efficiently and effectively. As a consequence, actors have the freedom to assert their interests also in their communication behavior and to prioritize messages in all communicative respects strategically. Not infrequently, actors strive to flag strategic messages as thematically factual in order to cash in on the associated reputation bonus.

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The habit of reducing observations of communication to the sender’s perspective results in little attention being paid to how much factuality or strategy can also shape recipient behavior. Put simply: A fact-oriented reception is very interested in counterarguments, while the strategic reception only takes note of confirmations of its own information and knowledge status. While the strategic program of communication is accepted as a necessity and the factual program is highly valued, the entertainment program is rather underestimated. A communicative behavior that “only” serves the experiential desires of recipients and thus does not primarily commit itself to the matter itself or the purposes of the sender, ranks at the bottom of the value scale - but enjoys, after all, that is its program, special popularity among recipients. This constellation leads, on the one hand, to a constant discrepancy: the factuality considered valuable “succumbs” in practice again and again to entertainment, which at least in parts of the public causes a permanent dissatisfaction with the existing communication conditions. On the other hand, it is not surprising that strategic communication, because of the great demand for experience-oriented messages, also likes to present itself as entertainment. And thirdly, it can be expected that entertainment will be instrumentalized for whatever goals and purposes. With these systematic considerations on the program structure of communication, we have also laid the foundation for Chap. 4 in which we discuss the instrumentalizations of the game. In addition, we now also have the systematic justification for the fact that ludic communication - precisely because it is part of entertainment - is ranked lower in societal evaluation. How up- and down-valuations within entertainment and within games take place can only be judged on a more concrete level of analysis. The analytical distinction between strategic, factual, and entertaining helps to understand how these programs merge into each other in the practice of communication, so that various mixed formats emerge, which then bear names such as infotainment (factual and entertaining), press release (strategic and factual), film commercial (strategic and entertaining). It also becomes fundamentally understandable that, for example, serious games (Sect. 4.3) and gamification (Sect. 4.4) are normal development possibilities from a communication perspective, which are just waiting for opportunities to be realized. Both the development of the concept of play (Chap. 2) and now the communication-theoretical analysis have assigned the game to entertainment, thus confirming common knowledge. At least we now have systematic knowledge of why this is so and know the first consequences.

3.2

Development and Differentiation of Communication

On the outlined foundation of sender-message-recipient, communication develops and differentiates - with profound effects both on the way of human coexistence and for the conceptions of reality and worldviews that people make.

3.2

Development and Differentiation of Communication

41

The simple idea that there is only one reality, which is perceived, seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted by living beings, begins to become problematic as soon as the reality of signs, whether as texts, sounds or images, is added to perception. For now, imaginations are constantly present, fictions are normal, and lies must be expected. In every present, a division of the world takes place into a part for which signs are used, and the other part that remains unnamed. Unnamed means in practice unobserved, unnoticed. It makes sense that signs are only used for objects and events that have practical relevance to life. So, although there is a sign for every person, namely his name; “big names” are signs that many know. But so far there is no reason for each individual animal or each individual stone to have its own sign. Much had to be discovered by humans first in order to be able to name it. For example: Since there has been human life, it begins with an inhalation and ends with an exhalation. Oxygen, however, was only discovered around 1775, before that there was neither a word nor the chemical sign for it. That perception is only possible selectively is something no sane person would dispute. We can now name the inevitable selective nature of communication in its three dimensions. The first selection distinguishes the designated from the undesignated; the undesignated can be perceived, but not communicated. The second selection separates within the designated the thematized and the non-thematized; the mandatory choice of topic means a narrowing of communication, which excludes other topics and consigns them to the waiting list or to oblivion. The third selection sorts within the thematized between recipients and non-recipients, because not everything that is communicated is received by all; this is where it is decided what attracts broad attention and what remains a niche topic. These selections are as simple as they are fundamental facts that are largely ignored in everyday communication because it is fascinated by the fact that communication succeeds at all. But it is a success that is only possible due to such restrictions. Anyone who still appears with the claim of complete knowledge in any field can only be a charlatan. Undeniably, the number of signs has increased over the millennia, but not continuously. Rather, it has grown strongly since the fifteenth century in the process of modernization, which was also a process of alphabetization, and then exploded since the end of the nineteenth century. In 1975, Jean Baudrillard published the essay “KOOL KILLER or the insurrection by signs”. The impression that communications increasingly overlay direct perceptions, that messages increasingly replace immediate experiences, provoked criticism and unease even before the effects of digitization became apparent. In science, the view found supporters that human perception does not penetrate - more or less far - into reality, but that what people consider reality is formed in the communication process in the first place. Under the term “constructivism”, this view was able to establish itself (e.g. von Glasersfeld, 1995). In the relationship between events of tangible reality and the accompanying communication events, many real events become a punctual occurrence due to the increase in signs, which is flooded by messages like a pebble over which a dam breaks. The presence of the event is far exceeded by its presence as a topic of communication. To realize this, it is enough to take a single attention-grabbing game

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of a professional football or basketball league. To read, hear and watch everything that is said before, during and after this less than two-hour event in personal conversations, reported in print and broadcast media, and posted on the internet, no human life is enough; not least because communication cascades are created, because the communication about the topic itself becomes the topic again, comments are commented on, the reports are criticized, perhaps even scientifically analyzed and the analyses then become the subject themselves by being subjected to criticism from other scientific perspectives. What can also be noted is the connection between the increase in signs and the expansion of the imaginable. The development of communication prompts people to form an idea of people, things and non-things (cf. Flusser, 1999) that are not accessible to their perception, that are literally not “comprehensible” to them and go beyond what is known. The possibilities of thinking new things, imagining alternatives and communicating them go hand in hand, because consciousness and communication are closely linked. The communication conditions that contemporaries of the twenty-first century take for granted exhibit a historically unprecedented abundance of signs and thus increasingly draw previously unimaginable things into the realm of imagination. The game plays a special, an outstanding role in this, precisely because it is better able to exploit the possibilities of communication in the mode of non-binding action as if. There is no need to speculate about the distribution of shares of strategic, factual, and entertaining messages in this enormous expansion process of communication at this point. It is obvious: As long as free time is available, the possibilities of desired experiences, that is, the entertainment offers can increase and thus also the gaming possibilities. The noticeable expansion of gaming is not an isolated phenomenon, it takes place within the framework of the general accelerated development of communication, which is also scientifically described under the term of mediatization (Hjarvard, 2013; Pallas, 2020).

3.2.1

Evolution of Distribution Media

Quantitatively and qualitatively, the evolution of sign usage is linked to the distribution media. The transport possibilities - to pick up the problematic metaphor once again - limit or expand what, how much, and how far can be transmitted. The milestones in the development of distribution media, also referred to as “mediamorphoses”, have often been described: language, writing, printing, broadcasting, digitalization. Two aspects are initially to be emphasized, which also influence the evolution of gaming. First, much depends on the availability of the distribution medium: whether it is used collectively at a central point like a printing press or a cinema, or individually like the printer next to the desk and the television in the apartment. Second, the production process and the distribution services of the distribution media are becoming increasingly demanding, especially in connection with the industrialization process. It starts with the mechanical reproduction of signs,

3.2

Development and Differentiation of Communication

43

with printing technology becoming increasingly powerful up to rotary printing. The nineteenth century experiences a chemical mediamorphosis with the photo and the beginnings of film. The electromagnetic and its subsequent - initially analog, then digital - electronic transmission of signs form the steps up to the present with its global, satellite-supported networks (cf. Wu, 2011). In cinema and television, optical and acoustic reproduction merge, which writing had kept clearly separate. Effects on gaming are always evident. As long as only language is available for the distribution of messages, the range of hearing forms the limit of reachability. Games in oral communication depend on the physical presence of the participants. Communication among those present, also called interaction or face-to-face communication, has remained a very attractive format for gaming for several reasons to this day: On the one hand, the gaming experience is directly linked to the experience of the fellow players, their emotionality, facial expressions, and gestures. On the other hand, presence allows smooth transitions between communication in the game, communication about the game, and communication beyond the game. This triple interaction as actors of the game, as people who have the game as a common theme and experience, and as individuals who have (more or less) interest in each other, intensifies the shared gaming experience. The attraction of gaming as interaction between those present is also shown by the fact that with sports and acting (theater), two early forms of gaming in front of an audience have been preserved for millennia. It falls under the secret of success of digitalization that it provides not identical, but comparable possibilities of interaction between absentees. The writing, which enables communication between absent parties, makes knowledge about games independent of individual memory performance and oral tradition. It expands the repertoire of games, game materials can be equipped with numbers and letters in addition to images. However, the game situation as an action between present parties does not change with the advent of writing. The gaming experience remains an interaction between those present. Even the printing press only marginally changes this basic constellation at first. The development of printing technology particularly promotes the career of card games, which could not be stopped by either church or state prohibitions; but also the spread of lotteries, because it facilitates the printing of tickets. According to legend, the construction of the Great Wall of China was also financed with the help of an early form of gamification, the Keno lottery. The advancement of printing technology and the money economy, in combination, lead to games expanding beyond the family and circle of acquaintances and the spread of gambling for money. The seventeenth century marks the beginning of a golden age of casinos in Europe. Direct, non-media mediated perception is fundamentally open to all five senses. Distribution media, however, are so far only accessible with the ears and/or eyes. The inventions of the camera at the beginning and film at the end of the nineteenth century have significantly increased the importance of the image for communication compared to text. As important stages of visual communication, they belong to the prehistory of video games. From the perspective of the game, film is a step in the developmental line that leads from the drama of the theater stage, through the novel,

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the feature film, the radio play, and the television film, to video games. The basic communicative pattern of this development is the fictional narrative, which is presented with actors or speakers in sight or brought to the ear. The modifications of the communicative constellation sender-message-recipient that result from this do not need to be reconstructed here in detail, we will present them precisely for video games. Having this developmental line in view makes two phenomena understandable that emerged very strongly in the early phase of digital games. One is the scientific controversy that ludologists and narratologists have fought over whether video games are better understood when observed and described as a game or as a narrative. It has now largely been accepted, “that the so-called Narratology vs. Ludology Dilemma is a false one and that this debate will have to be resolved, as it is of no help to the cause of establishing Computer Games Study as an autonomous and independent academic field” (Kokonis, 2014). If one understands the game as an integrated element of the history of communication, one does not even come up with the idea of opposing the two perspectives, but recognizes that narratives can of course be the red thread of a game. The other phenomenon is the frequent, persistent public criticism of digital games. They are branded as inferior entertainment with a dangerous addiction potential. The Chinese government, for example, attacked the internet company Tencent and referred to video games as “electronic drugs” (BBC, 2021). The criticism reads differently when one knows that the beginnings of film and later television were also subject to massive accusations. The film, for example, was described by none other than Alfred Döblin, the author of the famous novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, as “theater of the little people” and as a mere “amusement machine”; Döblin certainly forgot that novels were initially scandalized and only gained recognition as literature in the eighteenth century (cf. Watts, 1957). The diagnosis that technological progress and cultural decline go hand in hand is repeated, it accompanies film as well as television and computer games. From the program analysis of communication, we know that this cultural criticism is directly related to the downgraded value of entertainment. A third phenomenon, namely the cineludic transformation, receives attention later, around the turn of the millennium. Mutual transformations of films and film series into game formats and from games into film formats become a matter of course and attract great attention. In the format of the series, which practices offensive expectation management with the cliffhanger and shows many moments of repetition in its sequels (even if it is only the reappearance of the main actors), these externalities already point to a certain proximity to the game. Cross-media genre settings can be anything but a surprise when one remembers communication history and realizes the potentials of digitization. Nevertheless, in view of such hybrid tendencies, it is important to remember the peculiarity of the game and to emphasize the difference to the film. Jordan Mechner (2008) has worked this out in an essay and established as rule number one: “Do It, Don‘t View It”.

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Ludic Gala Thanks to Digital Media

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“What kind of story does a video game need? The traditional way to tell a story in a video game is to create a series of cinematic cutscenes that serve as “rewards” – transitions between gameplay levels. However, the cool way to tell a story in a video game is to eliminate or reduce the canned cutscenes as much as possible, and instead construct the game so that the most powerful and exciting moments of the story will occur within the gameplay itself. The screenwriting maxim actions speak louder than words applies to video games as well as films, but in a different way. Video games, unlike movies, are interactive. Whereas in a film it’s better to show than to tell, in a video game it’s better to do than to watch. Give the story’s best moments to the player, and he’ll never forget them. Put them in a cutscene, and he’ll yawn.” (Mechner, 2008) As an interim conclusion, we note that the milestones in the development of distribution media build on each other. Language, writing, printing, and radio do not disappear with digitization, they remain important for the communication of texts, sounds, and images and enter into digitization in modified forms. The same applies to the evolution of gaming, in that much of the old is preserved in the new. All previous stages continue to exist, which means that all ludic variations that existed before the computer remain possible. From direct communication between those present (e.g., hide-and-seek, singing, ball games) to writing (e.g., board, puzzle games), printing (e.g., card games) to radio media (radio plays, feature films), nothing is lost in principle. Even the toys developed with analog techniques, up to the electric train, the talking doll, and the remote-controlled car, remain. What is new?

3.3

Ludic Gala Thanks to Digital Media

If playing means dealing with the unexpected again and again in the mode of a non-binding doing as if voluntarily, temporally, often also spatially marked in the hope of success, the question arises why game and computer apparently fit together so well. What additional communication potentials does digitization offer that trigger a boom in gaming? For gaming, all variations that existed before the computer remain possible, but the attractiveness of gaming on and with the computer pushes itself to the fore. Virtuality becomes the gala of ludic communication. What is the basis for this and what differentiation processes are underway or, figuratively speaking, what is the root for this and what flowers does it produce? This section is dedicated to these two questions. The answer to the very basic question, “why are there computer games at all?” (Pias, 2017, p. 7) lies in our view in the minimalism of the medium computer with simultaneous maximum variety of possible communications. A comparison with writing may illustrate this statement. The Latin alphabet has 26 letters from A to Z, from which an unmanageable amount of words and with these an unmanageable amount of sentences can be formed. As soon as printing presses could multiply the words and sentences in large editions, a new culture developed – often referred to as

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the Gutenberg galaxy today – with profound, “revolutionary” effects on social life. Modern society had a midwife in the printing press, the computer brings it to its peak (see also Sect. 5.3). Even more revealing than the comparison with writing is the parallel to the operation of language. “Language offers a positive and a negative version of everything that is said.” (Luhmann, 2012, p. 132) We want to call this duplication rule, which underlies the structure of language, a “binary coding” with Niklas Luhmann. The code of language operates with the two values Yes and No. “It’s raining”, “it’s not raining”, “I love you”, “I don’t love you”, in both cases the language is freely available for both statements, each of the statements is equally understandable. “Coding as such contains no preference for yes-versions or no-versions, just as language as such is not there to favor the acceptance of communication over rejection.” (ibid, p. 136) The flexibility of language also allows to evade the Yes or No with silence or with relativizing formulations, maybe, could be. But what matters in our context: If everything that is affirmed can also be denied and everything that is denied can also be affirmed - and language provides exactly for this and thus invites dispute -, then, purely linguistically speaking, nothing is necessary and nothing is impossible. Its simple binary coding increases the statement possibilities of language to the infinite. But language remains bound to the limit of meaning, as its basic code Yes/No conveys meaning. It fails as soon as the meaning of the signs used is not shared, as soon as its signs appear meaningless. This is exactly where the difference to digital technology lies. Structurally, the computer operates exactly like language with a binary basic code, known as 0 or 1. However, this is a use of signs that makes a difference without meaning. Apart from their difference, this 0 and this 1 have nothing to mean. This emptying of meaning, the maximum reduction to the mere marking of a difference, allows digital technology to register everything - actually and without restriction everything -, which makes a difference, as data. Mind you, as data, not as information, because what difference the difference makes (Bateson, 2000/1972, p. 315; see Sect. 3.1, fn. 3), which is registered as data, the calculating machine does not need to bother with. The software is responsible for the question of which differences are informative. An impression of how calculation can disregard meaning is conveyed by the comparison between the use of a firearm and a tennis racket in a computer game. The relationship between time and space is calculated for a movable point. The consequences of presence or absence at a certain moment are computationally indifferent. “In this regard, shooter games and tennis games are not so far removed from one another, for the problem of dying or letting a ball pass by does not lie in striking a target or being struck; rather, it lies in a player’s responsiveness to punctuality. A player’s concern about bullets and tennis balls consists of being at the right place at the wrong time or of being at the wrong place at the right time – that is, of temporal displacement. In any case, it is a time-critical question whether I am there where a bullet is coming or not there where a ball is approaching. Thus my opponent’s goal in tennis is not to hit me but rather to locate my absence.” (Pias, 2017, p. 112)

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Science has always collected data by observing differences (and then gaining information from them), but never before in the quantity and speed possible with digital technology, never with these storage and computing capacities. The computer captures and processes data in a quantity and at a speed that far exceed human comprehension and processing capacity. This potential is based on a known principle. It can unfold, “because the more complex arise out of a combinatoric play upon the simpler. The larger and richer the collection of building blocks that is available for construction, the more elaborate are the structures that can be generated” (Simon, 1996, p. 165). The simplest currently known building block of communication is this difference between 0 and 1. And the computer “plays” with this difference. Its mode of operation makes the computer not only indifferent to any communication. Every topic and every contribution, whether it is verbal, written, visual, or auditory, becomes data collection for it. The computer is also indifferent to differences in physical, chemical, mechanical, biological, social data. The “Internet of Things (IoT)” is also capable of virtualizing physical data. The 3D printer receives its information, such as construction plans, in purely digital form and transforms them, along with the fed materials, into a tangible object. This operating principle is best illustrated by its optimal form, beaming, as we know it from the science fiction series Star Trek: The almost instantaneous transport of an object or person to any other place is no longer a physical process, but an information process. Dissolved into data, the object travels at lightning speed to be recovered from this data at another location.

3.3.1

The Great Advantage of Playing in Digital Times

The radical reduction of every difference to the meaningless binary digital code becomes the starting point for a design potential, whose dimensions, measured by the real existing shifting baselines, break many boundaries. Due to digitization, society had to search for ways and means to use and harness this design potential, and in doing so had to restructure its communication and working conditions in many respects. And here comes the great advantage of the game into play. Because they take place in the mode of non-binding acting as if, ludic actions can allow the design possibilities of digital technology to unfold freely without regard to normalities. It has often been said and written, also by Claus Pias, “that the world of the (digital) computer is itself already a game world: It is a world-generating (and thus medial) game in terms of limited number of symbols and starting points, its fixed repertoire of possible moves, and its restricted set of potential rule violations and outcomes. To conceptualize the game world of computers is thus to conceptualize the history and theory of the computer itself.” (Pias, 2017, p. 11) The digitized electronic calculating machine can play with everything, whether it is a game, a tax return or a construction makes no difference for the computing operations.

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Programming means, in this sense, developing a specific game for the computer, which never does anything other than play. This is a very popular, repeatedly presented view. In our opinion, it only gains great significance when it is rated as equally true and false. The ludic moment of a design freedom, which is allowed to leave everything normal and necessary behind, undoubtedly resides in the computer. Nothing prevents it from calculating every conceivable possibility. And computers have no problem with the unexpected, because they operate without any expectations. Nevertheless, for good reasons, we colloquially say “the computer works” rather than “the computer plays”; it processes a program, it is programmed. Programming is usually a work performance, not a game, at most, paradoxically formulated, a commissioned game. Even the programming of a game usually takes place in binding work contexts. The contrast between the voluntariness and non-binding nature of playing and the commissioned activity of programming, which is involved in consequential economic, medical, political etc. operations, needs to be emphasized (see also Sect. 5.4). It can be described in such a way that the computer plays with all necessities and normalities, but this does not make them a game. It may be helpful for understanding to recall the historical cultural comparison made by system theorist Dirk Baecker (2003, pp. 58–76) between writing, printing, and computers. Roughly sketched, he argues that in the script culture of antiquity, priests were responsible for guarding the border between the correct worldview and heresy, while farmers, soldiers, and, what Baecker forgets, women had to take care of necessities. In the modern culture of printing, intellectuals took over the former function of priests at the borders between truth and untruth, while the writers, accountants, recorders, chroniclers, noted the necessary. In digital culture, players are the guardians of the realms of possibility and programmers are there to do the necessary work. This understanding of culture reflects both aspects very well, on the one hand the outstanding importance of the game for digitization, but on the other hand, the one-sidedness of a perspective becomes clear, which pretends as if everything important about computers has been said. Ambiguity is a decisive characteristic of digital culture, which is dissolved in favor of an unrealistic clarity when, in the context of Game Studies, the playful gala of the computer sometimes makes its function as a calculating machine a marginal note. Nevertheless, it is true when Sherry Turkle diagnoses that it was primarily video games that brought computer culture into everyday modern life. “From their first appearance in the late 1970s, video games brought the computer culture into everyday life. The world of the video games, like all computer micro worlds, taught about action freed from the constraints of physical reality. In video games, objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer’s imagination. The objects in a video pinball game are made of information, not metal. Computational representations of a ball unlike a real ball, need not obey the laws of gravity unless their programmers want them

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Ludic Gala Thanks to Digital Media

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to. The heroes in the worlds of Nintendo can jump enormous height and crush opponents with their ‘weight’, yet suffer no harm to themselves.” (Turkle, 1995, p. 66) Again, we must refer to ambiguity, because the limitless design freedom has a downside. The real ball, which does the surprising thing on its own, only exists digitally as a computer-controlled object - everything surprising about its movements is programmed. We had noted in Chap. 2 about the peculiarity of the game: The ludic space of possibilities does not dictate and does not determine what use is made of it, everything can become the theme and subject of the game. This also applies to computer games and yet a new, different situation arises because the participants lose their sovereignty in dealing with the individual game model and its rules. The players cannot override the programmed sequences without leaving the game. They must stay in the game, they cannot switch to a pure play mode and reinvent the game for themselves. “To play an action game means to perform a permanent accommodation. [...] There are no gimmicks or negotiations in action games – there is no incorrect way to play correctly. Moreover, there is no room for a subject to transcend the game and impose his or her (specifically human) will.” (Pias, 2017, p. 122f) Again, a relativization is needed, because thanks to the outstanding capacities of the calculating machine, the programmed sequences can leave so many spaces for play that the participants either do not feel restricted in their decision-making freedoms or where they encounter barriers, they experience these as game rules that need to be observed and adhered to in order to advance in the game. “One of the most significant differences between video games and more traditional games is how the rules are enforced. In traditional games, rules are primarily enforced by the players themselves or by an impartial referee in high stakes games, such as sporting events. With computer games, it becomes possible (and sometimes necessary) for the computer to enforce the rules. This is more than a convenience – it allows for the creation of games much more complex than was traditionally possible, because now the players don’t have to memorize all the rules about what is and is not possible – they just try things in the game, and see what works and what doesn’t work – they don’t have to memorize it all, or look it up. [...] A game like Warcraft could conceivably be a board game, but there would be so many rules to remember and state to keep track of that it would quickly become a dreary experience. By offloading the dull work of rules enforcement onto the computer, games can reach depths of complexity, subtlety, and richness that are not possible any other way.” (Schell, 2008, p. 147f.) The enormous dimensions of the space of possibilities, in which the scenarios of the Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) are designed, offer the participants a virtual persistent world that increasingly takes on the characteristics of so-called hyperrealism in art (e.g. Cormand, 2019) and whose history continues regardless of the personal participation of individuals in the game - as long as others play. Under such comfortable gaming conditions, it is easy to forget the calculating machine operating in the background and its capacities, however limited they may be.

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3.4

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The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

On the Development Dynamics of Video Games

To understand the development dynamics of video games, it is advisable not to immediately focus on their uniqueness, but to precede with a more general observation. Many examples can show how artifacts that prove themselves as everyday objects become a kind of medium that can take on the most diverse forms. Take shoes for example. The basic idea of not walking barefoot, but somehow covering the naked human foot, has become globally accepted. The development process, which has resulted in an almost unmanageable diversity of shoes, runs along the difference between shoe and environment: shoes take on forms that meet the expectations and requirements of the environment. The basic function of covering the naked foot differentiates into the most varied performances, which each create their own form, a specific design of the shoe, such as hiking boots, felt slippers or flip-flops, football boots or high heels. The clock is another example. The idea of measuring time beyond the natural change of day and night and the seasons is a few thousand years old, starting with the sundial. However, mechanical timekeeping devices have only existed since about the fourteenth century. Here too, it is the relationship of the basic function, measuring time, to the historical circumstances that determines the design of the clocks, whether they are tower, pocket or wristwatches, quartz or digital watches. The same, such a differentiation process according to functional and aesthetic criteria, can be observed thousands of times, also with gloves, glasses and headgear. More abstractly formulated, the state of the respective object results from the interaction of object and circumstance (see the methodological note in the introduction). The circumstances can be more precisely defined as a combination of the two variables technical development plus expectations and requirements of the social environment, with the dominant actors, for example the church, nobility, the militarily particularly strong, the economically particularly rich, the politically particularly powerful having the greatest influence. What stands out in the development of video games is the high speed at which they have spread in a large “species diversity”. Even from this perspective, the development is better understood when the more general context is illuminated. There must be reasons why people’s living conditions have changed only very slowly over many centuries and have remained very dependent on their natural environment, while in the 19th and 20th centuries a fundamental difference has emerged between highly developed industrial nations and - from their perspective so-called developing countries, which still lived and worked in the old mode, now appearing as stagnation. “In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature.” (Rosa, 2003; see also Rosa, 2013, pp. 211–223; Gleick 1999; Herz, 1997). Acceleration and diversity of artifact development increase markedly under three mutually reinforcing conditions. (a) Firstly, when there is an explicit interest in offering new special performances instead of just reacting to randomly changing

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On the Development Dynamics of Video Games

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circumstances. (b) Secondly, when basic societal functions such as economy, politics, military etc. gain a certain independence and can develop relatively freely in their field. (c) Thirdly, when the lifestyle individualizes and the individual use of artifacts - one can think of the telephone, washing machine and car, for example takes the place of or even replaces collective forms of use. We would like to briefly explain each of the three conditions. (a) As long as it is exclusively about the possible uses of artifacts, there is no permanent pressure for expansion, because practical use has relatively narrow limits. The amount an individual consumes, even if they live in luxury, has natural boundaries. The idea of infinite needs, which mainstream economics declares to be a natural state, only arises together with the spread and use of money as a universal investment tool used for its multiplication. Money used as capital indeed demands more money. “The Phoenicians invented money, but why so little,” is the associated bon mot. With the enforcement of the capitalist economic system, the question in society is reversed: Previously, people as consumers asked what they needed and tried to satisfy this need as producers. Now, people as producers and service providers ask what (solvent) consumers and other (solvent) producers might need, and try promising problem solutions, higher performance, more comfort in everyday life, in short: a better life - to present their ideas as innovations and generate demand for them. As long as money as capital is looking for profitable investment opportunities, the search for new ideas that prove themselves on the market does not end. In modern society, this drive for innovation has become so selfevident that it is often classified as a human natural characteristic not only in journalistic, but also in scientific communication. (b) No matter which area of human need one considers, whether food, clothing, medicine, information, communication tools, transportation, even weapons, in all fields there is such a rich assortment and such (highly unevenly distributed) abundance that the term “multi-option society” has become popular. This pervasive abundance arises from a mix of monoculture and multiculturalism: On the one hand, the individual performance fields can largely follow their own logic and drive further diversifications; there have never been more types of coffee, more types of bicycles, more film genres, more sports, more music directions etc. (while at the same time natural biodiversity is shrinking). On the other hand, all have each other in view and constantly check which of the - especially technical - developments in other areas could enrich their own field and which of their own innovations could also be used in other fields. Hybrid forms have become normal. Together with the innovation drive owed to the economic system, a kind of greenhouse climate for always more and constantly new things is formed in each performance field. (c) Whether 50 people travel in a coach or in 50 separate cars from A to B, whether 100 people use a phone booth over the course of a week or have 100 separate mobile phones in their pockets, whether 1000 people work in an office building

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or in 1000 home offices, makes a difference in many - social, economic, cultural, ecological - respects. “‘Why not?’ - is the most frequently posed question in a multioptional environment. It triggers changes in established societies by questioning traditional rules and values. From an individual viewpoint options create the basis for self-actualisation. Social systems that were formative in the past, such as hierarchy, church, state and family, have lost their influence ever since.” (Maas & Bühler, 2015) In our thematic context, it is only important to illustrate the logic of development as it is driven by processes of individualization in conjunction with innovation pressure and diversification. There is an obvious tendency to align the application possibilities of artifacts towards individual use, up to the current trend of singularization (see also Sect. 4.4): From mass production for individual application to the “tailor-made suit”, to individual production. Embedded in the megatrends of innovation pressure, diversification and individualization, the development stories of the computer and computer games no longer seem so extraordinary. The sensational undertone that adheres to some descriptions, which cannot sprinkle in the term revolution often enough, is certainly appropriate with regard to the basic technology of digitization, but the process of digitization remains within the pattern of technical modernization processes. This also applies under the profane aspect of research funding. “When you trace back the patents, it’s virtually impossible to find an arcade or console component that evolved in the absence of a Defence Department grant” (Herz, 1997, p.105). With quite different views on their beginnings, the history of the computer from Konrad Zuse’s Z3, probably the first functional computer, to the present smartphone has often been told (e.g., Campanile-Kelly et al., 2019) - but this history continues to be written, an end is not in sight. The potentials of digital transformation, which are being researched and tested under terms such as artificial intelligence, robotics, chatbots, Internet of Things, augmented reality, seem far from being exhausted. The computer game is not only a dependent variable of digitization, it is also considered a driver of technical developments. Digital technology inspires the game, the game inspires digital technology. Reports like this are anything but rare: “Porsche Engineering, technology service provider and wholly owned subsidiary of Porsche, is using games engines from the computer games industry to develop the intelligent vehicle of the future. Game engines - popular examples include Unity and Unreal - generate photorealistic images and ensure the physically correct behavior of objects in computer and video games. Among other uses, Porsche Engineering utilizes these software packages for the virtual development and testing of highly automated driving functions.” (Edwards, 2021) The development history of computer games (see e.g. Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008; Ivory, 2016) is driven on the one hand by a growing inner driving force. The great global resonance encourages game designers to constantly test new ideas and offer new games. The obvious chances of success invite many to take the risk, but public communication conveys a distorted picture: information is mainly about successes, failed attempts are much less often a public topic.

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On the Development Dynamics of Video Games

53

On the other hand, a strong expectation pressure has built up from the outside on the games industry, because the societal performance fields, above all the economy, want to participate and use the interest in computer games for themselves. Coupled with the technical efforts to further exploit the potentials of digitization, and with the still ongoing process of individualization, a dynamic market has emerged. On this market, it is the - compared to the MMOGs - seemingly unspectacular casual games on smartphones and tablets that particularly contribute to the big breakthrough of digital games. “In the short history of video games, casual games are something of a revolution - a cultural reinvention of what a video game can be, a re-imagining of who can be a video game player.” (Juul, 2010, p. 5–7) Casual games anchor the game in everyday life. They turn the bus and the subway, every waiting room and every park bench, the lecture hall and the work break into a playground. The game is mobilized and personalized in such a way that it can actually take place anywhere and at any time. “Until recently, gaming - like making phone calls and watching TV - was largely technically bound to specific locations: board gamers, for instance, usually sat in the living room, PC gamers at a desk, etc. Only two recent innovations introduced a potential delocalization of digital playing: first, the proliferation of smaller highperformance devices, such as PDAs and cell phones, mobile consoles like the PlayStation Portable (2004) and the Nintendo DS (2004), smartphones and tablets like the iPhone (2007) and the iPad (2010); second, the proliferation of wireless broadband connections over local networks (WLAN), cellular radio and GPS. Special attention should be given to the escalating delocalization of playing in so far as it has impacted how we play in and outside of our homes as well as how it influences where other players hang out and can be found.” (Freyermuth, 2015, p. 98) The above-described megatrends of innovation pressure, diversification, and individualization ensure that a variety of video game types have emerged and continue to develop at a high speed, which are difficult to overview and capture. With Fig. 3.1 we provide an overview that revolves around six basic distinctions: Action, Adventure, Strategy, Simulation, Role-playing games, and Diverse. The names of the individual game types are explained in a glossary at the end of this chapter. Good descriptions of most game types can also be found in Wolf (2012). In all these variations, computers and living people are involved, but in different ways. The computer can merely act as a kind of game board or offer an entire game world, it can be a co-player and opponent, and it always serves as the distribution medium, providing the people with a communication network. The people, who are connected to the computer via different interfaces, either only carry out game moves as in an analog board game, or they move avatars, which intervene in the game action as their virtual representatives. Or they wear so-called head-mounted displays, also known as VR glasses, and interact with them in a computer-generated world that creates a spatial impression in the brain with three-dimensional images (for the state of the art see, for example, Lv et al., 2022). The experience with HoloPac, the virtual reality version of Pac-Man, is described by Jeff Burton, a pioneer of video games, member of the founding team of Electronic Arts: “Suddenly, I was Pac-Man. I was

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Fig. 3.1 Types of Videogames (Source: Own representation. For explanations see the glossary at the end of this chapter)

running down the corridors in a maze, collecting gold coins and had to look for monsters at every corner. I didn’t control Pac-Man with a joystick. I was running myself.” (Kerler, 2019) There is no reason to believe that this marks the end of digital game development.

3.5

A Computer on Computer Games. Interview with ChatGPT

We have systematically followed the development of communication up to the reality form of virtuality and have been experiencing since November 2022 that a new communicator is intervening, the so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is a computing machine that delivers results - incomprehensibly fast compared to human performance - based on incessantly fed data and predetermined algorithms. The fact that it answers questions and solves tasks faster and more comprehensively than a

A Computer on Computer Games. Interview with ChatGPT

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Fig. 3.1 (continued)

3.5

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Fig. 3.1 (continued)

Fig. 3.1 (continued)

single human being evokes admiration and warnings. We do not interfere in this debate, especially since the practical progress of AI is not disturbed by it anyway. In our thematic context of the game, the observation seems important: AI can do impressively much, but it cannot distinguish between the non-binding acting as if of ludic communication and the binding seriousness of normal communication. It can neither recognize nor make this difference. The AI knows this itself and answers a corresponding question: As an AI model, I have no direct way to actively adjust my communication style or to distinguish between non-binding playful statements and normal binding statements. My goal is to provide useful and understandable information, regardless of the type of statement. It is up to you to interpret the meaning and context of my answers and decide whether they are

3.5

A Computer on Computer Games. Interview with ChatGPT

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Fig. 3.1 (continued)

meant to be more playful or binding. I will do my best to answer your questions clearly and precisely. If you have specific requirements or preferences for the communication style, you can state them, and I will try to adjust accordingly.

The fact that a communicator cannot distinguish between playful non-bindingness and normal obligations “is not a social trifle, is much more than a question of style, but a fundamental fact.” Johan Huizinga (1998/1938). In his fundamental work “Homo Ludens”, he presented backgrounds and contexts in many details with the punchline: A communicator who does not know the difference between play and normality has no culture. AI is cultureless: it does not ask questions of meaning, it does not orient itself towards values, it has no morals. We believe that our audience should know such contexts before we present the interview on the topic of play that we conducted on February 1, 2023, with the textbased dialogue system ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was developed by the American company OpenAI and made available to the public in November 2022 (c.f. OpenAI, 2022). On February 1, 2023, we conducted the following interview with the text-based dialogue system ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was developed by the American company OpenAI and made available to the public in November 2022 (c.f. OpenAI, 2022). Please, introduce yourself briefly. Who is giving me the interview? ChatGPT: Hello, I am ChatGPT, an advanced AI language model created by OpenAI. I don’t have a physical form or consciousness, so I am not conducting an

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Fig. 3.1 (continued)

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interview in the traditional sense. I am simply providing answers to your questions based on the information available to me. I would like to talk to you about games. Can you explain the difference between game and play? ChatGPT: In general, “game” and “play” are related but distinct concepts. A game is a structured activity typically with rules, objectives, and a outcome. Games can be competitive or cooperative, and they can be played alone or with others. Games often involve strategy, skill, chance, or a combination of these elements. On the other hand, play is a more general term that refers to engaging in activities for enjoyment or leisure. Play can encompass games, but it can also include other activities such as imaginative play, sports, or recreational activities. Play is a fundamental aspect of human experience and can serve as a means of learning, socializing, and stress relief. In summary, games are a type of play, but not all play is a game. What influence does digitalisation have on the possibilities to play? ChatGPT: Digitalization has had a significant impact on the possibilities for play. It has opened up new avenues for play through the creation of digital games, which can be played on a variety of devices such as computers, consoles, and mobile devices. Digital games offer new and unique experiences that are not possible in traditional physical games, such as the ability to simulate complex systems, explore virtual worlds, and connect with players from all over the world. Furthermore, digitalization has also changed the way we play traditional games. For example, many board games now have digital versions that can be played online, making it easier to play with friends and family who are not physically present. Digitalization has also enabled the creation of new hybrid games that combine physical and digital elements, providing new and unique play experiences. In addition, digitalization has expanded the reach of gaming, making it more accessible to a wider audience. Games can now be easily distributed and downloaded online, and many are free or low-cost, reducing barriers to entry for players. This has also led to the growth of the gaming industry and the creation of new jobs and economic opportunities. Overall, digitalization has greatly expanded the possibilities for play, offering new and unique experiences, making it more accessible and convenient, and creating new opportunities for growth and innovation. What is your understanding of video games? ChatGPT: Video games are interactive digital games that are played on electronic devices such as computers, consoles, and mobile devices. They typically involve visual and auditory elements, allowing players to control virtual characters, objects, or environments. Video games can range from simple arcade-style games to complex simulations and role-playing games (RPGs). Video games often have objectives, rules, and a system for keeping score. They can be played competitively against other players or cooperatively with others. Some video games also allow players to create their own content, such as custom levels or mods, further expanding the possibilities for play.

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The video game industry has grown rapidly in recent years and has become a major form of entertainment for people of all ages. Video games can provide opportunities for learning, problem-solving, and social interaction, as well as serving as a form of escapism and stress relief. Overall, video games are a diverse and constantly evolving form of digital media that offers a wide range of play experiences and can have a significant impact on culture and society (Fig. 3.2). Which different genres of computer games do you know? ChatGPT: There are many different genres of computer games, each offering its own unique play experience. Some of the most popular genres include: Action games – focus on fast-paced, reflex-based gameplay, often featuring shooting, fighting, or platforming elements. Adventure games – typically feature a storyline and puzzle-solving elements, allowing players to explore virtual worlds and interact with characters. Role-playing games (RPGs) – players take on the role of a character, often in a fantastical setting, and make choices that affect the outcome of the game. Simulation games – simulate real-world systems or environments, such as cities, economies, or ecosystems. Strategy games – challenge players to make decisions, manage resources, and plan tactics in order to achieve a goal. Sports games – simulate athletic competitions, such as football, basketball, or golf. Puzzle games – challenge players to solve increasingly complex problems, often using logic and spatial reasoning. Casual games – simple and easy-to-learn games that can be played in short bursts. This list is not exhaustive and there are many sub-genres within each category. The landscape of computer games is constantly changing, with new genres emerging and existing genres evolving over time. Which countries are leading in the development of computer games today? ChatGPT: The computer game industry is a global phenomenon, with significant development and production taking place in many countries around the world. However, some countries have established themselves as leaders in the industry and are known for producing some of the most innovative and successful games. United States – The US is home to many of the largest and most well-known game development studios and publishers, such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, and Ubisoft. The US is also a hub for innovation in the game industry, with Silicon Valley being a center for technology development. Japan – Japan has a long history of producing games and has been at the forefront of the industry since the early days of arcade games. Japanese companies, such as Nintendo and Sony, have been instrumental in shaping the industry and continue to be major players today. South Korea – South Korea has emerged as a major player in the industry in recent years, with companies such as NCSoft and Nexon producing successful online games. The country has a thriving gaming culture and a strong technological infrastructure, making it an attractive location for game development.

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Fig. 3.2 Created by DALL-E 2 (OpenAI)

Canada – Canada has a thriving game development industry, with a large number of studios located in cities such as Montreal and Vancouver. The country is known for its talented game developers and has produced successful games in a variety of genres. Europe – Europe has a rich and diverse gaming industry, with companies in countries such as the UK, France, Germany, and Sweden producing successful games. The region is also home to many independent game developers who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in gaming. This list is not exhaustive and there are many other countries around the world that are making important contributions to the game industry. The industry is constantly evolving and new players are emerging all the time, making it a truly global phenomenon. Which are the most successful game development studios? ChatGPT: The success of game development studios can be measured in various ways, such as sales, critical acclaim, player engagement, and cultural impact. Here are some of the most successful game development studios based on these metrics: Rockstar Games – known for their Grand Theft Auto series, Rockstar Games is one of the most successful game development studios of all time. The company is renowned for their open-world action games, which have sold millions of copies worldwide.

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Valve Corporation – best known for their Steam platform, Valve is also a successful game developer. The company’s games, such as Portal and Half-Life, are known for their innovative gameplay and storytelling. Activision Blizzard – one of the largest game publishers in the world, Activision Blizzard has a portfolio of successful franchises, including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. Electronic Arts – one of the largest game publishers in the world, Electronic Arts has a long history of successful franchises, including FIFA, Battlefield, and The Sims. Supercell – a Finnish mobile game development studio, Supercell is best known for their hit games Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars. The company is one of the most profitable mobile game developers in the world. CD Projekt Red – a Polish game development studio, CD Projekt Red is best known for their critically acclaimed RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Nintendo – a Japanese video game company, Nintendo is one of the largest and most well-known game developers in the world. The company is best known for its Mario, Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon franchises. Ubisoft – a French game development studio, Ubisoft is best known for their Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed, and Far Cry franchises. These are some of the most successful game development studios, but there are many others that have also made significant contributions to the industry. The gaming industry is constantly evolving and new players are emerging all the time, making it a highly competitive and dynamic field (Fig. 3.3). How do you assess the economic development of the games industry so far? ChatGPT: The games industry has experienced rapid growth and economic development over the past few decades. The industry has become a major contributor to the global economy and is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Here are some ways to assess the economic development of the games industry: Revenue: The games industry has experienced significant revenue growth in recent years. In 2021, the global games market was estimated to be worth over $159 billion and is projected to continue to grow in the coming years. Employment: The games industry is a major employer, with thousands of jobs being created in game development, publishing, and distribution. The industry is also a major source of job opportunities for artists, programmers, and other creative professionals. Investment: The games industry has attracted significant investment from venture capitalists, private equity firms, and other investors. Investment in the industry has been driven by the growth of mobile and online gaming, as well as the increasing popularity of esports. Cultural impact: The games industry has had a major impact on popular culture and has been recognized as a form of art and entertainment. Games have been featured in major film festivals, museums, and other cultural institutions, and have been the subject of academic research and public discourse. Global reach: The games industry is a global phenomenon, with significant development and production taking place in many countries around the world. The

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Fig. 3.3 Created by DALL-E 2 (OpenAI)

industry has helped to bridge cultural divides and has brought people together from all over the world through the shared experience of playing games. Overall, the games industry has experienced rapid economic development and has become an important part of the global economy. The industry is constantly evolving and adapting to new technology and market trends, making it an exciting and dynamic field to be a part of. Do you know how many of the approximately eight billion people play video games every day? ChatGPT: According to industry estimates, the number of people playing video games every day is estimated to be in the billions. It’s difficult to determine an exact number as the definition of “playing video games” can vary and different sources use different methods to collect data. However, it is widely recognized that video games are one of the most popular forms of entertainment and are played by people of all ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds. The rise of mobile gaming has made video games more accessible than ever, and the growing popularity of esports has further increased the reach of the industry. Given the widespread adoption of video games and the growth of the industry, it is safe to say that a significant portion of the world’s population plays video games on a regular basis.

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Can you say something about how the use of videogames has developed? ChatGPT: The use of video games has developed significantly over the past few decades, driven by advancements in technology and changes in consumer behavior. Some key developments include: Evolution of hardware: The evolution of hardware, from the earliest consoles to modern gaming PCs and consoles, has enabled the development of more complex and immersive video games. Rise of mobile gaming: The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets has led to the growth of mobile gaming, which has become one of the most popular forms of video games. Mobile games have made video games more accessible and have brought new audiences into the industry. Growth of online gaming: The growth of online gaming has enabled players to compete and collaborate with others from all over the world. Online gaming has also facilitated the development of new business models, such as free-to-play games that are supported by in-game purchases. Expansion of esports: The expansion of esports, or competitive video gaming, has created a new form of entertainment and has attracted significant investment from brands and media companies. Esports has also helped to legitimize video games as a sport and has brought new audiences into the industry. Advancements in VR and AR: Advances in virtual and augmented reality technology have opened up new possibilities for video games and have created new forms of immersive and interactive experiences. These are some of the key ways in which the use of video games has developed, but the industry is constantly evolving and adapting to new technology and market trends. The gaming industry is a dynamic and rapidly growing field that is having a significant impact on entertainment, culture, and technology (Fig. 3.4). In which countries are computer games used particularly heavily? ChatGPT: Computer games are popular in many countries around the world. Some countries where video games have particularly high usage include: South Korea: The country has a thriving esports scene and a large population of avid gamers. China: China has the largest gaming market in the world, with hundreds of millions of active gamers. United States: The US is home to many of the world’s biggest gaming companies and has a large, diverse gaming community. Japan: Japan has a rich history of video games, with a culture that deeply values games as a form of entertainment. Germany: Germany has a large and passionate gaming community, as well as a thriving video game development industry. These are just a few examples, and other countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and France also have significant numbers of gamers. What are the benefits of playing videogames? ChatGPT: Playing video games can offer several benefits, including: Improved cognitive skills such as attention, memory, and decision making. Increased hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills.

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Fig. 3.4 Created by DALL-E 2 (OpenAI)

Stress relief and relaxation. Improved mood and emotional regulation. Socialization and teamwork through multiplayer games. Opportunities for learning and personal growth, such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Increased creativity and imagination. Opportunities for virtual travel and exploration. It’s important to note that video games can also have negative effects, such as addiction, decreased physical activity, and violent behavior. Hence, moderation and balance are key to enjoying the benefits of video games. Can you think of any other negative consequences of playing videogames? ChatGPT: Yes, playing video games can have several negative consequences, including: Addiction: Prolonged and excessive gaming can lead to addiction, which can interfere with daily activities and relationships. Decreased physical activity: Spending long hours sitting and playing video games can lead to decreased physical activity, which can lead to health problems such as obesity and poor posture. Aggression and violence: Some studies have linked violent video games to aggressive behavior and desensitization to violence.

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Sleep disruption: Spending late nights playing video games can disrupt normal sleep patterns, leading to sleep deprivation and fatigue. Decreased academic performance: Spending excessive time playing video games can lead to decreased focus on academic studies and decreased academic performance. Social isolation: Spending excessive time playing video games can lead to decreased face-to-face interaction with others, potentially causing social isolation. It’s important to remember that these negative effects are most likely to occur when video games are played excessively and in isolation from other activities and relationships. Like most things, moderation and balance are key to enjoying the benefits of video games without experiencing negative consequences. Which videogame is the best? ChatGPT: The best video game is subjective and depends on personal preferences, interests, and playing style. Some popular and highly regarded video games include: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64, 1998) Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985) Half-Life 2 (PC, 2004) Grand Theft Auto V (PS3, Xbox 360, 2013) Minecraft (PC, 2011) These are just a few examples, and many other video games have been highly praised by players and critics for their storytelling, gameplay, graphics, and other features. The best video game for you will depend on your preferences, so it’s important to try out a variety of different games to find what you enjoy most. What do you think, where will be the videogameindustry in 10 years? ChatGPT: As a language model AI, I don’t have personal opinions but here’s my understanding of the current trend and advancements in the video game industry: In the next 10 years, the video game industry is likely to continue its rapid growth, driven by advancements in technology, increased accessibility, and a growing player base. Some potential developments include: Virtual and Augmented Reality: Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are likely to become more advanced and widespread, allowing for more immersive and interactive gaming experiences. Cloud gaming: Cloud gaming services will likely become more prevalent, allowing players to stream games on a variety of devices without the need for high-end hardware. Mobile gaming: Mobile gaming will likely continue to grow in popularity, especially in developing markets where smartphones are more prevalent than traditional gaming devices. Esports: Esports will likely become even more mainstream and professionalized, with more opportunities for players to compete and earn a living from gaming. Artificial Intelligence: AI will likely play an increasingly important role in video games, enhancing game AI, creating new gameplay experiences, and making games more accessible to players with disabilities.

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Overall, the video game industry is likely to continue to evolve and grow in the next 10 years, providing new and exciting gaming experiences for players around the world. Thank you for the interview! ChatGPT: You’re welcome! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Glossary of Types of Video Games 4X

4X games are a subgenre of strategy based games. 4X is the abbreviation for explore, expand, exploit and exterminate. These four terms describe the gameplay: Exploring the territory, claiming new territory, gathering resources and eliminating rival players. Basically the aim of each 4x game is to build and lead an empire, by using different economic and technological as well as military strategies

A Action Horror

Animal simulation Arcade shooter Arena shooter Artillery game

Auto battler

Auto runner

Action horror games are a subcategory of survival horror games. They are using more action elements such as those found in first-person and third-person shooter games. These elements are paired with horror themes, which makes the Action Horror games way faster-paced than traditional survival horror games Animal simulator games allow you to take on the role of (mostly wild) animals and let you see life from their perspective Arcade - shooter games are usually set in fantastic environments where the players fight in mass battles against hordes of monsters. The focus in these games is on reaction speed Players of arena - shooters play in a demarcated area that is usually characterised by fast movements, long jumps, wall runs and the use of explosive weapons The artillery game is a subgenre of strategy games. It is usually designed as a turn-based multiplayer game in which the players operate two or more artillery emplacements like tanks and cannons. The aim of the game is to hit and ultimately defeat the enemy’s units The auto battler is also known as auto chess. It is a subgenre of turn-based strategy games. The concept combines chess with the elements of a multiplayer online battle arena game. The term „auto “refers to the automatic fighting of the placed units An auto runner is a sub-genre of jump ‘n’ run, skill game and racing game. In an auto runner, the player’s character automatically follows a route without stopping and the player has to avoid obstacles and collect objects. Usually the player does not have the option of turning around or run back

B Battle Royale

This genre is named after the movie „Battle Royale“. In a Battle Royale the player fights with a predefined number of other players in a delimited game area, which becomes smaller and smaller in the course of the game. The goal is (continued)

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Beat ‘em up

Boomer Shooter

Brain games

Brain training Business simulation

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

to be the only player or team to survive at the end by using the items collected in the game area and killing the other team Beat ‘em up - also known as Brawler - is a subgenre of action games that focuses on the use of direct physical violence, often in the form of different martial arts fighting styles. Depending on the theme, the game characters can also use weapons and sometimes supernatural abilities A boomer shooter is a term that is used to describe newer First Person Shooter (FPS) games from the 2010s and later. These games are designed to emulate the style of the original FPS games but are focusing less on realism and story. Instead they emphasize fast gameplay and over-the-top combat. The term “boomer” has a double-meaning: It refers to “boomstick” as well as it refers to the baby boomer generation Brain game are focusing on the thinking ability and rationally demanding solutions to problems that have to be mastered with different mental powers. In this respect, they differ from games in which luck or chance play a dominant role. Since brain games have a cognitively oriented way of playing they show the rather contemplative, serious, concentrated character of this category of games Brain training games help to train mental performance with the aim of maintaining or increasing it In a business simulation the players task is to generate as much profit as possible in a simulated economic system. In the process of reaching that goal they have to set up production facilities or run a company, an association or a state, and successfully hold their ground against competitors. The players are usually placed at the management/executive level and must make appropriate decisions

C Card- & Boardgames Casual games

Construction & Management Simulation Cooking simulation

Co-op

Are games that require cards or a game board on which players act with tokens and dice or other game material Casual games is a buzzword for simple computer games that are characterised by particularly easy accessibility, intuitive input methods and a quick sense of achievement. The games are aimed in particular at people who are looking for diverting entertainment without a lengthy learning phase Construction and management simulations, are a subgenre of simulation games in which the players plan, build, expand and manage fictional communities - usually with limited resources Cooking simulations allow the players to take control of a usually realistic looking kitchen with all the necessary appliances and perform kitchen tasks such as cooking, cutting vegetables and cleaning Games which include a Co-op mode are called Co-op games. The Co-Op mode is a variant of multiplayer mode in computer games in which at least two players compete together against the computer. Unlike competitive multiplayer mode, the competition does not take place between players or groups of players, but primarily between players and the computer

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D Digital novel

Driving simulator

Digital novels are usually Japanese adventures which are the specifically Japanese form of adventure games. Outside Japan, these are often referred to as visual novels which are, however, only a subgenre. These Japanese adventures are mostly text adventures with the use of still images. They do not contain the puzzles, item inventory or verb system typical of Western adventures, and the plot usually has a strong romantic or erotic aspect. They thus correspond more to interactive novels or interactive fiction A driving simulator is a simulation software or technical device used to simulate the driving process. They are used in teaching, entertainment, research and product development/improvement. They are also often used for training drivers Driving simulators are available for different vehicles such as automobiles, buses, trains, motorbikes, agricultural and military vehicles and trucks

E Educational Games Ego-Shooter

Escape game

Exer games

Educational games - in addition to a playful action and the learning implied in it - specifically impart knowledge to the player on certain topics, skills and cultural techniques. In game science, they are also referred to as didactic games Ego-shooter is a neologism from the German-speaking world; in the Englishspeaking world it is normally referred to as “first-person shooter” In Ego-Shooters the players act from a first-person perspective in a freely accessible, three-dimensional game world and fight other players or computercontrolled opponents with firearms Escape games or escape the room games are part of the genre of adventure games. They are mostly browser games that are typically controlled by pointand-click In addition, there are numerous implementations of the game principle as a group game in the real world. Here people have to solve tasks or puzzles in a room in a given time in order to master the game Exergames (a compound word of the English words “exercise” and “gaming”), are also called fitness games. Exergames is a term for computer games that call for physical movements and reactions. In this way, it differs from computer games that are played sitting down with a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, and instead relies on various movement sensors, image recognition processes and motion capture. Exer games are aimed at making exercise more fun

F Fighting Game

Flight simulator

Fighting games are a subgenre of the action game. Even though the term appears to be very generalizing, it refers to a very specific genre of computer games. The central element of the game is usually two equal fighters who face each other in a clearly defined area (e.g. an arena). The player who defeats the opponent first, wins Almost exclusively in German-speaking countries, the term “beat ‘em up” is often incorrectly used for fighting games. Even though there are overlaps, this is a genre in its own A flight simulation realistically recreates the flight in an aircraft or spacecraft. They were originally developed for crew training, by now programmes were also created that primarily serve entertainment purposes and are classified as computer games

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G God game

The term god simulation refers to a computer game genre which is in many ways a variant of computer strategy and simulation games. Within these games, the player takes on the role of a supernatural being or god (not necessarily a good one) and is tasked with taking care of beings he has created and leading them to glory, prosperity and/or autocracy

H Hack & Slay

Hero Shooter

Hidden object game

Horror games

Hotseat

The term hack & slay is mainly used in reference to action role-playing games to describe the central game mechanics. In hack&slay video games, the player’s task is primarily to slay monsters with various weapons or spells in order to obtain loot, experience or complete quests In hero shooters (which function similarly to MOBAs and are therefore also called MOBA shooters), players control a hero character with special abilities/ characteristics and fight - usually in teams - against other hero characters to protect their base In hidden object games the players try to find various objects, parts of objects or geometric figures in a mostly detailed, still or very little animated image The difficulty in finding things, at least initially, is that the player does not know the type of representation as well as the shape, size, orientation, etc. The horror game is a video game genre based on horror fiction and usually designed to terrify the player. Unlike most other video game genres horror games are not classified by their game mechanics but excel in their narrative or visual presentation Hotseat is a method of playing computer games with several players on only one machine. A characteristic of the hot seat mode is that only one player plays at a time. The player takes a seat in the “hot seat”

I Interactive fiction

Interactive movie

Interactive fiction (often abbreviated IF) is a video game genre in which the plot and the game environment are described as text within a game world and in which the player can influence the plot. The best-known and most widespread type of interactive fiction are text adventures Interactive movies are a video game genre in which the game scenes consist entirely of full motion video, either animated or live-action. The term is also used to refer to games - usually computer role-playing games - that place a heavy emphasis on cutscenes and plot at the expense of gameplay

J Job Simulation

Jump ‘n Run

Job or work simulations represent individual job profiles and workplaces and portray the working world in a simplified way. The focus is on fun, although there are also often monotonous jobs to be done. Job simulations can show knowledge and interest in a profession, but usually do not replace professional practice Jump ‘n’ Run is the term used to describe video games in which the character moves while running and jumping. The term “Jump 'n' Run” has become established as a computer game term in German, but is rather unusual in English, where it is generally referred to as a ‘platform game’ or ‘platformer’ (continued)

Glossary of Types of Video Games Jump scare Horror

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Jump scare horror games are based on the one hand on jump scares, i.e. moments of terror in which the player is unexpectedly and abruptly surprised, and on the other hand on the tension or fear that arises when such a jump scare is expected. Jump scares are generally a common element in various horror game genres, jump-scare horror games are games that are limited to this mechanism to a certain extent

K Karaoke

Karaoke is a leisure activity and a party game originated from Japan in which players sing live into the microphone to instrumental playback of well-known songs

L Life Simulation Game

Lightgun Shooter

Looter Shooter

Life simulations are video games that represent and simulate the life cycle of an object or a person according to previously defined rules. It is thus a specialised subcategory of the simulation game genre and often includes realtime elements Sometimes the user who has started the simulation can interactively intervene in the events, sometimes the simulation runs completely on its own after the rules have been defined and the scenario has been started In lightgun shooters, the player does not use classic input devices such as the mouse, keyboard or gamepad to shoot, but a “lightgun”. A “lightgun” takes its name from the fact that it uses light to register where on the screen the player is aiming at In looter shooters, the players collect weapons, ammunition, accessories, equipment and other items (so-called loot) for combat situations. To collect these things players complete quests, missions or campaigns and are rewarded with said loot

M Marine Simulator (Naval Simulator) Mathematical Puzzle

Maze

Mecha

Medical simulation

A Marine or Naval simulation is a videogame genre. A naval simulation gives the player the opportunity to command a surface or underwater unit, sometimes even complete formations Maths puzzles require the involvement of mathematics to obtain a solution. The subject of the mathematics of games is more serious than it suggests. Game theory, for example, has applications in social and military fields of studying tactics and strategies. A maths game usually does not contain any coincidences A Maze is an arcade and computer game genre used to describe games such as Pac-Man, in which the player must move through a maze to chase enemies, avoid them and find treasures or loot In science fiction, the mech or mecha is a general term for today’s largely fictional, piloted walking robots and robot-like machines, which can look humanoid, insectoid or avianoid. In a Mecha simulation the players take over the control of such a machine for example to destroy the enemy’s headquarter Take on the role of a doctor and successfully treat your patients. In a medical simulator you can measure blood pressure, examine the lungs, take x-rays and much more to make the right diagnosis and cure your patients with the right therapy! (continued)

72 Metroidvania

Military simulation game

MMO(G)

MMOFPS

MMORPG

MMORTS

MMOTBS

MOBA

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Metroidvania is a videogame genre and a portmanteau of the games Metroid and Castlevania. Their game design is characterised by a large and coherent environment through which the player navigates without a clear goal. The levels are limited by initially insurmountable hurdles. With the help of new equipment, new abilities and methods of movement, which are acquired during the course of the game, the hurdles can eventually be overcome and previously inaccessible areas of the game world can be opened up. Metroidvanias are closely related to genres such as jump ‘n’ run/ side-scroller, role-playing game and action-adventure A military simulation tries to represent military operations as faithfully as possible. They are thus oriented towards war games and simulation games. Therefore, tactics and strategy as well as expertise in weapons and vehicles are in the foreground. Instead of a lot of action, a military simulation should above all convey authenticity and realism in control and gameplay The term massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) refers to a type of videogame that offers players a virtual persistent world that continues to evolve even when the players are offline and can be played by very many sometimes thousands of players simultaneously over the Internet. It is in that sense an extension of the normal multiplayer mode A massively multiplayer online first-person Shooter (MMOFPS), is a mixture of MMORPG and first-person shooter In contrast to ordinary MMORPGs, in these games, as in firstperson shooters, the main thing is to target one’s opponents with the mouse and fire each shot automatically A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a special form of MMO that usually uses role-playing game-like game mechanics. The actual game world and the game characters called avatars are managed on servers. The player typically connects to the server via a client programme In terms of content, an MMORPG is comparable to other computer role-playing games, but the focus is more on interaction between players and groups of players (guilds). In solo or in groups, players fight either against opponents controlled by the game, which is called player versus environment (PVE), or against other players (player versus player, also called PVP) Massively multiplayer online real-time strategy games (MMORTS) are a mix of the genres of real-time strategy and MMO in which a very large number of players interact with each other in a virtual world. Players often take on the role of some type of leader that controls and coordinates armies into battle whilst trying to maintain the needed resources Massively multiplayer turn-based strategy (MMOTBS) games are games in which the players’ actions are carried out in individual turns. The players plan and execute their moves alternately or one after the other or they plan their moves simultaneously round by round and the moves are then executed simultaneously Multiplayer online Battle Arena (MOBA), also known as action real-time strategy (ARTS), is a subcategory of real-time strategy (continued)

Glossary of Types of Video Games

Multiplayer games

Murder Mystery

Music games & music making/mixing

73

games At least two teams compete against each other on an arena-like map. There are different versions with different objectives such as destroying the enemy base or eliminating the enemy team, base expansion and resource gathering. The game mode is made more difficult by a limited number of attack lanes, which are also guarded by defensive installations. At certain intervals, weaker units appear in the bases, which are controlled by the computer and attack the enemy base along predefined routes The term multiplayer describes a type of game in which one plays with or against other people. It is the counterpart to the single-player game mode, in which a single player plays alone with or against the computer A murder mystery game is a term for various deductive parlour games What they all have in common is a criminalistic frame story in which fictitious perpetrators murder fictitious victims. The participants’ task is to solve the case just like the investigator in a detective story Music games are a genre of computer and video games in which music is a central element of the gameplay. They are often rhythm games in which the player has to make certain inputs at the right moment to the rhythm of the music played, e.g. press a certain key on the keyboard or sing into a microphone

O Online game

Online games (often known as internet games) are computer games played online over a wide area network, nowadays mainly the internet

P Party Games

Platform games Platform Shooter Point-and-click

Programming game

Party games is the generic term used for a number of different forms of games that are grouped together as sociable games in the context of a party They can take place on a highly intellectual level, but also indulge in obscene forms. Party games are already popular at children’s parties, at student parties and still in retirement homes. They can make considerable demands on the knowledge, creativity, intuition or empathy of those playing See jump ‘n run Platform shooters are basically jump ‘n run games which were extended by the shooting aspect Point-and-click adventures are defined by their method of control and are a subgenre of the adventure game The term describes a narrative game in which the player must apply logic and reasoning to solve puzzles and advance the plot. The narrative often follows literary topoi such as crime novels, fairy tales, travel literature or heroic epics. Point-and-click adventures are single-player games, which means that cooperation between several players in the game itself is not possible A programming game is a computer game in which the player has no direct influence on the course of the game, but instead writes a computer programme (continued)

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Psychological Horror

Puzzle

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

in a domain-specific language that takes control of the game character, usually a robot, tank or bacterium The game characters then fight autonomously against each other in “arenas” and try to destroy each other until only one remains. The player who has written the best programme wins Psychological horror games are designed to scare players through the emotional, mental or psychological state rather than through monsters or classic scares and jumpscares. The fear plays more on the imagination and what the player does not see, i.e. the player’s abstract fear of the unknown. These games usually rely on the protagonist’s unreliable perceptions or questionable sanity to enable the game’s plot. Psychological horror games usually do not depend on action as much as survival horror games, but instead give the player time to explore the game environment and build atmosphere A puzzle is a mechanical game of patience, or more precisely, a laying game, in which attempts are made to reassemble individual puzzle pieces into a whole. The English-language term for it is jigsaw puzzle (“fretwork puzzle”), since the first such documented game was made in England with a fretwork saw

Q Quiz

A quiz is a question game or guessing game in the course of which brainteasers and knowledge questions have to be answered as correctly as possible. Quiz programmes are particularly popular on radio and television. But there are also online quiz games, most of which can be played free of charge. Some of these games also offer the possibility of competing virtually against friends and other players

R Real-time strategy

Real-time tactics

Retro games

Real-time strategy (RTS) is a popular videogame genre in which all game participants interactively subject their actions to the aspects of a strategic game i.e. problem analysis and diagnosis, setting up alternative courses of action and, in contrast to turn-based strategy games, execute them simultaneously i.e. in real time. The player’s task is therefore to implement the right action at the right time in the right place in order to achieve the game goal Important game elements of real-time tactics are forming, coordinating and controlling units, upgrading and healing these units and carrying out attack and defence strategies. Contrary to pure real-time strategy, the focus of realtime tactics is on controlling a few individual units on a battlefield, which have to be controlled tactically, and usually no resources can be managed or buildings, unit types and civilisations can be established. Diplomacy, research and economy are also largely dispensed with Retrogaming is a term used to describe playing and collecting older computer and video games. Often the period of change to the predominant release of 3D games in the mid-1990s is seen as the boundary, heralded by more powerful graphics chips in PCs and game consoles. Following the principle of retro, however, this boundary is shifting; often games are already considered “retro” by the end of the 1990s. Furthermore, the term has also established itself as a genre designation and as such describes computer games up to the end of the 8-bit era (approx. 1970 to approx. 1985) (continued)

Glossary of Types of Video Games Reverse Horror

Rhythm matching Riddle

Run-and-gunShooter

75

Reverse horror games involve the players “conversely” scaring others, rather than the players being scared themselves. A player is instead what would be called an antagonist in the classic horror game, in which mostly one player takes on the role of a monster or villain. Reverse horror games can also derive from an original horror game, developed as a sequel or prequel to the original and designed to show the perspective of the title antagonist See music games & music making/mixing A riddle is a task that must be solved by thinking. Riddles can serve to pass the time, to entertain and to educate the riddle solver. Their solution is sometimes made more difficult by misleading, ambiguous information Besides the usual scenarios showing science fiction-influenced conflicts with all kinds of military equipment, there are numerous other shoot ‘em ups. The transitions to other genres are fluid. For example, there are run and gun shooters which means simply that players are shooting and running at the same time

S Sandbox Games

Serious games

Shoot ‘em up

Shooter

Shooting gallery

Sandbox games - also known as Open World games - are a type of videogame in which the player has an above-average amount possibilities to play the game. The special feature of open-world games is the unrestricted freedom of movement. Thus, the player decides for himself what he wants to explore in the game world, when and how The course of the game, which is usually tied to the development of the plot, is not determined by a predetermined sequence of successive levels Games described as sandboxed have the specific characteristic that the player can act on the existing virtual game world and influence its simulatedphysical structure. For example, items can be created - this is called crafting which does not necessarily affect the progress of the game A serious game is a board, card or computer game that is not primarily or exclusively for entertainment, but may contain such elements. Serious games - as well as educational games - have in common the aim of conveying information and education. An authentic and credible, but also entertaining learning experience is the focus of interest In Shoot ‘em up games the players control a character to destroy a large number of enemy units with a virtual firearm. In a broader sense, shoot ‘em up refers to any game in which the player-controlled character is supposed to destroy a large number of enemy units with a virtual firearm. In a narrower sense, shoot ‘em up refers to a “shooter game” with limited freedom of movement The core game mechanic of Shooter games is shooting. The objective of a shooter is to shoot at computer-controlled (player versus environment) or opponent-controlled (player versus player) game figures according to certain instructions without damaging one’s own figure through attacks by the opponent or the game physics Shooting gallery games are also known as target shooting. In this sub-genre of the Shooter games the players aim at moving targets on their screen. They don’t move their character around. This is to be distinguished from rail shooters in which the player moves his character only along a vertical, fixed line and has hardly any control over the horizontal (continued)

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Side - Scroller

Space flight simulator

Split screen

Stealth games

Submarine simulator

Survival

Survival Horror

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

Side-scrollers are generally games in which the player looks at the gameplay from the side. This type of presentation is often used in jump ‘n’ runs, shoot ‘em ups and beat ‘em ups. In the latter two, the game section can move more or less automatically in one direction only and the player thus cannot move back A space flight simulation is a special form of flight simulation in which the player controls a spaceship. In addition to action-packed combat simulations and those that also include trading and exploration aspects, there are programmes that are more focused on realism and do without combat. Space flight simulations are to be distinguished from space-based shoot ‘em ups that use a side-scrolling or bird’s-eye perspective In videogames, split screen is used as a solution to allow several players to play simultaneously on one device and one screen in multiplayer mode and yet provide each player with their own playing field in which they can act and whose viewing angle they can influence independently of other players. This technique is very widespread in the console sector, especially in first-person shooters and racing games Stealth games are characterised by the fact that opponents are not confronted in open combat. Instead, the player must sneak past them unnoticed and kill or stun them as silently as possible from ambush. These games can be 2D or 3D games A submarine simulation is a computer-based simulation of the characteristics and functions of submersibles and submarines in a naval combat environment. For this purpose, elements of a naval simulation are combined with those of a military simulation In a survival game the players try to survive as long as possible in a game world. It differs from other games, in which the player also has the goal of not dying, primarily in that the basic needs of the game character must be secured for survival. Often, collected items can be processed further through a crafting system These games typically focus on the player character’s survival in a horror environment with limited resources, and thus tend to be action games or action-adventure games. A common theme of these games is escape or survival from the equivalent of a zombie apocalypse with limited weapons, ammunition and armour

T Tank Simulation

Third person Shooter

Tower defense

Tank simulations are computer-based simulations of the characteristics and functions of motorised armoured vehicles in a battlefield environment. These simulations combine the elements of driving simulations with those of a firstor third-person shooter to create a war simulation with the essential attributes of armament, armour and ground-based movement of armoured combat vehicles The name of the genre can be considered as its definition: Third-person shooters are all games in which the camera perspective is positioned behind the main character and in which ranged attacks and the use of firearms are essential elements Tower defense (TD) refers to a subgenre of real-time strategy games. The task in these games is to erect various types of defenses - usually guard or gun (continued)

Glossary of Types of Video Games

Train simulator

Turn-based strategy

Turn-based tactics

77

towers, hence the term - on a map. These defenses are then supposed to prevent several onslaughts of different enemies from crossing the map A train simulation is a simulation of the journey of a train or other track-bound vehicle of the railway. Train simulations are used for the training of locomotive drivers and the research and development in industry. Furthermore they are used, similarly to virtual model railways, in the entertainment sector Turn-based strategy (TBS) games are games in which the players’ actions are carried out in individual turns. This can mean that the players plan and execute their moves alternately or that they plan their moves simultaneously round by round and that the moves are then also executed simultaneously or at least not in player order In turn-based tactics games (TBT), the players control armed forces to carry out tasks like military operations or rescue missions. In contrast to the pure turn-based strategy game (TBS), the focus is less on economy, diplomacy, administration, building construction and research. Instead, the focus is on direct executive power, like taking care of the transport, formation, healing and upgrading of units as well as warfare tactics

U Unplugged games

Unplugged games refer to games that do not require the use of electronic devices. These can include board games, card games, or traditional games like chess or checkers

V Vehicle Simulation

VR games

Vehicle simulation video games allow the players to operate a variety of vehicles in a realistic manner. This genre also includes the simulation of driving cars, trains, planes, spacecraft, ships, tanks and other combat vehicles Total mastery over the control of the vehicle is the element that encourages players to keep playing, even after they have completed the objective of the video game Virtual reality (VR) typically refers to a computer technology that represents and simulates the physical presence of the players in an artificially computergenerated environment. Virtual reality artificially reproduces a sensory experience (this may include sight, touch, hearing and smell) with which the players can interact

W War Games

The term War Games encompasses a broad spectrum of game forms, ranging from childlike Indian games, knight games and party games to cross-country games with modern dummy weapons and shooting with coloured ammunition. The term is also applied to corresponding board games, computer games, military simulation games or tabletop games by means of which warlike actions can be simulated or re-enacted on a complex tactical or strategic level The term also refers to a method for simulating complex real socio-technical systems. War games (the German Planspiele) are often used for teaching and learning purposes. Examples are the flight simulator in pilot training, the business simulation in management training or the leadership simulation for training leadership skills. Their origin lies in the simulation of military conflicts (military simulation game) (continued)

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Word games

The Computer as Game, Toy, and Player

Word games are spoken or board games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties. Word games are generally used as a source of entertainment, but can additionally serve an educational purpose

X X-treme sports games

X-treme sports games are a type of sports video game that features extreme sports. These games often include sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, motocross, and BMX biking. They are known for their fast-paced gameplay and often include elements of racing and stunt performance

Y Youth games

Youth games are games that are specifically designed for children and teenagers. They often have simpler gameplay mechanics and are designed to be educational and entertaining

Z Zombie games

Zombie games are a genre of video games where the player fights against and often runs from hordes of the undead, usually in a post-apocalyptic setting. These games can be of various sub-genres, including first-person shooters, third-person shooters, tower defense, and more

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James Gleick, J. (1999). Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. Pantheon. Gumbrecht, H. U., & Pfeiffer, K. L. (Eds.). (1994). Materialities of communication. Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. In Reason and the rationalization of society (Vol. 1). Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action. In The critique of functionalist reason (Vol. 2). Polity Press. Herz, J. C. (1997). Joystick nation. How videogames ate our quarters, won our hearts, and rewired our minds. Little, Brown and Company. Hjarvard, S. (2013). The mediatization of culture and society. Routledge. Ivory, J. D. (2016). A brief history of video games. In R. Kowert & T. Quandt (Eds.), The video game debate: Unravelling the physical, social, and psychological effects of digital games (pp. 1–22). Routledge. Juul, J. (2010). A casual revolution: Reinventing video games and their players. MIT Press. Kerler, W. (2019). Virtual reality in amusement parks or arcades makes gaming a community experience. https://1e9.community/t/virtual-reality-in-freizeitparks-oder-spielhallen-macht-gam ing-zum-gemeinschaftserlebnis/129. Kokonis, M. (2014). Intermediality between games and fiction: The “Ludology vs. Narratology” debate in computer game studies: A response to Gonzalo Frasca. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 9, 173. Luhmann, N. (1981). The improbability of communications. International Social Science Journal XXXIII, 1, 122–131. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000044930 Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (2000). The reality of mass media. Blackwell Publishing. Luhmann, N. (2012). Theory of society (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press. Lv, Z., Wang, J.-W., Kumar, N., & Lloret, J. (Eds.). (2022). Augmented reality, virtual reality & semantic 3D reconstruction. MPDI. https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-6062-5 Maas, P., & Bühler, P. (2015). I-society: How multi-optionality is pushing individualisation in the digital age. St. Gallen Business Review. https://www.stgallenbusinessreview.com/i-societyhow-multi-optionality-is-pushing-individualisation-in-the-digital-age/ Mechner, J. (2008). The sands of time: Crafting a video game story. Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/the-sands-of-time-crafting-a-video-game-story/ OpenAI. (2022). ChatGPT: Optimizing language models for dialogue. https://openai.com/blog/ chatgpt/. Pallas, J. (2020). Mediatization. In D. L. Merskin (Ed.), The SAGE International encyclopedia of mass media and society (pp. 1086–1089). Pias, C. (2017). Computer game worlds. Diaphanes. Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized highspeed society. Constellations, 10(1), 3–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00309 Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration. A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press. Schell, J. (2008). The art of game Design. A book of lenses. Morgan Kaufmann. Serres, M. (2013). Petite Pucette. Editions le Pommier. Simon, H. A. (1996). The science of the artificial (3rd ed.). MIT Press. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen. Identity in the age of the Internet. Simon & Schuster. Varela, F. J., Thompsen, E., & Rosch, E. (1993). The embodied mind. Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press. Watts, I. (1957). The rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Chatto & Windus. Wolf, M. J. P. (Ed.). (2012). Encyclopedia of video games: The culture, technology, and art of gaming (Vol. 3, 2nd ed.). Greenwood. Wu, T. (2011). The master switch: The rise and fall of information empires. Vintage.

Chapter 4

Instrumentalizations of the Game

Abstract Entertainment and experiential value, learning opportunities and possibilities for experimentation make the game an object of multiple interests. Each of the major societal functional fields - e.g. family, education, economy, politics, science, military, health, art, sport - has its own mix of methods to instrumentalize the game. Gambling and performance games are primarily economic deformations of the game. Colonization, Serious Games and Gamification have their peculiarities: In the case of colonization, external purposes penetrate into the ludic actions and influence them. Serious Games are designed from the outset for external purposes. Gamification has everyday action contexts as a starting point, which are enriched with ludic elements. Keywords Gambling · Performance game · Colonization · Serious games · Gamification Among the striking phenomena of the present is that almost everywhere on the planet, increasing attention is being paid to playing and its importance is rising. During the preceding three centuries, work had increasingly moved into the center of life. Work has not lost its importance, there is no displacement of work by play. What is new is that play is being instrumentalized for work contexts like never before. Both, work and play, are highly under the control of the economy and thereby follow a general development trend of bourgeois-liberal modernity, “which is defined by a primacy of the economy. For it, society becomes an aggregate of needs and possibilities for satisfying needs.” (Luhmann, 1981, p. 235). The game becomes an object of multiple interests thanks to its attractive potentials: entertainment and experience value, learning opportunities and possibilities for experimentation. As sharp as the controversies between opponents and proponents of the game are fought, everyone participates in the instrumentalization of the game in different ways and with different methods. Among the 12 major societal functional fields - family, education, economy, politics, law, public, religion, science, military, health, art, sport - each has its own mix of methods to access the game. Certainly, spontaneous statements about more proximity or more distance to the game can be made: That sport and art are closer to the game than politics and law is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Arlt, H.-J. Arlt, Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8_4

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obvious (see Sect. 2.6). Nevertheless, none of the functional fields refrains from making use of the possibilities of the game. “Games, game technologies, game practices, and game design are increasingly enrolled in and informed by other realms of social life. We see this in phenomena like the professionalization of digital gaming in e-sports (Taylor, 2012); the economization of gaming in goldfarming, real-money trading, virtual item sales, or game play as user-generated marketing (Kücklich, 2005; Malaby, 2007; Dibbell, 2008; Hamari & Järvinen, 2011); the rationalization of gaming, when gaming itself takes on more and more work-like features, prototypically in ‘grinding’ in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs, see Yee, 2006; Taylor, 2006; Nardi, 2009; Grimes & Feenberg, 2009); and in serious games (Ritterfeld et al., 2009) and gamification (Deterding et al., 2011): Games and design elements from games are increasingly instrumentalised within non-game contexts to improve everything from productivity to marketing, learning, user experience, entertainment, health, happiness, creativity, civic engagement, and governance. (Deterding, 2013, p. 11)

We propose to divide the instrumentalizations into four major groups. With gambling and the performance game, we encounter in the first group deformations of the game that pick out a certain component of the ludic action: In the case of gambling, the handling of the unexpected, in the case of the performance game, the intention of success. We title the three other groups with the keywords colonization, serious games, and gamification. These three types of access to the game can be characterized as follows: In the case of colonization, external purposes penetrate ludic actions and influence them. In the case of serious games, games are designed from the outset for external purposes. Gamification starts with normal action contexts that are enriched with ludic elements. It will become apparent that it is certainly not only, but primarily economic and work contexts for which the game is instrumentalized. This statement applies all the more if one accepts that the concept of work has two sides, namely the sides of production and consumption. In general language use, it has become established to refer to the side of services as “work”, i.e., to produce goods and perform services. But the work activity is only completed when the products are also used or, if it is a matter of paid services, were purchased before use. Without the consumption side, the work process is not complete (see Arlt, 2021). Work is characterized precisely by the fact that the services provided have a purpose. Because performance and consumption are usually separated personnelwise (the chemist and the pharmacist take the medications they produce or sell only in their own case of illness), it is particularly difficult to consider both sides as a unit; especially since this unit differentiates itself in practice into many individual parts that lead a diverse, often highly specialized life of their own as research, development, production, distribution, marketing, sales, consumption. But there is not only the operational-practical instrumentalization of the game but also the communicative instrumentalization of the game concept. Both in everyday language and in scientific discourse, the game often serves as a heuristic reference point. The linguistic reference to the game functions as an explanation offered with

4.1

Gambling and Competitive Gaming

83

versatile use value, because different aspects of the ludic action can be associated. However, these rhetorical occupations of the game and its use as an analogy, metaphor, and symbol take on their own practices and dimensions in each language, which is why they would have to be examined and described separately. We cannot do that.

4.1

Gambling and Competitive Gaming

The economization process of the game, which we discuss under the title of colonization in Sect. 4.2, should not be confused with a phenomenon that has accompanied ludic actions for millennia and is known as gambling. From dealing with the unexpected, which is part of the nature of the game, understandably comes the incentive to form expectations, make assumptions, venture predictions, “how it will turn out”. The dice - “dice games are as old as human civilization itself” (Sousa, 2022, p. 351) - is considered the toy that was historically associated with gambling from the beginning. The literature often reminds us that in Greek mythology Hercules is said to have gambled with a temple guard for a courtesan. But this example blurs the difference between games of chance, for which it is enough to participate (and win something or not), and gambling. These follow the basic figure of the bet, that is, they require everyone who wants to win something to make a stake, which is lost if the bet is not won. The risk of loss, the possible “gambling away the roof over one’s head”, regularly calls the state to the scene, which in most countries subjects gambling to legal restrictions. Such legal restrictions, in turn, have a criminal milieu as their flip side, into which prohibited forms of gambling migrate. The former British jockey Dick Francis (1920–2010) wrote many exciting, often awarded crime novels about the betting business in horse racing. From ancient dice games to the history of casinos beginning in the seventeenth century (c. f. Schwartz, 2013) and the various lotteries (c. f. Chambers, 2011, pp. 107–184) to online betting (c. f. Villeneuve & Pasquier, 2019), gambling has deeply penetrated everyday life. Chances of winning and thrill are the two motives most often mentioned by participants. The classic figure of the gambler, which novels and films often make a theme, particularly highlights the addictive potential of the game of chance. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821–1861) first-person narrator Alexei Ivanovich describes the beginning of his career as a gambler, when he is still able to decide to stop, with this scene: I began by pulling out fifty gulden, and staking them on ‘even’. The wheel spun and stopped at 13. I had lost! With a feeling like a sick qualm, as though I would like to make my way out of the crowd and go home, I staked another fifty gulden - this time on the red. The red turned up. Next time I staked the 100 gulden just where they lay - and again the red turned up. Again I staked the whole sum, and again the red turned up. Clutching my 400 gulden, I placed 200 of them on twelve figures, to see what would come of it. The result was that the croupier paid me out three times my total stake! Thus from 100 gulden my store had grown to 800! Upon that such a curious, such an inexplicable, unwonted feeling overcame me that I decided to depart.” (Dostoevsky, 2020/1867, p. 18f)

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After the transition from premodern subsistence economies to modern, money- and capital-based forms of market economy, gambling is often compared with financial speculations as well as with capital investments, both of which represent a kind of dealing with the unexpected (see Sect. 5.2). I additionally argue that a different type of media, stock trading apps, which exemplify the close relationship between gambling and capitalist financial systems, follows the logic of gamble-play. As DeGoede (2005) argues, the roots of many financial institutions, cultures and practices can be found in games of chance. The trading of future options, for example, is heavily reliant on chance and the risk that investors/players are willing to take. (AlbarránTorres, 2018, p. 2)

Gambling has also received a boost from digitization (Williams et al., 2012). Lotteries, casino games and poker on the internet, online betting on horse races and sports events can be participated in via mobile phones, tablets and PCs, slot machines can be “fed” day and night.1 New players are lured with free games or welcome bonuses. Just for advertising, more than 580 million euros were spent on the gambling market in Germany alone between July 2020 and June 2021 (Statista, 2023b). “Digital gambling is a multimillion-dollar industry that in recent years has seen many instances of industry convergence and consolidation. The change is so dramatic that even industry insiders have coined terms such as ‘the new poker’, referring to a different set of practices that are in tune with the values and practices of networked digital communication (McDonald, 2005). In the early 2010s, social casino apps, a salient example of what I call ‘gamble-play’, were mere curiosities, not the groundbreaking phenomenon that they became in 2011–2014 (Morgan Stanley, 2012) and consolidated during the next three years.” (Albarrán-Torres, 2018, p. 9)

4.1.1

Professionalization of E-Sports

Although billions are now also “in play” in e-sports, the economization process of the game should not be confused with performance-oriented ludic actions, in which the full concentration and all effort is directed towards success in competition against others - whereby the goal of success transforms into the purpose of success. Success is interested in whether the intended purpose is achieved (see also Sect. 5.4). Means and ways have to serve it, they have no intrinsic value and the consequences for others are considered irrelevant as long as they do not affect one’s own success. Success obsession does not ask about side effects, accepts damages and harm - even of one’s own body, as shown by competitive sports. The fact that games are designed as competitions is part of their classic variations. The playful action becomes a performance game when the focus is on winning, not on playing. Like gambling, the performance game, primarily in the field of sports, 1

For a well-developed case study, see Bedford (2019).

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Gambling and Competitive Gaming

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has a history spanning thousands of years, reaching back even further than the ancient Olympic Games. Sporting competitions, where the interest was more in the winners than in the competition itself, already took place in ancient Egypt, even though the agonistic aspect had a lesser value in ancient Egyptian culture than in ancient Greece (cf. Peck, 2013, pp. 171–179). The first official games in Olympia probably took place in the eighth century BC. It is known that ancient sports already knew professional athletes who were exempt from the normal necessities of life and were entirely committed to training and competition. “Some professionals could be full-time. There were enough festivals for freelance professionals to undertake tours in which they combined a number of local games with one of the more significant, and possibly highly lucrative, events. Evidence indicates that both individuals and, especially, states sponsored or subsidized talented athletes and – in the case of the more successful, who brought renown to their city – offered public pensions after they retired from competitive sport. Additionally, so keen were some states to gain victories that they persuaded star performers to change their citizenship with offers too good to refuse except by the most loyal.” (Vambley, 2021, p. 43f.) It is reported that the runner Astylos left his homeland Kroton in the fourth century BC because he was lured away by Syracuse, which caused great outrage and protests in Kroton.

4.1.2

Commercialization of Competitive Sports

How performance and competition infiltrate the game is most evident in sports. Although the sporting competition remains in the mode of ‘as if’ compared to a real violent battle (see Sect. 2.6), with professional sports, the playful aspect of sports becomes a marginal phenomenon - all unexpected and random elements should be eliminated as much as possible, or at least controlled, even though for the audience, the appeal of many sports lies precisely in the unpredictable course. The modern professionalization of sports began in the nineteenth century, and commercialization has completely permeated competitive sports, except for some fringe sports, since the second half of the twentieth century. The participation of professional athletes in the Olympic Games was approved in 1986. A history of criminalization can also be written about competitive sports, as about gambling, with doping being the pivot point (The New York Times, 2019). Not comparable in popularity and commerciality with professional sports, championships for board games have also been held since the mid-twentieth century, with world championships in disciplines such as Agricola, Backgammon, Carcassonne, Checkers, The Settlers of Catan, Monopoly, and Scrabble. The Chess World Championship, which has been held since 1886, is more traditional and prestigious. Once again, it is digitalization that acts as a midwife to a new quality of performance games. Before esports attracted public attention and financial investments and became a multi-billion-dollar market, it was a niche event for nerds.

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“Esports started as an underground culture with gamers organizing Local Area Network (LAN) parties and building their own communities from the ground up. Esports has now grown into a billion-dollar industry, attracting a global audience of over 500 million (as both participants and spectators), establishing it within digital youth culture. Esports in its broadest sense can be defined as competitive online video gaming and although not a new concept, the interest, popularity, and acknowledgment of the esports sector has grown significantly in the 21st century.” (Hayday et al., 2022, p. 2) As part of this development, for example, the Pokémon World Championship in video game format was created in 2009. World championship titles are played out annually in three age groups: juniors (up to 10 years), seniors (11 to 14 years), and masters (from 15 years). From humble beginnings at the start of the twenty-first century, esports tournaments have evolved into highly regarded and high-stakes events. On relevant websites, such as esports.net/wiki/tournaments/, you can find long lists of tournaments from local and regional events to global mega-events. Among the globally known tournaments, usually organized by the game developer companies, are for example The League of Legends World Championship(LoL Worlds) [on Youtube (2023) you can find the report “Giant vs. Underdog - LOL Worlds 2022 Finals Highlights] and The International [about the final teams Team Liquid and Newbee at The International 2017 can be seen in a documentary on Youtube (2017)]. The highest prize money E-Sports tournament to date (as of February 2023) was held in 2021 in Bucharest, Romania: The Dota-2 tournament “The International 2021″ had a total prize pool of around 40 million US dollars” (Statista, 2023a). Established sports clubs, primarily financially strong football clubs, have played a prominent role in this development. There is a case study for the English Premier League, which summarizes the two graphics (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The commitment of the Premier League clubs varies in strength, but all pay attention to E-Sports because they hope for image transfer and long-term commercial advantages. The ambiance of E-Sports now corresponds to the practices of professional competitive sports: talent camps, coaches, sophisticated training programs, managers, PR agencies, journalists, sponsors, event management with all aspects of show business such as music and fashion, stars who attract attention and money, and a large public interest. Esport - or competitive video gaming - is on the rise as events attract millions of viewers. For example, the League of Legends World Cup Finals in 2018 attracted more than 200 million viewers (Esports Charts, 2021). In contrast, the American Super Bowl 2019 attracted 104 million viewers on US TV (Nielsen, 2018) with an estimated 30–50 million international viewers (Constantine, 2019). The European esport industry alone was estimated to be worth EUR 3.9 billion in 2018 (Ludwig et al., 2020). The worldwide revenue from advertisements in esport was close to USD one billion in 2019, according to recent estimates (McKinsey, 2020).” (Werder, 2022, p. 393)

Without the interest of several societal functional areas, which work together in the entertainment industry, this rapid rise of E-Sports would not be possible. Graphic (Fig. 4.3) has compiled important functional fields, with the economy being addressed as the driving force under the term “multiple industries”.

4.2

Colonization: It’s the Economy

Highest Esports Engagement Aston Villa Manchester City Watford West Ham United Wolverhampton Wanderers Moderate Esports Engagement Arsenal Leeds United Burnley Tottenham Hotspur Norwich City Manchester United Limited Esports Engagement Brentford Leicester City Liverpool Newcastle United Southampton Brighton & Hove Albion Chelsea Crystal Palace Everton

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Multifaceted Esports strategies covering both commercial AND content strategy.

Multiple Strategies to integrate Esports into either content OR commercial activity

Limited/no Esports activity outside of ePL.

Fig. 4.1 Typology of E-Sports Engagement, EPL clubs, 2021/22 season (Source: Hayday et al. 2022, p. 79)

Commercial Activities

60% have partnerships with esports/gaming organisations (12/20) 35% compete in, or host , tournaments/events/competitions, outside the ePL (7/20) 25% engage with esports outside of footballsimulationgames (FIFA, PES) (5/20)

Communications and Content

40% have dedicated esports pages on the Club website: (8/20) 15% have dedicated esports pages on their social media platforms (3/20) 50% of clubs have their on Twitch channel (10/20) 30% promote their own esports players anywhere (6/20)

Fig. 4.2 Methods of engagement with E-Sports industry for 20 EPL clubs, 2021/22 season (Source: Hayday et al. 2022, p. 79)

4.2

Colonization: It’s the Economy

For gambling and competitive games, individual components of the ludic action tend to become independent and develop a life of their own. By contrast, we understand colonization of the game to mean that games as a whole are instrumentalized and subjected to normal societal purposes. Since play is a natural part of the child’s

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Fig. 4.3 E-Sports as a digital mediator converging multiple industries (Source: Hayday et al., 2022, p. 16)

socialization process, it is most obvious that education uses ludic actions specifically to promote the development of children. For pedagogy, play is part of the basic equipment of the arsenal of educational measures it takes. Colonization can even mean denying the game its own right to exist. A famous example of this is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who strongly advocated that the ludic action, even in children, must not be “mere play”, but “it must be play with purpose and end goal”. (Kant, 1803, p. 51) The great philosopher of the Enlightenment criticizes in this context: “The common people play with their children, like monkeys. They sing to them, hug them, kiss them, dance with them. They therefore think they are doing something good for the child when they run to it as soon as it cries, and play with it, etc. The more often they cry, however.” (p. 37) It is of utmost importance “that children learn to work. Man is the only animal that must work.” (p. 55) This view expresses not only the Protestant work ethic but also the worldview of the emerging industrial and work society. From this perspective, play is often referred to as the “profession of the child”. The obvious approach to play comes from education, the comprehensive one undoubtedly from the economy. What happens with the game is on the one hand only part of a general trend of economization of modern life: Among the communication media, money has gained the greatest enforcement power. On the other hand, the economic colonization of digital games unfolds its own qualities, as we will show. We had noted (in Sect. 2.4) that every ludic action must answer what is being played with. Making toys is part of the work process, not the game. With the

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economization of work, i.e., the growing importance of the question of the ratio of effort and return, toy production also falls into the hands of economic organizations that initially work manually, then mechanically. In the process of economizing play, we see three milestones. The first turning point is that toys become commodities. This means that it is no longer just the interest of players that prompts the production of toys, but that producers have their own interest in manufacturing and selling toys. The second major step is taken when not only play materials from dolls to tin soldiers are offered as economic objects, but also finished game models: Individual games are created, designed to the point of application, produced and positioned on the market. The development of game models thus becomes an economic decision, players are now also customers who are observed for their ability to pay. This stage of economization was reached long before digitization. Of course, the economization does not happen completely, it does not affect every ludic action. The possibility to play known or self-invented games with self-determined or self-produced toys still exists. However, they are overshadowed by the gaming industry, which also penetrates into children’s rooms.

4.2.1

Reach and Appeal Values

Computer games represent the third milestone of economization. Even though their midwives were science and the military; even though committed nerds continue to engage with computer games without economic ambitions in niches, so to speak in garages, beyond the beginnings: The decisive and overwhelming processes of the global spread of computer games - this applies to hardware as well as software - were and are firmly embedded in economic organizations. The division of labor that takes place between the companies in the games industry changes again and again, in its basic features it follows the structures of media economics from the author via the scripts and skills of the professionals, the production (initially of a prototype) and the distribution of the “copies” to the users. In the case of computer games, users often also take on an author role, because they expand the possibilities of the respective game model with their own creations. The path from material and immaterial raw materials to the finished product at the point of sale always runs on three tracks, because the use value, the exchange value, and competition must be kept in mind simultaneously. Which game models are offered on the market and which ultimately find the greatest demand are opaque processes that are extensively communicated - everyone knows some recipe for success. It is clear: computer games, whose use extends beyond an inner circle of relatives and friends, also serve an economic benefit and are produced with this in mind. The task of advertising is to hide such connections and to exclusively thematize and euphorize the user perspective. Speaking of advertising: We do not want to discuss, but we do want to mention that there are also computer games that, like many other communication offers on the

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Internet (but also earlier in analog radio, film, and television), use advertising placements as a source of financing. In doing so, usual methods are applied, for example, users have the choice to watch advertising or at least let it run to save costs, avoid longer game interruptions, or make faster game progress. It is not difficult to make statements about how economization affects game models. From tabloid newspapers and private film and television production, we know how business models of mass culture work. To achieve the highest possible reach and assert themselves against competitive offers, publishers and broadcasters serve the known stimuli of society and get into a bidding war. Disasters, violence, and sex, as all analyses and empirical experiences show, attract the attention of the audience best. Most bestsellers in the games industry follow this tried-and-true recipe. The unique quality of the economization of computer games is shown by the fact that game successes are now purchasable. To illustrate it with a pre-digital comparison: Imagine you are playing chess, and you have lost a rook, which you could use well in a later game situation; for a certain amount of money, you can buy it back and use it again in the game. On the computer, game console, and mobile device, in-game purchases - the acquisition of virtual services or goods - are becoming an increasingly important source of income for the games industry (see e.g., Grandviewresearch, 2022; Futuremarketinsights, 2022). The next higher level, a better weapon, more attractive clothing: the game becomes a shopping tour. Unlike apps and browser games, PC and console games usually have to be purchased for a fee, but in-game purchases have also established themselves here. However, these do not have central distribution platforms (like the iTunes Store and the Google Play Store), so the generated income is harder to determine. Practices include DLCs, loot boxes, auction houses, and game currencies. The abbreviation DLC stands for Downloadable Content. Expansion packs for a specific game model can be purchased via distribution platforms and common sales portals, such as additional game missions, characters, or levels. Such additional content can extend the gaming experience. Loot boxes are used primarily, but not only, in freeto-play games. They are virtual boxes that contain a purchasable offer of items, i.e., collectible items such as firearms and axes, costumes, but also pets. Game currencies and auction houses serve a similar function, but are stronger economization instruments that are used not only by game companies themselves, but also by players for money-making and thereby also open gateways for illegal practices. To show it with an older example, to make it clear that these are long-standing developments: In 2012, Diablo 3, an action role-playing or hack-and-slay game from the game series of the American company Blizzard Entertainment, made headlines in the gaming community. On the first day of sale alone, 3.5 million copies of Diablo 3 were sold, and 6.3 million in the first week. It had been advertised with large billboards in urban metropolises and television spots. The German weekly magazine Stern reported: ‘Mister Farmer’ does not play the online game for fun, but collects as many virtual gold coins as possible to convert them into real money. Just like in any real country, there is a currency in the online world of Diablo that can be used to buy goods such as healing potions

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and swords. The collection is tedious and time-consuming, and this is where ‘Mister Farmer’ and his colleagues come into play: They do the job that no one wants to do - beating up monsters for hours on end without any variation. They get paid well for the virtual dirty work, damn well even: On Ebay or other sales platforms, the virtual gold coins are auctioned off for real money. To maximize his loot, he uses up to 100 accounts with a total of 200 characters at the same time. Of course, he can’t control all of them by hand, so he uses programs, so-called bots. They navigate the 200 characters through the world of Diablo. The collection of gold coins is fully automated, they just need to be sold. On average, ‘Mister Farmer’s’ team manages to collect 50 million gold pieces per hour, which are currently worth about 250 euros on Ebay. The program doesn’t know breaks: It can slash demons 24 h a day, seven days a week. In a week, they generate a gold mountain worth 42,000 euros, in a month that’s 168,000 euros - at least theoretically. The big but: The use of bots is illegal. ‘The development studio Blizzard is cracking down hard on the cheaters, who are called cheaters in gamer circles. A few days ago, the company banned thousands of players who have used forbidden software to gain unfair advantages. What sounds like a big success is in reality just a drop in the bucket: In a conversation with stern.de, ‘Mister Farmer’ estimates that there are currently about ten thousand accounts in Diablo 3 that are exclusively collecting gold. Although he has lost some accounts, the majority of his characters can continue to collect as before. Blizzard’s security software called Warden only catches small fish. ‘Diablo 3 is supposed to make everything better now: Blizzard has now launched its own auction house in Germany, which is supposed to curb the illegal trade at least. There, valuable items - and soon also gold coins - can be sold for cash. This is supposed to lure players away from the shady dealers and offer more security. If a player offers large amounts of gold in a very short time, that would be conspicuous and could possibly cost him his account. This is the first time ever that a video game company is running its own real money auction house. But it’s not just fairness that motivates Blizzard. The company will earn a share of every sale. That’s also why, some farmers claim, the company is only superficially fighting the gold collectors. (Fröhlich, 2012; see also Schuhmann, 2019)

The tendencies towards fraudulent maneuvers in the digital game world are not caused by the game but by its economic instrumentalization. Money knows no stopping rule. It has neither qualitative nor quantitative internal limits (see also Chap. 3). It is available for everything that is declared as purchasable. And it makes sense at any level, that there is no “enough” without an external limit being set. Therefore, the game is in danger of getting into dark machinations where it is economically instrumentalized. After pedagogy and alongside the economy, politics has also discovered the game as an instrument. Its popularity makes the computer game interesting for political activists as a medium of dissemination. While socially and ecologically committed people focus more on serious games,

4.3

Serious Games and Workification

Serious Games fall under the umbrella term game-based learning. Action Learning, planning games, persuasive games, and advergaming are further terms that are used in this field, without there being a uniform understanding of the demarcations.

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Gameplay Game-based (ludus) Play-based (paidia)

Purpose Message broadcasting Educative Informative Persuasive Subjective Training Mental Physical Data exchange

Instrumentalizations of the Game

Scope Market State & Government Military Healthcare Education Corporate Religious Culure & Arts Ecology Politics Humanitarian Advertising Scientific Research Entertainment Public General Public Professionals Students

Fig. 4.4 The GPS model of serious games (Source: Djaouti et al., 2011, p. 130)

It is difficult to select a single example of game-based learning because games for learning is a genre of learning environment that spans a broad range of fields (e.g., humanities, sciences, engineering, second-language learning, science, history) as well as genres of games (e.g., casual, first-person shooter, massively multiplayer online, role-playing). (Plass et al., 2019, p. 5)

The basic method of Serious Games is simulation. Normal practices of a societal life area are reproduced in a game model. Popular examples are flight simulation and the simulation of management tasks in corporate leadership. The beginning was the simulation of military conflicts. The simulation situation is usually oriented towards one of these three possibilities (c.f. Dhar et al., 2022; Kuka, 2017): The game concept can be designed for training with the goal that the game participants subsequently master normal practices better. Or it can be about seeing and understanding relationships that are not so easily revealed in everyday life. Or it can be designed for changes with the innovative goal of inventing other practices. Ultimately, all Serious Games aim for learning effects that ideally lead to behavior changes (see de Carvalho et al., 2022). A differentiated overview is provided by the graphical representation of the GPS model, which Djaouti et al. (2011) have developed (Fig. 4.4). Serious Games have developed into a business sector of their own. Several years ago it could be stated: Today’s ‘serious games’ is serious business, as stated by Ben Sawyer, co-founder of the Serious Games Initiative, the serious games market is now at $20 million, and digital gaming is a $10 billion per year industry, and the market is expected to grow over the next decade. (Susi et al., 2007) The Serious Games Initiative (2022) describes the development on their website as follows:

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The initiative has also begun hosting a series of meetings aimed at helping the area of ‘serious games’ emerge into an organized industry of developers and development studios skilled at using cutting-edge entertainment technologies to solve problems in areas as diverse as education, health-care, national defense, homeland security, analytics, corporate management and more. Over the last several years such projects have begun to emerge as an important outgrowth of the gaming industry. The number of non-entertainment games under development is rapidly increasing. The appreciation for the ideas, skills, technologies, and techniques used in commercial entertainment games is at an all-time high. Many commercial games are already in use for purposes other than entertainment. Titles such as Sim City, Civilization, Hidden Agenda, and others have been used as learning tools in schools and universities across the globe.

As a business, Serious Games are the product of a double colonization of the game, because they are produced and sold as goods, so they are economized to that extent, and on the other hand they are designed for non-ludic purposes. These can serve educational, medical, political, military, advertising and many other purposes. Many Serious Games are not traded as economic goods, but serve a social, ecological, or democratic commitment - or far-right political goals. The beginnings of far-right computer games, which glorify violence, xenophobia and misogyny, anti-Semitism and hate campaigns, go back to the 1980s. By now, there are also games that suggest taking on the role of far-right terrorists and reenacting their acts of violence or committing new ones virtually. Above all, right-wing extremists can use chat rooms of video games for their anti-democratic narratives and conspiracy stories. A 2021 report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) also found Steam (an online gaming platform) to house a diverse range of public servers created for violent neo-Nazi groups and noted that Discord (a third-party chat system often used by gaming groups) actively hosts white nationalist and white supremacist groups featuring neo-Nazi content (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2021). (Kowert et al., 2022)

Here are two examples from the area of ecologically committed serious games: • SEGAE, an online learning game published by the Erasmus program of the European Union and the French L’Institut Agro Rennes-Angers: “The game is based on a modeling framework that gamifies the implementation of agroecological practices in an integrated crop-livestock farm and assesses their impacts on sustainability.” (ScienceDirect, 2021). The participants manage a virtual farm and try to improve sustainability, develop the operation further, and produce sufficiently high-quality food with the help of agroecological practices while at the same time reducing environmental impacts. The balance must be found between economic and social sustainability while keeping an eye on both working conditions and, for example, the potential for global warming and humane animal husbandry. • “Change Game” [www.changegame.org/], a free city-building strategy game for iOS and Android developed by the Italian non-profit research institute “EuroMediterranean Center on Climate Change” (CMCC), brings climate change and its consequences closer to younger players. The aim of the game is to build a functioning city in a self-chosen urban or rural, mountain or coastal environment.

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Instrumentalizations of the Game

For this, resources must be managed, an energy and water supply ensured, and production and service companies built. This sounds familiar so far, but caution is required: Because the higher the emissions caused by other players, the greater the risk of droughts, heatwaves, floods, new diseases, or a further rise in sea levels. The scenarios of the game are based on real existing scientific findings. What peculiarities of the game come to the fore in Serious Games? Obviously, it is primarily the non-binding acting as if, that comes into play here. This playful way of acting allows both arbitrary repetition and free experimentation. The consequences of actions remain fundamentally enclosed in the social space of the game, without preventing the participants in the specific case from drawing consequences from the gaming experiences for subsequent normal practice. Developers, manufacturers, and providers of Serious Games promise that exactly such (learning) effects will occur. There is a number of design elements for games, that can be used to achieve the intended interactions with the learning content in a playful, motivating way. These include game mechanics, visual aesthetic design, sound design, narrative design, incentive system, and content skills. (Plass et al., 2019, p. 11)

Three reasons are given for why Serious Games can achieve the promised positive effects. First and foremost is the advantage of the game that participants are not only receptive but actively involved. Under the term design, we (in Sect. 2.5) introduced this characteristic of the game. Players make their own decisions and they themselves carry out these decisions. That is, they actually gain practical experience, experience the reactions of others, can observe and influence processes. Almost automatically, reflection processes follow, at which point a different decision would have meant a different course, and thus a different result would have come out. In the game, teachers do not stand like transmission towers in front of learners, but teaching and learning take place - if the game concept is intelligently, not trivially designed as an interplay. Secondly, Serious Games benefit from the freedom of the game to define its goals. What should succeed under which circumstances can be incorporated into the creation of the game exactly as it seems best to serve the extra-ludic purpose. However, there is a great danger that game concepts will emerge whose instrumental character is immediately obvious to everyone, while ludic qualities are mutilated beyond recognition: The game is deprived of its life elixir, the unexpected. Some clients want to avoid possible failure and prevent a different result than the desired one. Games can be instrumentalized, but not controlled, otherwise the experiential qualities that motivate participation in a game are destroyed. Serious Games can, this is the third point, increase motivation to participate in learning processes because a gaming experience is promised with the known features of active entertainment, sociable cooperation, and exciting self-efficacy. Where the great triple ludic freedom of the “whether”, the “what” and the “how” (see Sect. 5) is guaranteed, this motivating force can also unfold. But: In organizational and work contexts, when employees are suggested or even ordered to participate in the game, deception and possible disappointments are inscribed in the concept of Serious Games from the start. Because then neither is the voluntariness of participation

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given, nor do the participants have a choice in which game they want to participate. The danger that the how is subject to too many restrictions, we have addressed under the second point. With the usual game mechanics alone like badges, scorecards, or storytelling, which we will go into in more detail in the gamification section, ludic actions do not become the desired experience. On the internet, there are numerous websites of serious game providers, which highlight their advantages and prospects of success - which undoubtedly exist. However, such websites convey a one-sided impression that not only obscures how much the instrumentalization of playful actions can damage their attractiveness. It is also assumed that spillover effects of playful experiences on normal everyday behavior succeed relatively easily. The still growing importance of serious games is also evident in the fact that the question of their effectiveness has developed into a comprehensive field of research. It is no coincidence that it shows similarly disparate research results as media impact research in general, because in the end it is always about trying to influence human behavior, i.e., asserting the predictability of fundamentally unpredictable things for specific individual cases. Caserman et al. have compiled a good summary of the quality criteria: First, high-quality serious games should keep the characterizing goal in focus and should use appropriate methods for the specific application area and target group. Serious games should provide suitable feedback so that players can assess their progress and work towards achieving the characterizing goal. The effectiveness of serious games should be proven in scientific studies or by winning game awards. ‘Second, high-quality serious games should be fun and enjoyable. They must ensure player engagement and should keep the players in flow (ability vs skills). Finally, the double mission of serious games, that is, the balance between the serious and the game part, must be ensured. Therefore, high-quality serious games should embed the characterizing goal into the gameplay so that engaging in the serious part is mandatory for playing the game. Furthermore, the interaction technology should be suitable for the target group and game purpose. (Caserman et al., 2020, p. 10)

Graphically represented (Fig. 4.5), this picture of the quality criteria emerges in Fig. 4.5. More and more offers for and a rising demand for serious games can only develop in a society that believes it has a constant need for modernization and optimization. This is the path that the mainstream of contemporary society is on without ifs and buts. Career ambitions of individuals, expansion efforts of organizations, and competition of nations for location advantages - the vast majority of individual and collective actors participate in the optimization race in all performance fields and in all disciplines. This megatrend guarantees that serious games arouse great interest and are rated as attractive offers. Protagonists like the Serious Games Initiative (2022) are not shy about using big words: “If we are successful we hope to create not only better tools for policymakers, but the chance to ‘game our way’ to a better world as well.”

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Quality criteria and relevant quality aspects Characterizing goal Focus on the characterizing goal

Explanation y y y

Clear goals

y y

Indispensability of the characterizing goal

Methods Correctness of the doman expert content

Appropriate feedback on progress

y y y y y y y

Quality Proof of effectiveness & sustainable effects

Awards and ratings

Learning/training goal must remain in focus, for which a combination of physical and cognitive traning can be beneficial Support players to achieve the characterizing goal Game elements should not interfere with the learning/training process Appropriate methods for the specific application area and target group Goals are clear and appropriate so that players can work towards the characterizing goal Serious part must be mandatory Characterizing goal must not be avoidable Training and learning tasks should not be a hurdle

y

Avoid errors and ensure that the content is technically correct Ensure correct technical language Remain neutral, especially on political and social issues Players should receive feedback on their performance and progress Visible and recognizable effects Provide simultaneaous feedback (eg. visual, audio, haptic; multimodal feedback Provide positive reinforcement and in-game awards

y y

Prove that the chracterizing goal is achieved Learning/training effects need to be sustainable

y

Game awards, professional and user ratings, recommendations by domain experts, game reviews and number of players/ downloads state the quality of the game

y y Appropriate rewards

Instrumentalizations of the Game

Fig. 4.5 Quality criteria for serious games (Source: Caserman et al., 2020, p. 4)

4.3.1

Workification

“Workification” refers to a type of game that at first glance appears as a serious game. This impression is suggested because work activities are simulated, but it is deceptive. Workification is not about learning or innovation processes, but actually about the pleasure of playing. This is particularly revealing because work activities are often the first thing mentioned when asked for the opposite of play. How is it possible for the opposite of play to occur as a game? The first and most important prerequisite is, of course, the virtualization of action and the associated dematerialization. Needless to say, but often forgotten in discussions about workification: those who plant a field or build a house in a video game do not get their hands dirty, do not dig in the earth, do not carry stones, but control the work processes relatively comfortably with a mouse, controller, joystick, or keyboard (see Fischer 2021). Despite this prerequisite, workification can be used to reconstruct how even work activities can function as a game, because in the ludic action it is not about what, but how - otherwise war could not be such a frequently played scenario. How can a task that is more or less reluctantly to be done be transformed into a welcome game? Based on the theory of ludic action, as developed in Chap. 1, basic conditions can be named for this.

4.4

Gamification: A (Too) Great Promise

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Mark Twain (1876, pp. 26–32) tells a fitting story in his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom has been fighting with other boys and as a punishment, Aunt Polly forces him to repaint the garden fence in front of the house. To his friends, who pass by on their way to swimming and mock him, he gives the impression that he is working here of his own accord - “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” -, because it is an interesting challenge and a great sense of achievement to paint a fence - until his friends even pay to take over the work for him. The story informs us that the decision to play and the decision for a particular game are based on expectations that can apparently also be fulfilled by work activities. These expectations are what encourage voluntary participation, as long as they are not disappointed. For ludic work performances, they can be summarized from the classical sociological perspective of subject and situation: The situation must neither overwhelm nor underwhelm the subject; otherwise, it will be experienced as frustrating or boring, but it must challenge. A favorable mix is a ratio of changing difficulties so that success and failure alternate. For this, participants also receive direct feedback, “thunderous applause” or the encouragement to try again. Progress is made visible and possibly ranked. There is clarity and agreement about the goal to be achieved, but the ways to get there are not fixed, the players have creative freedom. Jane McGonigal summarizes the situation description with reference to Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (1996) as follows: “But Csíkszentmihályi’s research showed that flow was most reliably and most efficiently produced by the specific combination of self-chosen goals, personally optimized obstacles, and continuous feedback that make up the essential structure of gameplay.” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 36)

Workification sometimes also includes what is referred to in gamer language as “grinding”. This refers to the monotonous, repetitive execution of the same action in order to unlock a certain game object or to gain the experience necessary for game progress. “Treadmilling” or “pushing the bar” are other terms reminiscent of training in gyms. Grinding, for example, involves repeatedly killing the same enemies to gain experience points or, for example, gold. We have discussed the practices of economization used in connection with grinding (also as violations of the game rules) in Sect. 4.2. The point to highlight is that here, activities are carried out that hardly anyone would choose to do of their own free will, but they are accepted because they are embedded in a game. The basis of gamification is the reverse process, namely, to implement playful appearances in normal activities, carried out without intrinsic motivation, perhaps even reluctantly.

4.4

Gamification: A (Too) Great Promise

Injecting playful components into the communicative and operative actions of daily life - infecting normal action contexts with game elements: game and infection form the two-word components - is the basic idea of gamification. “Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 1) is a definition that is as short as it is precise. It is important to note the difference from practices that garnish normal learning or work processes with a game, for example as an introductory phase for getting to know each other or as a break for relaxation

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(c.f. Harney, 2020); in these cases, the normal activities and the game remain separate, whereas gamification merges the two. As a topic in business and science, gamification is relatively young, as a widespread phenomenon it has been around since about 2010, as a practice without special attention it was used for example in retail in the form of loyalty discounts as early as the twentieth century for customer retention. As with Serious Games, the fields of application for gamification are diverse and wide-ranging. Employee motivation, competence building, further education and customer animation are large fields of application, but also working on emails, brushing teeth, using stairs instead of escalators, jogging, saving energy, improving traffic safety and much more can be gamified, i.e., charged with the additional sense of participating in a game. (Arlt & Arlt, 2023, p. 149)

Two examples out of thousands: Louis Vuitton is celebrating the 200th birthday of its legendary founder on August 4, 2021 with the release of a smartphone game called “Louis - The Game”. But why is the luxury industry increasingly relying on tools like gamification and virtual reality? Because, it takes customers into a fantasy world and creates an emotional anchor. (House of Eden, 2023) In England, only 37% of adults aged 16 or over travel actively (walk, cycle, scoot, or wheel to get from place to place) at least twice a month. We need to find exciting ways to encourage more people to travel actively for the sake of population and planetary health. Active travel can help reduce congestion, air pollution and climate change. However, in the UK – as in many countries across the world-traveling by car remains the dominant social norm. Our research shows that gamification – offering points, badges, prizes, or spots on a leaderboard in exchange for participating in specific, non-game-related activities – can encourage people to travel actively to school or work. To test this, we set up a gamification initiative called Beat the Street to see whether it could encourage people in the London borough of Hounslow to travel actively. (Harris & Crone, 2021)

For gamification to be operationalized as a concept and to expect positive resonance, the societal status of the game must have achieved good values on the scale of public recognition. Gamification can only establish itself in a social environment where the experiential qualities of the game in the adult world are not rejected - as in the expansion phase of industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries - as harmful distractions from diligence, discipline, and obedience, but are accepted as desirable experiences. This is also why it is no surprise that digitization, with its reputation boost for the game, had to establish itself before gamification became a hyped recipe for success. There are primarily two tasks that gamification is supposed to fulfill or at least facilitate. The aim is, on the one hand, for individuals - as customers, clients, visitors, guests - to feel (better) addressed and to participate (more). Playful incentives are supposed to encourage them to more easily accept offers and participate in events more often. On the other hand, gamification is supposed to contribute to the fact that unavoidable activities - primarily in the context of gainful employment, but also tasks in other areas of everyday life - are carried out with more motivation and commitment thanks to playful ingredients. One of the highly interesting empirical facts of modern society is that, on the one hand, it proclaims freedom as its central trademark. On the other hand, it is deeply

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Gamification: A (Too) Great Promise

99

characterized by the fact that the actors, both individuals and organizations, try to influence each other with great effort as to what use the others should make of their freedom. The reason is obvious: The consequences of the free decisions of others constantly transform into - favorable or unfavorable - conditions for my own actions. In the family, in circles of friends and acquaintances, in organizations, on markets, and in all social relationships, the behaviors of others are regularly experienced as interference in one’s own affairs, regardless of whether they are meant that way or not. Approval and rejection, promises and cancellations, participation and non-participation, pricing and purchasing decisions, always the autonomy of one creates dependencies of others and in this process, every person and every organization experiences itself as both autonomous and dependent. Therefore, for all those who have the opportunity, it is an important concern to attempt to control the behavior of others. Direct control is experienced as an attack on freedom rights, it quickly reaches its limits in a society that explicitly wants to guarantee free decisions - within the boundaries set by law and morality. Under such conditions, persuasive communication becomes very important. Persuasion is understood as “a conscious attempt by one individual to change the attitudes, beliefs, or behavior of another individual or group of individuals through the transmission of some message (Bettinghaus & Cody, 1987, p. 3). Another way of influencing below the threshold of direct control attempts is known as context control. We understand gamification as a special case of context control. The name already indicates that there is no direct order or instruction to individuals, but rather an intervention in a context of action. The idea is to change the situation in such a way that individuals act out of their own motivation as expected of them. In the case of gamification, the change in the situation involves adding playful elements. Some also speak of “playful interventions”; the term “nudging” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009) also occasionally appears in these contexts. It is assumed that the positive experiential values of the game can also be implemented in normal contexts of action and that both the willingness to participate and the commitment increase. The simple game mechanics are at the forefront of gamification: • • • • • • •

Set clear, escalating tasks Vary difficulty levels Mark progress Award points Establish rankings Promise and distribute rewards Award honors

In our analysis of the gaming experience, we highlighted the experience of selfefficacy: The players become visible as individual participants, both in cooperation with others and in competition, which additionally emphasizes differences. An analytical look at the game mechanics typical for gamification reveals that their effects primarily make participants visible and distinguishable. Gamified everyday practices do not disappear “without a trace” in the flow of routines, but the actions and inactions of each individual become reflexive in the sense that they emerge as

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observed decisions - observed by each participant themselves and possibly also observable by others. Distance to and indifference towards one’s own behavior are hardly possible in a gamified context, as long as one operates the game mechanics. Moreover, self-observation and observation by others automatically generate a moment of control, both self-control and being controlled. In anticipation of the sociological analysis of the fifth chapter, it can already be noted here how much gamification, with the offer to distinguish oneself and become visible, meets the socio-cultural development trend that the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2020) has termed singularization. Popularly expressed, this means that it is no longer enough to belong and participate, but it is important to profile oneself as something special and “do one’s own thing”. To distinguish oneself and be visible is the condition of the possibility of prominence. The status of prominence means having to know it (him/her), having seen it, having heard it. Singularization means a kind of prominence on a small scale: profiling can be sought and achieved in various specific contexts. Reckwitz emphasizes that this socio-cultural trend applies not only to individuals, but to all units of the social, i.e., not only to subjects, but also to collectives, objects, spaces, and times. For example, it is noticeable how much spaces try to profile themselves as unique places - not least with the help of gamification. Such places are not simply used and passed through; rather, they seem valuable and emotionally attractive to those participating in them. Charming cities such as Venice and Paris - with their layouts and atmospheres, but also with the cultural associations and memories associated with them - are historical prototypes for ‘intrinsically logical’ places. (Reckwitz, 2020, p. 48; see also Xu et al., 2014; Bulencea & Egger, 2015).

If you enter gamification together with the name of a well-known city into an Internet search engine, you can expect many hits, for example in the case of San Francisco (on 01/14/2023 on Google) with 2,840,000. The opinions on gamification are so divergent that it is difficult to take the two extreme positions seriously: On the one hand, euphoric promises of salvation that see the end of all tedious or boring everyday tasks and only creativity and selfrealization. On the opposite pole, a deep condemnation that “exposes” gamification as a manipulative workshop of rose-colored glasses and complains that seduction and delusion are taking place here. For a factual-serious evaluation, it is recommended to look at the respective concrete game to see whether it only superficially applies game mechanics like whipped cream on an old dried-up cake or whether playful quality features are realized.

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Chapter 5

The Ludic Culture of Modern Life: The Ludic Century

Abstract The best starting point to describe the ludic culture of modernity is the decision. Being able to decide constitutes the practical side of freedom. Every game begins and functions with decisions. The decision leaves open how it turns out. There is uncertainty, the unexpected must be expected. Even and especially one’s own actions are unpredictable: one is always good for a surprise to oneself and others. People with unpredictable behavior, because it is open to decision, failure as well as success in view, encounter each other in unclear situations. This basic figure of the game is a typical life experience. This does not turn everyday life into a game. The game needs cared-for players, needs free time. Keywords Decision · Freedom · Uncertainty · Failure · Success To use the space of possibilities of the game specifically in normal everyday actions, as in gamification and serious games, is one way in which ludic elements find their way into societal normality. Another development is when normal living conditions themselves partially take on the character of a game event. With the emergence of modern communication, work, and living conditions, later further enforced by digitization, revealing affinities to the game can be observed in today’s actions and experiences. To pursue the ludic in the normalities of modern life is the task of this chapter. Modern society is, as it were, accommodating the game. Without this accommodation, there would be neither the extensive instrumentalizations of the game, as we were able to demonstrate in the fourth chapter, nor would the game have achieved this high societal status that it now holds.

5.1

Freedom, Equality, and Decidability

In modern society, whose incubation period generally begins in fifteenth-century Europe and experiences its breakthrough in the transition from the 18th to the nineteenth century (the so-called saddle time) in Europe and North America, it is immediately noticeable: The guiding idea it proclaims, the concept it places at the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. Arlt, H.-J. Arlt, Gamification of Life and the Gaming Society, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45907-8_5

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center of its communications, freedom, is also the positive feature that is particularly emphasized among the properties of the game. Having freedoms that are not normally given is certainly one of the associations most directly connected with the game. Despite all the diversity of meaning attached to the concept of freedom, this commonality between play and modernity can be considered a revealing starting phenomenon. In the meaning of the word “playroom”, this potential for freedom is encountered in everyday language, as it expresses that alternative possibilities for movement exist, that there are no strict monocausalities, no inevitabilities. Rather, the possibility is seen to make a decision and to give the event a turn with this or that “move”, to risk something, to be able to influence successes and failures.

5.1.1

The Claim to Shape

Societally, in the background, there is a change in the worldview that brings the experiences of the game on the one hand and the ideas of human existence on the other closer together. Pre-modern ideas of life and coexistence see higher powers (in all kinds of variations) at work, creating a cosmic order into which humans have to fit without alternatives: Fate takes its course. Modernity bids farewell to such a worldview. The idea gains the upper hand that people make their own history, that not eternal cycles, but possibilities of progress and decisions to be made again and again determine the course of things. The claim of being able to shape both nature and society as well as one’s own life becomes the dominant idea, which today culminates in the concept of the Anthropocene, the so-called age of man. The advent of modernity is marked by liberations that enable individual decisions. The novelty is having a choice where previously alternatives were not even recognizable, or prohibitions and commandments barricaded access to alternatives - even if it is the possibility to think and express that the sun does not revolve around the earth. The liberation of communication is both a prerequisite and a consequence of these developments. Where censorship was previously the rule, freedom of information, opinion, and press are now progressively enforced, and in direct connection, freedom for science, religion, and art. Freedom of communication is both fundamentally recognized and, concerning its practical limits, a permanent point of contention. Dissent in specific individual cases would not arise if the claim to freedom of communication were not fundamentally accepted. If one tries to find a starting point to describe the changes that can substantiate the thesis of the ludic culture of modern life, then the concept of decision is particularly suitable for this. Being able to decide, having a choice, constitutes the practical side of freedom. Every game begins with the “free decisions” of the participants: Whether they play and which game they choose. The game continues with free decisions, within the game, however, observing the rules it prescribes; but it would not be a game if these rules did not offer spaces for the participants’ decisions. In all three respects, whether they play at all, which game they choose, and how they then play within the rules, there is fundamental equality among the involved

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Freedom, Equality, and Decidability

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persons to make their own decisions. The second central - and socio-politically no less controversial - concept that the emerging modernity proclaims, equality, thus finds its correspondence in the game. All political interpretation battles from right to left do not change the structural fact that brings about the differences in interpretation in the first place: That modern people fundamentally have (should have) equal rights. The openness to decision of modern living conditions also contributes to the spread of a ludic basic feeling because the normal and the ludic sense of time converge. The ability to decide turns time into a plaything because one can be sure of neither the future nor the past. Although past decisions are irrevocably fixed, they change their meaning depending on what they turn out to be in the present. A dramatic example in 2022 in Europe was the past decisions of some countries to have gas supplied from Russia. In the past present (the 1970s), these decisions were understood as a clever economic move, but as a present past, they appear in many eyes as a serious geopolitical mistake. One can try to understand the peculiarity of this sense of time by choosing a simple, indisputable starting point: Everything that happens, happens in the present, not yesterday and not tomorrow, but now. Whatever happens, it happens simultaneously. After the event, it is an unchangeable past, before it is an unknown, possibility-rich future. The decision marks the difference between past and future so sharply because it takes the liberty to let the future become different than the (then past) present was. Quite unlike routine, habit, automation: They minimize the difference between past and future because both are aligned by repetition in the present. Among the established positions of more recent historical research is that the temporal structures within which society describes itself changed radically in the transitional period leading up to the modern era, especially in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century.“ (Luhmann, 1993, p. 37f.) . . . [B] ecause “in the modern period the difference between the past and the future takes control over time semantics [...] (ibid).

The decision emphasizes the difference and directs attention to the future, because the decision is about the future. Among the consequences is that the right thing becomes a matter of timing. When we look back, we no longer understand why in a present now belonging to the past we had been so cautious, or, as the case may be, why we had made such a risky decision. And from out of the future another present stares us in the face, in which we will in retrospect certainly come to a different appraisal of the risk situation we are experiencing in this present. But how we will see it remains uncertain. (p. 42)

We are already familiar with the behaviors that such time relations suggest, they are flexibility, improvisation, reckoning with the unpredictable, deciding out of the situation and revising decisions if necessary - all characteristics that are typically attributed to players (cf. Hörning et al., 1997, pp. 140–165).

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Decision-Making Profiled

Decision-making makes visible. How much attention is focused on decisions is clearly shown by people who hold leadership positions; but they are only the highlighted cases. The remarkable aspect is that in modern times it becomes the norm to be able to decide. Along with their decisions, every single person steps into the spotlight, it becomes a hallmark of their individuality, how they decide each time. The sociologically prominent concept of individualization gains its profile in the context of decision-making. From today’s perspective, such considerations read like unmentionable selfevidence. But in doing so, one overlooks the new and different compared to pre-modern ways of life. An episode from the (multiple filmed) life of George Bryan Brummel (1778–1840; cf. Kelly, 2006), a friend of the Prince Regent and later English King George IV, may illustrate this. Faced with the panorama of a Scottish lake landscape, Brummel is said to have asked his servant: “Which lake do I prefer?” Such behavior seems absurd today, why was it appropriate then? To have an opinion of one’s own, to openly articulate one’s own interests, to commit oneself in the process and to become recognizable as an individual, questions the universality of one’s own behavior. To consider distinguishability more important than belonging, such a thing was not appropriate then. As soon as one begins to assert a personal opinion, individual interests, it automatically entails a relativization, one exposes oneself to the judgments, perhaps even condemnations of others. Universality, absoluteness are only possible as temporary claims after individualization, not as eternal values, because others may see it differently. In modern society, every person is expected to have their own opinion, to consider alternatives conceivable, possibly also feasible, to recognize and perceive personal interests, i.e., to treat (life) situations not as determining circumstances, but as opportunities and “to make the best of it for oneself” - an attitude and behavior that is also expected in the game.

5.2

The Voluntary, the Unexpected, and the Non-committal of the Committed

Based on the structural similarity resulting from the - always contested, always controversially understood - enforcement of freedom and equality and the practice of own decision-making possibilities, further affinities between the game and modern society arise, which will be presented in detail below.

5.2

The Voluntary, the Unexpected, and the Non-committal of the Committed

5.2.1

109

Voluntary Temporary Participation

Similarly, in the shadow of individualization, which focuses attention on the individual, novel forms of organization compatible with individual preferences are spreading, namely the organization of interests and work performances. Personal, cultural, and political interests can come together for self-chosen purposes, for example in sports and shooting clubs, in singing societies and literature circles, in citizens’ initiatives and parties. At the same time, work organization is increasingly detaching itself from familial domestic contexts and is taking place in entrepreneurial forms of wage labor. The underlying common feature of these developments is that membership in an organization becomes a decision. The possibilities to join and leave are regulated in practice in different ways with regard to the interests of both the members and the organization - the general agreement with the game, the voluntary temporary participation is maintained. Previously, organizational affiliation, as far as familial ties allowed room for it, was socially regulated by birth and status or commanded by authority, now memberships under the conditions of assembly and association, professional and trade freedom are optional. Affiliations, apart from the status of family member, are fundamentally at the disposal, compulsory memberships (prison, school, psychiatric institution) require special legal or political decisions.

5.2.2

Dealing with the Unexpected

Decisions have the characteristic that it is open how they will turn out. There is uncertainty, the unexpected must be expected. Often situations prove to be ambiguous, and probabilities can be suspected, but certainties, which decision will prove to be better or worse, how it will continue, what will happen next, are not available. Cooperations and confrontations are open-ended, even one’s own actions are not always predictable: One is always good for a surprise to oneself and others. What sum results - randomly? - from the individual decisions and how do the individuals then react to the result (which they themselves produced, but did not plan together)? Recognizing habits and behavior patterns, because one’s own possibilities depend on them, becomes an important task. It is precisely such uncertainties and moments of tension that make games exciting experiences. In the practices of modern everyday life, it is primarily the market structures that provide decision-making freedoms for individuals and uncertainties for everyone. It is now less nature, whose unpredictability occupies people. Nature seems to be largely controllable (until ecological disturbances and destructions raise new, fundamental questions after the second half of the twentieth century). The challenges now arise - as in the game - primarily from the uncertainties of how others will decide and act.

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Dealing with the unexpected becomes a social reality, especially as the social form of the market continues to spread. The “marketization” encompasses areas of life beyond the goods, labor, money, and real estate market to the marriage and relationship market. Stock market transactions are usually described as a kind of gambling and their basic character, the bet, also identifies them as such. (see Sect. 4.1) Shareholders usually sell a share because they expect its price to fall, while buyers expect its price to rise. Basically, both are trying to “pull one over” on each other - a phrase that comes from the strength sport “finger wrestling”. Whoever bets commits to the fact that a currently unknown fact will turn out to be this way and not otherwise. This can be already existing, verifiable knowledge that at least one of the betting parties currently lacks. Or it is a fact that will only occur in the future, which none of the betting parties currently knows. The development of a share price and the outcome of a game are classic cases. Ultimately, a bet can be made on any (non) occurring difference, in the sense of the popular saying: “When the rooster crows from dungheap’s top the weather will soon change - or not.” That speculation is said about money stakes in stock exchange and off-exchange trading, while it is said about the real economy that here investment is made. What is the difference between speculation and investment? As we have seen, this question lurked behind the commercial regulation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of which was intended to restrain the former but encourage the latter. But there were also some contexts in which the question was in the foreground. In these situations, lawyers, judges, and legislators routinely had to classify particular transactions as instances of speculation or investment, because important legal consequences flowed from the decision. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a great deal of thought was devoted to an immediately practical question: where does investment stop and speculation begin? (Banner, 2017, p. 279).

The difficulty of drawing a clear line is easy to explain and hard to overcome: Here as there, it is about dealing with the unexpected. The owners of a textile factory also advance money, buy machines and raw materials, pay wages, and produce in the expectation that these costs will be reimbursed through the sale of goods and even a profit will be made. Whether this succeeds, however, is uncertain, unpredictable external circumstances (interest rate, economic cycle, wage tariff, monetary value development) and the strategies of competitors are not controllable for the individual company. Dealing with uncertainties has become a matter of course in modern everyday life. People with unpredictable behavior, because it is open to decision, encounter each other in unclear situations, this basic figure of the game is a modern life experience. It is a general belief that individuals can improve or worsen their own situation with their decisions. Against this background, it is anything but coincidence that a well-known scientific theory that analyzes dealing with the unexpected is known as game theory. The classic logical figure that game theory found in the middle of the twentieth century is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (Kuhn, 2019), in which one’s own choice and dependence on the decision of another are in an obvious, but uncontrollable relationship.

5.2

The Voluntary, the Unexpected, and the Non-committal of the Committed

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In the Prisoner‘s Dilemma, each player has a choice between two moves, one cooperative and one aggressive. If both choose the cooperative move, both receive a moderate reward. If one chooses the cooperative move, but the other the aggressive move, the co-operator is penalized severely while the aggressor receives a larger reward. If both choose the aggressive move, both receive lesser penalties. There is no obvious rational strategy. Each player will gain from cooperation if and only if the partner does not aggress, but each will gain even more from aggression if he can count on the partner to cooperate. Treachery pays, unless it is met with treachery. The mutually beneficial strategy is unstable. (Simon, 1996, p. 37)

Being able to decide for oneself as well as feeling the effects of others’ decisions leads to the contradictory experience of simultaneous independence and dependence. The experiences of success as well as failure in the game often stem from this two-sided constellation, most pronounced of course in competitive games, when the failure of others contributes to one’s own success. In societal normality, it is the career that exhibits this double polarity. In a career, one’s own and others’ decisions add up to a resume that is influenced by external circumstances but is generally believed to be largely the responsibility of the individual. This results in an additional parallel between game and modern normality, because here as there this self-reinforcing mechanism works, which makes successes create new chances of success, while failures make the next failure more likely. “When you lose, you lose,” says an American proverb.

5.2.3

Non-binding Nature of the Binding

Non-commitment has emerged as a playful characteristic because the events in the game remain without social connection to the activities of the players beyond the game (even though especially pedagogical instrumentalizations aim at the transfer of learning processes by trying to exploit the fact that the same people act inside and outside the game). This peculiarity of the game, to define itself as an autonomous not self-sufficient - field, modern conditions develop: Due to functional differentiation processes, societal performance fields are able to establish themselves as zones of autonomy (cf. Stichweh, 2022), which align themselves with their respective success media such as money, power, love, truth, attention. An overarching, binding sense-giving instance like religion in the feudal society no longer exists, even religion itself is referred to its own corridor and becomes a field among others. The “correct” religious belief does not guarantee successful communications and operations either in the economy or in science or in the public. Love is not a question of power, truth is not a question of money - and if it is, it is classified as corruption as soon as it becomes known. Crossover effects occur below the threshold of the official at any time and the success medium of the economy, money, has gained an increasingly pervasive importance, but still: successes and failures in one performance field have no binding force for other areas. Failing as a politician does not prevent economic, athletic, or scientific success careers.

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To put it in a nutshell: Being able to isolate action and experience semantically, possibly also temporally and spatially, and to separate it from the rest of societal events, is a primarily playful experience for which there are tendential parallel experiences in the normality of modern society.

5.2.4

Bindings and Unbindings

In the analysis of playing, another aspect of non-commitment has emerged, which has to do with the freedoms of decision. What was decided in this way and not otherwise, develops binding force, which creates a certain expectation security. But what is only the way it is because it was decided that way, is confronted with the possibility that it will be decided differently in the future, so that it can only be a potentially temporary expectation security. The binding nature of the decision includes, precisely because it is a decision, unbinding as a possibility. The temporary staying, this ongoing relationship between binding and releasing, more sharply formulated: between docking and fleeing, can be found in the everyday life of the modern world in many situations. In the context of media consumption, there is now the term zapping for this. A vivid example is the coffee house, whose beginnings date back to the seventeenth century. The coffee house differed from its predecessor, the tavern, by its urbanity and sobriety. From the stuffy provinciality of the village pub, where every stranger was eyed suspiciously, people came to the bright, marble, glass and gold equipped open spaces of the coffee house, whose visitors felt stimulated precisely because they met strangers; [...] it was a place without dogma and authority; it was a place that guaranteed freedom. (Schulze, 2006, p. 75)

Perhaps the classic formulations from the Communist Manifesto are well suited to illustrate how much the modernization process has loosened old bindings: [...]“uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, and all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned [...].” (marxists.org) In place of fixed, immovable obligations, decisions do not simply replace non-commitments, which would be too roughly thought, but decisions that - to put it precisely once again have binding forces, but also the potential to dissolve these obligations again. The concept of positive law captures exactly this fact: laws of modern states are not “natural laws”, they apply, but are changeable and replaceable by others. In social relations, it is the contract, which represents this dual property of deciding for a bond and at the same time providing for possibilities of release. This description comes very close to ludic relationships. Both participation in the game, once it is agreed upon, and the rules of the game, once they are accepted, require commitment if a longer-lasting, experience-rich interaction is to emerge, but

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Pretty Best Friends: The Digital and the Ludic

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the players can decide anew at any time, end their participation or put the game rules up for discussion. The modern form of government, democracy, for example, expressly invites collective binding decisions to be aligned with the majority will, which can be different tomorrow than it is today. But the modern way of doing business also contributes greatly to making it easier to dissolve bonds. The money mechanism greatly facilitates changes of ownership, as both goods and services can change owners or possessors relatively smoothly - and above all without the use of violence - through the process of payment. In the form of the project, we find this new relationship of bonds and releases in the world of work. Classic industrial relations are characterized by hierarchical organization, relatively firmly anchored job assignments and responsibilities, and stable roles and routines. Whereas traditional organizations are oriented toward long-term durability and reproduction, the most prominent feature of projects is their time limits. Projects are episodes with a beginning and an end, and thus they have the character of an event in a broad sense of the term. In addition, projects are highly open to the new and unexpected (including the reality that certain ideas might be dead ends), and they form a narrative arc. A project begins with an exploratory initial phase, moves into a phase of research and testing with feedback loops, and ends with an especially intense final phase. (Reckwitz, 2020, p. 152)

Reckwitz emphasizes that in project work a cultural practice emerges “with narrative, design, ethical, ludic, and even aesthetic qualities” (p. 153) The ludic characteristics are easy to discover: the precise definitions of beginning and end, the openness to the unexpected, a tendency towards more equality of the participants, the crowning conclusion. In project relationships, it should be added, individuals must show themselves as individuals, as in a game. It is not only about delivering a performance contribution that anyone else can also make, but always also about showing one’s own competencies, personal potentials, special impulses. Under the conditions of digitized communication, in the networks that emerge from it, projects become such a self-evident form of work that their specialness compared to the classic industrial relations almost falls into oblivion.

5.3

Pretty Best Friends: The Digital and the Ludic

This particularly important thesis - “that digitization is directly related to the social structure” of modern society - was formulated by the German sociologist Armin Nassehi (2020, p. 6) and is well justified from our point of view. Nassehi argues that the triumph of the computer is rooted in the functioning of modern society itself. The binary coding with which digital technology operates - it only knows the difference between 0 and 1 - is also found in a different way in the major societal functional fields such as economy, politics, law, science, health, etc. This has been extensively demonstrated by Niklas Luhmann. The basic operation of the functional fields is also

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a hard either-or: payment or non-payment in the economy, government or opposition in politics (in other words: having power or not having power), right or wrong in justice, truth or untruth in science, healthy or sick in the health system. The application of the codes each requires certain programs that make it decidable whether the positive value or the negative is present; in science, for example, these are theories and methods. The dramatic aspect of these binary-coded operations is that they do not know a stop rule. There may be practical obstacles to and resistances against the application of a certain code, but there are no systematic barriers. This fundamental lack of barriers turns the entire society into a potential playing field for the application of the code. The term “playing field” is deliberately chosen because the attempt to expand the application of the code can initially only be a trial action. Success is questionable, unexpected events must be expected. Economic, political, medical actions etc., are not a game, they are not a non-binding act as if, they are strictly bound to their respective code, but the respective functional fields have this ludic component, to seek dealing with the unexpected, to test success. Expeditions into unknown territories are part of their program. Binary coding is programmed for expansion. This urge for expansion can be empirically observed in the historical development of modern society. It is particularly noticeable (and controversial) in the case of the economy, which with its medium of success, money, penetrates into more and more social situations and poses the question of “pay or not pay”. But also the public, politics, science, medicine, and sports are expanding or at least constantly trying to. For example, there is hardly any behavior that does not have to answer the question of whether it promotes health or causes illness. Digitization is based on a code that, in order to function, needs nothing more than a binary difference. The speed with which digital technology permeates modern society worldwide, making the planet its playing field, has these two causes: Modernity is already familiar with binary coding from its own habits and digitization applies the simplest possible form of binary coding, which opens up a hitherto unprecedented space of possibilities. The logic of binary coding, on which the modern, functionally differentiated society structurally builds, comes to free development with digitization. Therefore, the cultural scientist Andreas Reckwitz can call the computer a culture creator. “The digital computer network is a culture machine, which means that its technologies are focused on the production, circulation, and reception of narrative, aesthetic, ludic, or design-based formats of culture.” (Reckwitz, 2020, p. 184) Among the many societal changes triggered by digitization, three are particularly noteworthy that bring the game and normal life even closer together. Firstly, with the virtuality a new, additional level of reality is created, which with its multiple effects resembles ludic realities more than previous reality experiences. Secondly, the so-called social media introduce an affective non-commitment into public communication, which was previously reserved for the game and can be found in sports and art (see Sect. 2.6). Thirdly, the network character of digital communication causes changes in social relationships that reveal a kinship to the game.

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The game, as we had summarized, can absorb all perception and communication possibilities and transform them into a ludic reality. So far, we have encountered the object-thing-like, which is accessible to our sensory perception, as well as the imaginations and fictions, which present themselves as thoughts and as communicative messages - be it as spoken or written texts, be it as sounds or as images. What makes the special feature of the virtual? To be perceptible as a message, the imaginary and fictional - before the possibility of digitization - must be materialized. Both superheroes and their adversaries, monsters and villains, who appear as moving images on the cinema screen, must perform as actors, be they living or mechanical, in order to be filmed and then shown. This strict coupling to materiality is lifted by digitization, it allows the transformation of imaginations and fictions into bits and bytes. All communication possibilities can now be traced back to a common binary code, all messages can be made accessible in a uniform virtual presence of perception. What ludic communication has always allowed itself, namely to transform all modes of reality indiscriminately into its own mode of as if, is accomplished by digitized communication by transforming all messages into virtual ones. And they are offered via the same medium, the computer in its different hardware variants. This opens up previous media boundaries, which had previously clearly marked whether one was dealing with a book, a film, a press release, a radio broadcast etc. - or with a game. The game comes into immediate communicative proximity to all other digitized messages. Only mouse clicks or swipe movements separate game and normality.

5.3.1

Fake News

One of the most well-known consequences is that it becomes much harder than in the past to distinguish between facts and fakes. Public discussions and scientific analyses (e.g., Anstead, 2021) repeatedly address the problem of fake news. The much greater difficulties in controlling the empirical reality content of messages, distinguishing between authentic, staged and freely invented, not only affect the spoken and written word, but especially images. Whether they are representations, technical modifications or pure creations often eludes the judgment of the recipients and can be deliberately obscured by producers. Such boundary blurring, which the game practices as a matter of course, becomes an everyday occurrence with digitization. They do cause unease and insecurity but are nevertheless accepted as inevitable.

5.3.2

Transformation Skills

In the context of these changes in communication, the issue of identity comes to the fore. Because all the stagings and creations that are possible in dealing with other

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topics are also available for self-presentation. The title Who Am I and If So How Many? of the book by the German philosopher Richard David Precht (2011), translated into more than 30 languages, has hit the nail on the head. Identity issues are nothing new in societal normality, but they gain particular relevance and urgency under the conditions of digital communication. In the game, especially in role-playing, identity changes have their unquestionable place, transformation skills can unfold freely. Up to identity theft, identities in the communication space of the Internet are available in a quite comparable way. Cosplay can be understood as a kind of link (the word is composed of costume and play). Cosplay originated in Japan’s comic and animated film culture, the fan scene of manga and anime, and has since become more widespread (Han, 2020). Public masquerades and costumes, which are otherwise only common in carnival, are playfully placed in the “drab monotony of everyday life” in a creative way.

5.3.3

Affective Non-commitment of Social Media

The new possibilities of public communication, to which social media platforms have been inviting all Internet users since the mid-1990s, drive the competition for attention, in which every public announcement must participate, to the extreme. The chances of getting attention and perhaps even feedback, whether positive or negative, increase with the spontaneous expressivity of the message. Emotional outbursts, actual or staged, are more attention-grabbing and connectable than factually balanced statements. And “negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.” (Lanier, 2018, p. 15) The functioning of the major social media platforms provokes emotional and moralizing communication behavior. “Outrage has become the defining emotion of the 21st Century, worn righteously, as a finger-pointing badge of honour.” (Fleming, 2020) This means that we encounter a “liberation” of emotionality comparable to the game (see Sect. 2.6). In many cases, these are waves of outrage that subside again; but the next occasion is sure to be found. The emotional outbursts are in a certain way non-committal, they are not tied to any specific topic or event. They also have something playful about them in this respect - although not for those affected by hate speech.

5.3.4

Network Character

Digitization expands the possibilities for communication so enormously in quantitative terms that this quantitative leap also has consequences for the quality of social relationships. The range of potential social contacts now encompasses the entire

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global digital computer network. Contacts, as the word suggests, are loose couplings that generate significantly less binding force than contracts, for example, and imply less clearly defined expectations than roles, for example. In order to be able to use contact possibilities in a variety of ways, individuals must not commit themselves permanently, either temporally, factually, or socially, but must remain open to new connection possibilities (Leifer & Rajah, 2000). Contacts can be chosen “at will” “postmodern arbitrariness” has become a catchphrase -, although of course the fact remains that a contact always requires two: it must be mutually desired. It also remains a problem that a contact can be much more important for one person than for another; and that, especially in the platform economy, contacts between people and organizations can be asymmetric. Taking all this into account, it remains fundamentally true: Temporary, flexible, and mobile are the outstanding characteristics - not of all, but of many - social relationships in the digital age. The term network has made a career in this context, “network society” (Castells, 2009) has become a frequently used term for contemporary society. The network character is intensively observed and described in a variety of ways in the development of work and interest organizations. Membership as a mode of binding with fixed agreements and longer-term perspectives does not disappear but loses its status of self-evidence and gives way to networking practices. This new quality makes normal relationships more similar to playful relationships because it is part of the game to be able to start, try out, end prematurely, and replay “at will”. The digitalization of already loosened modern obligations can be observed in such ubiquitous success media of society as attention, money, truth, love. These phenomena have been described many times, here it is only briefly reminded to illustrate more concretely how playful arbitrariness is spreading in normality. Attention: Binding attention to a specific message on the computer screen proves to be an almost insoluble task. Paradoxically, games are probably the offers that manage this best. In his poem “Burnt Norton” of 1936, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) prophetically described the situation in front of the computer screen as “distracted by distraction by distraction”. Money: Unfetteredness is assumed as a general characteristic for money to fulfill its functions as a medium of exchange and as capital. Computer-based high-frequency trading overshadows all previous transactions. Securities change their owners in nanoseconds based on algorithmic calculations. Truth: Different – older, bigger, faster, more dangerous, etc. – than previously assumed, is a typical phrase when previous truths are to give way to new insights, when “from now on” something different should apply than “so far”, as the Austrian philosopher Josef Mitterer (2011) has expressed. In pre-modern times, the new was the suspicious, in modern times it is the sought and strived for, without therefore being automatically welcomed. In the singular, “the truth” can no longer be found in the face of the flood of information, storage and processing capacity of digital communication. Truth loses its binding power. Wherever it asserts its validity, it risks being rejected as an imposition. Searching for one’s own truths becomes normal, just as it is normal in the game to explore one’s own paths.

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Love: Love vows often come with an “eternal” expiration date. But on dating portals, swipe movements decide whether a love relationship is considered or not. Contacts, even if the step from online to offline is successful, do not need to last long. Ghosting, simply opting out of a relationship, is a common practice. It is also not unusual to say goodbye with one online message here and to establish a new contact with another. Free and entangled, independent and dependent, unbound and networked, these complementary characteristics of modern coexistence have become even more pronounced with digitization. Therefore, social sciences also speak of a “ludic basic feeling” that permeates digital capitalism and, as we have been able to show, also finds its expression in gamification practices. Because of this megatrend towards a network society, no description of contemporary conditions can do without the two superstars of the modern sociological arsenal of concepts, namely complexity and contingency. Complexity means compulsion to choose: the network of relationships in which I move is much larger than my sphere of influence; by doing one thing, I leave – with unpredictable consequences – many other things. Contingency includes the risk of disappointment: much can, nothing must, and in the end, what I expected either comes true or does not happen. Moments of gaming experiences can be well recognized in this.

5.4

Unbroken Power of the Factual: Gaming Needs Free Time

We can play any games we want. We can create any future we can imagine. Let the games begin. (McGonigal, 2011, p. 15)

We have analyzed and described games and their significance in the present from changing perspectives. In every respect, it has been shown that playing is no longer to be classified as a social fringe phenomenon, but attracts great public, economic, educational, scientific, political, cultural interest. Even where critical objections and negative judgments dominate, the increased and still growing presence of the game is registered. It is important to prevent a possible misconception. The diagnoses that speak of the “Gamification of Life”, the “Gaming Society”, and the “Ludic Century” could lead to the assumption that the distinction between normality and games is fading. Due to the diverse application of gamification and the similarities of modern social structures with ludic components, the impression may arise that the difference between “real life” and the game is only to be noted as a marginal one and to be neglected due to its insignificance. This impression is strategically reinforced in three ways: The entertainment industry is expanding. Neil Postman’s bestseller Amusing Ourselves to Death. Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) critically described this development as early as the 1980s. Secondly, advertising communication often promotes products and services in a way that presents

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solutions to all problems as a piece of cake. Thirdly, self-presentations of work organizations highlight ludic components of work relationships for reasons of attractiveness. In sum, it amounts to making everyday life appear as a journey through spaces of possibility full of ease, casualness, and free development - a very unrealistic picture. Because only the game includes the offer to continue as if nothing had happened. All other actions and experiences, no matter how many ludic elements they may contain, create a past whose effects the actors, for better or worse, feel in the present. Representations suggesting that the difference between play and normality has become vanishingly small are misleading. This does not require the terrible proof of war. Even a peaceful everyday life marks the fundamental difference, because the game can only take place on the condition that the ordinary supply problems of daily life are solved or their solution can wait. Having time for entertainment presupposes that one’s livelihood is secured. Basic questions of human survival such as food, housing, clothing must have been answered. The game needs free time. It shares this with art, which is also often called unprofitable art. Players take their time. Even when the course of the game itself does not allow time to be taken, the game time is broken out of the normal events and can, depending on how the game is evaluated, be interpreted as wasted or valuable time. In the time, however, that the players take, the normal events continue, that is, they encounter a different factual state of affairs after the end of the game. How the ludic becomes normal, but the power of the factual remains unbroken, is particularly evident in the change in the world of work. In the colorful spectrum of work activities and consumption habits, historically predominant types also emerge. For characteristics of the game to take hold in the world of work, the Taylorist and Fordist conditions had to be replaced, which were dominant during the industrialization processes of the 19th and large parts of the twentieth century in the economically leading countries. In these mainly Western European countries, there was a broad consensus on what was to be understood by a so-called normal employment relationship, namely a relatively strictly regulated dependent employment with defined - albeit sometimes enforced in labor disputes - temporal, factual, social and financial specifications: Defined working hours, defined tasks, defined hierarchies, defined incomes. These - often collectively and long-term regulated - conditions “liquefy” increasingly in the late twentieth century. Several megatrends are at work here, especially the expansion of the service economy and the production of immaterial goods, framed by processes of globalization and digitalization. Among the consequences, in the context of our question, these three are particularly noteworthy: 1. Gratuitous independence, 2. Subjectivization of work activities, 3. Primacy of success. 1. Terms such as crowd-, gig-, and clickworking highlight that – especially in the platform economy, but also beyond – work relationships have been established that the traditional industry did not know. “Mobile working,” as allowed by home office, for example, opens up freedoms previously unavailable to the average working life: choosing the workplace oneself, determining the working hours

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oneself, choosing cooperation partners oneself. External determination, a characteristic feature of industrial dependent employment, gives way to freedoms known to game participants. Where dependence prevailed, independence can unfold. However, the new possibilities also include the fact of having to organize and discipline oneself, with all the risks, all the stress, and all the overwhelm to generate oneself. Among the hard facts is also the risk of being left without follow-up orders and thus without employment and income, and – the old legal and social ties have fallen away – to find oneself outside any institutional frame of reference that grants social security in case of illness and in old age. Such failure, which in the game is only an invitation to restart the game, can make the beautiful freedoms wilt for individual affected people in everyday life like leaves in autumn. Then the advantages of playful freedoms resemble an invitation to upright walking without ground under the feet. 2. Under the keyword “subjectivization” developments are summarized that offer more opportunities for fulfillment and intrinsic motivation in the world of work. Most pronounced in the so-called Creative Economy, but now also increasingly in most sectors, individuals are confronted with the expectation of not just correctly performing a specific task, but also paying special attention to the how: performance is key. The formal qualification, which others may also have, is one thing, the appearance, which can only ever be one’s own, is another. Being able to recognize and find oneself in the work activity, to bring oneself in as a personality, is both an invitation and a demand. This subjectivization, which we have observed and described in the game (see Chap 2.5), brings a playful element into the world of work because performance per se has a staging character and its success depends precisely on making the difference between authenticity and demonstration invisible. In fact, this introduction of the ludic into work relationships means that social inequalities are hardening. Much more now depends on how much cultural capital individuals were able to accumulate in their socialization process, and this in turn is directly related to their social background and the peer groups in which they moved as adolescents. “This sort of cultural capital, which features above all in educated milieus, encourages people to develop multifaceted personalities (with experience abroad, social engagement, interests in pop culture) and helps to create the fragile balance between concentration and nonchalance that the creative economy appreciates and requires in so many branches. In other words, it fosters the refined mixture of confidence and self-questioning – a fondness for experimentation and a subtle interest in profiling – that the performance economy expects.” (Reckwitz, 2020, p. 167) 3. Among the great modern narratives is the belief that societal order is based on a meritocratic foundation: The position of individuals, their individual goods, personally perceptible rights, and practicable freedoms are directly related to the contributions they make to society. The degree of reality in this narrative does not need to be discussed here. Socio-economic diagnoses now largely agree that a practice of success has become established, which, as long as no criminal

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traces are evident, no longer asks about previous achievements, but only about results: successes speak for themselves. What is noticed, favored, and rewarded is decided by the public (in their various roles as mass media observers, interested parties, customers, etc.) regardless of the ambitions, competencies, and efforts of the actors. From the perspective of the actors who are striving for their success, successes occur - or not. The unpredictable and unavailable is now accepted as its own power, even though rationalization with the methods of planning, design, and optimization is stated as the goal and purpose in the birth certificate of modernity. Just as chance in a game can bring luck to any participant, success forms a difficult to control variable (not only) of working life. Legends revolve around it, especially when ascents to unimaginable heights are to be admired. Stars (and their later fall) are the focus of public attention. "And so the modern subject is notoriously engaged in attribution games, from which one's own self should emerge as the cause of successes, while failures must be attributed to unfavorable circumstances, random events, or the contrary realization of third parties' goals, whose successes then are one's own failures." (Neckel, 2004, p. 63; see also Sect. 4.1) In the game, failure, defeats, and losses can be forgotten "at the final whistle", in the working world they remain factors of further events with a formative influence on the further life of the actors. Therefore, failure is usually concealed in normality, while in all games that have not been instrumentalized for specific purposes, it is accepted as a normal event that happens to everyone and is often commented on with cheerfulness.

5.4.1

Autonomy, Not Autarky

Where does the temptation come from to level the differences between normality and play, even though every life experience teaches the difference? In Sect. 2.5 we worked out the paradoxical basic structure of the gaming experience: How the contradictory experiences of self-efficacy in the form of decision-making freedom on the one hand and being at the mercy of chance on the other collide. In the dominant modern conception of the designability of nature, society, and one’s own life, we encounter such a paradox again. The ability to design presupposes a certain area of autonomy that the social actors, the individuals, and the organizations must have. The difference between autonomy and autarky is crucial here. One can venture the thesis that no modern actor, neither any person nor any organization, lives or functions autarkically. The autonomy they have does not free social actors from the existential necessities of accessing information and resources from their environment. What consequences arise from this? The actors experience uncertainty and dependency. How are autonomy, uncertainty, and dependency related? The claim to design, which modern individuals, as well as organizations, raise for themselves,

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includes the possibility to decide freely and to execute the decision. This possibility cannot be realized without fulfilling some conditions. Anyone who has to make a decision chooses between alternatives (see Sect. 2.3) and needs information for this, which - to themselves and others - can serve as a justification for preferring one alternative and rejecting others. Such information in modern times is hardly obtained from direct perception, but largely only through communication. This means that the improbabilities of communication (see Sect. 3.1) are incorporated into the decision-making process. The question of who messages reach at all, the problems of understanding and misunderstanding a message, and the big question of whether information is affirmed or denied, together pose a high potential for uncertainty that burdens all those who make decisions. To execute decisions, considerable resources are often necessary, which must first be procured. Property rights of others usually block access to these resources. The acquisition or temporary use of the necessary means is therefore dependent on the approval of others. There is no need to think about extensive, material-rich investments made by organizations, and to discuss the energy and raw material needs of companies, a look at the everyday living environment of an individual is enough to determine: From the dishes in the kitchen cupboard to the clothing and furniture she has chosen, to the means of transport for the big trip as well as for urban public transport, every person is dependent on the work of others. And the more elaborate and demanding she designs her life, the more so. It falls under the communicative habits of the modern mainstream to highlight and celebrate the freedoms and design claims of societal actors. The inseparable uncertainties and dependencies, on the other hand, are either completely concealed or rated as marginal phenomena. The double face of bourgeois-modern freedom has already been described scientifically thousands of times, for example by the GermanAmerican social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980): Any understanding of freedom in modern society must start with that period in which the foundations of modern culture were laid, for this formative stage of modern man permits us, more clearly than any later epoch, to recognize the ambiguous meaning of freedom which was to operate throughout modern culture: on the one hand the growing independence of man from external authorities, on the other hand, his growing isolation and the resulting feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness. (Fromm, 1941, p. 39)

The political mainstream responds to this problem by evading it. Where uncertainties and dependencies emerge negatively in an undeniable way, they are preferably attributed to individual actors as personal failures, which could have been avoided with greater foresight and smarter decision-making behavior. This basic attitude of the modern self-image, to reward design claims and to ignore the associated problems as much as possible, is very conducive to giving uncertainties and dependencies a playful appearance, to dress them in the light garment of error-friendliness and consequencelessness. The steep rise of the game, the multiple instrumentalizations of the game, and the blurring of the difference between normality and game, these three megatrends of the ludic century are not surface phenomena, they are structurally anchored in digital modernity.

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