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Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)
01:01:13
An interview with Miguel Sicart
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- [00:00]
Miguel Sicad
Ugh.
- [00:01]
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- [00:18]
Miguel Sicad
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- [01:01]
Miguel Sicad
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:05]
Rudolf Indus
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Rudolf Indus, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Miguel Sickard, the author of Playing Software Homo Ludens in computational culture from 2023, and the publisher is MIT Press. Before we jump right in though, I want to let you know that if you like our show, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the audio platform of your choice and share this episode with your friends on social media. So now back to the show. Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing software shapes every aspect of our lives. In Playing software, Miguel Sicker delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by factors using play to weaponize everything from conspiracy theories to extra capitalism. Miguel, welcome to the show.
- [02:25]
Miguel Sicad
Thank you very much, Rudolf. It's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to this.
- [02:32]
Rudolf Indus
I wonder if you could begin the interview by telling us a bit about yourself.
- [02:38]
Miguel Sicad
Sure. All right. So my name is Miguel Sicad. I'm originally from Spain, from the northwest of Spain. So I'm Galician, but I've been living in Denmark, in Copenhagen, for the last 21 years. I'm professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where I am the head of a new research center called the center for Digital Play. So I used to. There used to be a thing called the center for computer games research. And about a year ago we switched a little bit the orientation, we changed a number of things and we became the center for Digital Play. And that's what I'm currently heading. My background is in the humanities, so I've studied a lot of productively useful knowledge and productively useless knowledge. So I have a little bit of a background in philosophy and in literary theory and in linguistics and so on. But I mostly teach, I guess, in the intersection of design critical algorithm studies and game studies. So that's where I teach. And I also think that's where my, my research falls in. Right. Sort of. And then, yeah, I've written this book, Plain Software, which has just been published and it's the fourth book I've written. The things I've written before were the ethics of computer games and beyond Choices, the design of ethical gameplay, sort of a one, two series of punches on how to think about and design ethical gameplay experiences. And a book called Play Matters, which was My Tiny Theory of Play.
- [04:20]
Rudolf Indus
Great. I just was wondering, was there any specific reason why you actually did change the name from Computer Game Research Digital Play? Because it seems to me, especially knowing about the background of the great, great, great Copenhagen IT University tradition of researching games, this must have been quite a discussion, right?
- [04:47]
Miguel Sicad
It was a bit of a discussion. And so the important thing is to say that we still do games research at the itu. And in fact, what used to be the center for Computer Games Research still exists as a research group inside this broader center for Digital Play. I think what we wanted to do. This is a little bit complicated, so let me just explain it. And I don't know if your audience will actually enjoy people explaining academic structures, but let's see.
- [05:17]
Rudolf Indus
Sure they will. Yeah.
- [05:19]
Miguel Sicad
Okay. Okay, that's good. Then you have the right audience, or hopefully. So the center for Digital Play is an umbrella center that contains four research groups. One of them is the Games Research Group, which is the old center for computer games research. Then we have another one called Creative AI Lab, which is a lab that works with creativity and AI. You know, all these things that are so popular now, all the ChatGPT, all the Dalles, all of that stuff. And it's actually a computer science, deep learning, evolutionary algorithms focused research group. They are with us because a lot of the work they do is based either on games or on play. So they fit very well with the kind of ethos that we have at, you know, at the, at the center. Then there's another group called the Media Art and Design Mad that Does mostly interaction design with cultural partners, typically museums, but other cultural institutions. And then we have a fourth research group called Digitalis, which is about digital life and culture. So they study how do we live in a digital world, typically using social sciences, humanities, and sort of communication studies work. So the reason why we switched gears was that while all of us in this center work together, games is not what pulls us together. We all have an interest in games, but games are one of the things that we are interested in. And at some moment, it became a little bit difficult to think, okay, so we are going to be identified with this object called games. Right. Which is a very generous object in the sense that it's a liminal object. My colleagues here have spent many years trying to define what a game is, and I'm not going to go there. Yeah, but at the same time, it was very difficult to find these connection points that we otherwise have in this sort of broad research group. So we thought about maybe it's time to switch gears and say, instead of focusing on a liminal object as the thing that brings us together, we are going to focus on a liminal activity, Play something that it's very difficult to define, that can be perceived and seen in many different types of contexts. And that is what brings us together. Some of us study play in the form of games. Some others study play as a way of training machine learning algorithms. Some others apply play in museums, and some others see the play element in digital life. That seemed like a more coherent way of both doing a research center, but also looking at phenomena in our life and in our societies that are not restricted to games, but that can be explained through the concept of play. This is a very long explanation as to why we changed name.
- [08:32]
Rudolf Indus
Very interesting. Well, thank you, because this is highly interesting to me also, but I'm sure our listeners will appreciate this. Of course, we have to check for your Ludo street credibility, though. So please tell us, what's your favorite game and the one or even the ones you are playing right now?
- [08:54]
Miguel Sicad
All right, that's a great question. Let's see. I don't think I have a favorite play, but I would say. Or a favorite game. Sorry. See, like, I'm already. My brain is already mushed into play. I would say probably multiplayer FIFA between FIFA 10 and FIFA 18 is one of my favorite multiplayer games. Shadow of the colossus on the PS2. Not the remixes. I mean, the remixes are fine. It's a great game. But there was something about the aesthetics, the beauty of the graphics and the motion Besides all the lovely things about the gameplay and the world building. But yeah, Shadow of the colossus on the PS2 was mind blowing. I would say Spelunky. I've played many hours of Spelunky. But then instead of naming a game, maybe I would like to say that probably my favorite platform was the Nintendo ds. I missed the Nintendo ds. It was such a great platform. There was so many things going on in it. And so currently. So since March 2020 I've played Slay the Spire at least once a day. So I play the daily and then maybe some more. And I would say that that is probably the game I'm still playing right now. I dip my toes in many games I try to keep an eye on like indie games following, you know, things like Warp Door. I also tried to some of the AAA games but. But by the end of the day I just go back to Slay the Spire every day. So that's my go to both favorite game and favorite ritual.
- [10:40]
Rudolf Indus
Yeah, actually I do remember talking about Nintendo ds. One of my best experiences I had actually the platform's ability to only have one Mario Kart module. But sharing the game with I think up to eight or seven other players, this was so much fun.
- [11:05]
Miguel Sicad
It was mind blowing and it was super clever because Nintendo pushed sales of the console without necessarily binding everybody to buy the same game. And it's just. Yeah, but I mean I also remember, I remember it fondly. Maybe it's not a great game, but I remember Hotel Dusk which was sort of an adventure narrative game where you flip the console vertically so you actually were holding it like a book. Mind blowing. So like all the kind of crazy wacky stuff that that console allowed us to do, the rhythm games for the Nintendo ds, from Rhythm Tengoku to Elite Beat Agents or the Japanese Osutaka Oenban. I mean it was such a rich console. Lost in Blue, a fantastic survival narrative game. I mean I still have my. I have two functioning Nintendo DS's and I don't know over 100 games and it's. I get rid regularly of old games from old platforms but I think I still keep a bunch of my PlayStation 2 and almost all of my Nintendo DS games because that platform is. Yeah, it was foundational for my taste in what I like in video games. It was even though, you know, I got to it a little bit late. Not late, but I was old. I was not, I was not a kid when, when that was released. But. But I think it had, it had a bigger effect in me Than, than probably some of the machines that I played as as a kid, more than the Commodore 64S or Spectrums or Amstrads. I would, I would say that the Nintendo DS changed the way I see video games.
- [12:52]
Rudolf Indus
Here, here Nintendo, you got us. Now circling back to your book. And what better way would they be starting with a very seemingly innocent question, because I'd like to start our conversation by quoting a sentence from your preface when you write, in California, I learned to appreciate fun in a different way. And since I have spent some time in Denmark as well, I would guess now, and point to the typical Danish weather, maybe.
- [13:22]
Miguel Sicad
Well, I'm looking through the window and it's pretty gray here. So there's an element of truth that maybe everything is gray and flat in Denmark. And that's why my year in California was so important. But I think there's also something about, I mean, my Californian appreciation of fun. It's a little bit double edged because on the one hand I lived in Northern California, right? So this maybe does not apply to Central or Southern California, but at least in my experience of a small town in Northern California is that on the one hand, fun is a prime motivator for life. Nature is so wild, the weather is so excellent, people are so friendly and open that you just really want to enjoy. So there's like a hedonistic, almost like an inevitable hedonistic take on the world when you are in that environment. And of course, just to be clear, when you're privileged enough to be able to have fun, right? Which is in the case of the United States, it's not that simple. But at least in my case, I learned to appreciate the notion of fun as something that was both more concrete and productively vague than what I had thought before. And at the same time, it also has a dark side because the promise of fun justifies a lot of the things that are wrong with California, with the United States, and also with some of our broader Western ideologies. The notion of fun is only allowed if you have work and fun is only the domain of the privilege. So I learned to appreciate the concept of fun differently, both positively and negatively. In my year in California. The weather helped, but I think the weather was more of a catalyst than a means. It was a means to an end, rather than an end on its own. It was a catalyst for these reflections.
- [15:35]
Rudolf Indus
But this is. If you mentioned the weather, this is not. I just trying to get a picture in my head because everybody's talking about, okay, Southern California, of course, but is this Already has this already been some sort of Northwestern kind of vibe, this almost Alan Wakeish wipe to it?
- [15:52]
Miguel Sicad
No, I think it's very difficult to put because I live in Santa Cruz, California, and Santa Cruz has nothing to. It's not. It doesn't have any. Any kind of Northwestern. You have to go further up north to get that vibe. I think it has a. I don't. I don't know how to put it. It's more laid back than the pretense laid back of Southern California. My experience of L. A is very limited, but it's more like it's almost wrong to take things seriously, but you have to take them seriously. Anyway, I was told when I got there that at least in Santa Cruz you work hard so you can play hard. So that's kind of like the vibe that comes there. So it's kind of like a weird. Keep Santa Cruz weird. That's something that they appropriated from Austin. So it's a very weird vibe. We're like, yes, sure, man, chill and enjoy the world. But at the same time, you still have to, like, live and produce and so on. So, like really, really strange and. And super nice. And I. It's a. It's a. It's a little paradise on earth. But, like, it also, it also. I think it also explains a lot why, you know, why Silicon Valley is there. Right. Silicon Valley is on the other side of the mountains from Santa Cruz. And it really explains this kind of like weaponized hedonism of Silicon Valley. So, yeah, so it's way closer if we want to do sort of like a media connection. It's way closer to the vibe in some of the sequences in the TV show Silicon Valley than to Alan Wake. There's no. Or even the old movies of the Lost Boys. Right. Which actually takes place in Santa Cruz. So it has a little bit more of that vibe. Right. That's where it is.
- [17:54]
Rudolf Indus
Yeah. When you were mentioning the term seriously or the description, I was thinking about the book Half Real. You know, it's half seriously new edition.
- [18:06]
Miguel Sicad
Absolutely, yes. I think that would be a. That would be a good one. Bart Simon has this paper called Unserious, which I think it's like. It's a really interesting take on the concept of seriousness as applied to game studies. It's still my favorite paper of his. And I tell him that every time I see him. And it's not that popular. It's not one of his most read or cited papers. I think I may be wrong, but it's a really good paper. It's like a really thought provoking paper.
- [18:39]
Rudolf Indus
Yeah, well, this tiny. This tiny piece of conversation is actually a pretty good bridge, I think, to the next talking point I'd like to talk to you about because only two pages later where you sort of confess, see my air quotes right here, that you hope that your goal with this book is get together ideas that will spark disagreements and revolts. And additionally you also write I don't even want to be right. So please tell our listeners a little bit more about this process of, let's say, revolting.
- [19:13]
Miguel Sicad
Right. Okay. So the revolting idea, I guess I like to be a little bit provocative and it took me a while to write this book, so I think it has to do a little bit with the history of this book. Play Matters was published in 2014 and this one is published almost 10 years afterwards. And it's all the time it took me to write this book. And that's because I started writing this book in California and I was super certain of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to say. And then I realized I am not that certain of exactly what's going on. So I went from I'm going to write this kind of combination of a takedown of homoludins and sort of a specific theory of play for the information age to a more explorative text that tries to synthesize many things in ways that make sense for me and hopefully also for the reader, but that does not necessarily want to assert that this is the truth. So I guess I went from being this more sort of assertive like this is how I see the world, understand me, I am right. To a more I think it's productive to think in this way, but I actually don't know. Shrug. And I think that's what I mean by revolting, because one of the things that I want to do with this work is to decenter the importance of. So there's two things about the Revolting. One of them is decenter the importance of. There's three things I'll go back to my own thinking. Okay, so first I want to de center the core of how we study play. So the hoising Haas, the caloas, all of that stuff when it comes to understanding how we play with software. And that also means sort of bring new theorists in to build that scaffolding. So I try to sort of throw away hoisting Jacalois, all of these people, and then instead bring in Maria Luganes as sort of the anchor of my argument and a little bit of the concept of boundary play by Christina Knippert ng to sort of try to say, okay, this is a more productive core of play. This leads me to a very provocative argument, I think, and I don't know, maybe it's not, but I thought I provoked myself, so at least I found it provocative, which is that in the digital societies in the information age, make believe is more important than agonism. So our classic play theories and a lot of the way we derive game studies from play theories or play studies comes from implicitly explicitly assuming that Heusenha was right, that that play through games creates culture, but that it is agonistic play. And I tried to do a little bit of that shift before in Play Matters, but in this one I'm kind of like going in and there's a chapter, chapter four in the book where I make the claim mimicry is way more important in digital play than agonism. So we cannot understand our life in the digital world without mimicry. An agonism, while important, it's secondary to mimicry. And that means, or it should mean a massive shift in how we study digital play. And so the third argument, the third provocative argument is that digital play is different than analog play. And that I know that is going to annoy a lot of people because I'm all for being embracing multiplicities. And of course game studies should be about analog and digital games and so on. But I think it's way more productive to assert the difference between analog play and digital play. If we don't do that separation. We are ignoring a number of, first, we are ignoring a number of things that digital systems that we play with do to the world and do to us. And second, we kind of forfeit the usefulness or the utility of some of the work that we do in play and game studies beyond games. And I'm not talking about gamification and any of these things. I'm talking about how we are able to, say, understand the importance of world building in games, but how we can see instances of world building or we can use them vocabulary of world building to understand things like the construction of the self in social media. So I think that by claiming that digital play is different than analog play or non digital play, I think we can actually do more in both game and play studies. But I know that that's kind of like provocative and that's. I may not be right, but I'm at a point in my career where I maybe don't want to be right. Maybe I just want to think things through. And if I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. That's fine. I am not the Pope. I don't speak ex cathedra. So I put ideas out there and hopefully people pick them up and complain about them. And one thing though, that. So this decentering of Huizingha and Caloa and so on, I think there's a movement now in game studies that's doing that particular work. And I just got the other day on the mail a really good. And what I think is going to be a really important book by Aaron Tramiel called Repairing Play, which is doing this decentering or this knocking down Hoisingha from its statue from a black studies and black culture perspective, which I think is like, it's going to be. It's a phenomenal book and I think it's going to be a foundational text in how we can move away in games and play studies from the inheritance of these romantic theories of play that have been so productive. And at the same time they have anchored us in a particular worldview, a particular politics and a particular ethics. So there's work out there that's in doing that work better than I think my book does. I'm not a very good salesman of my book. Right.
- [26:12]
Rudolf Indus
Just for the years of our listeners. So it's called Repair Play. Right.
- [26:17]
Miguel Sicad
Repairing Play.
- [26:19]
Rudolf Indus
Repairing Play. And the author again, or Aaron Tramell,
- [26:25]
Miguel Sicad
he's associate professor, I think he's at UC Davis. He's in one of the University of California. I'm sorry, Aaron, if you're listening to this, I cannot remember where you are right now. But anyway, buy his book and read it. It's amazing. It's really good.
- [26:42]
Rudolf Indus
See, see, see? All this nonsense about not a bit of being a good salesman. It's ridiculous. You made a tremendous job. Well, circling back a bit from your arguments, back to the two main premises of your book, then you write, the first one concerns the time in which it is written in it says, we live at an information age. And your second premise follows up by stating that in digital societies, play has a role of shaping our understanding and experience of software. So maybe you could elaborate on those two points a little bit more for us.
- [27:21]
Miguel Sicad
Absolutely. Okay, so the information age is a concept that I borrow from the philosophy of information directly, but it's not exclusive to that philosophical tradition. And it sounds great, but it's actually very simple what it does. The Information Age is a way of describing that period in history in which societies are thoroughly transformed by the ubiquitous presence of digital systems. So this whole process of digitization, from video Games to digital IDs to digital banking to everything running through software, computers and apps, all of that stuff. What it has done is to change or allow us to frame this particular historical moment as significantly different than the time before there were all of these ubiquitous digital systems. The Information Age is the equivalent from computer technology, computer culture perspective, to the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene describes the period in history in which the presence of humans is visible in the geological and environmental landscape of the world, the Information Age is that period of time in which digital systems are unavoidable in the experience of mundane daily life and the understanding of society. We cannot understand our societies if we do not understand the roles that computers play in it. So that's Information Age. And then the second premise is that given this period of time, given this historic moment we are in, we need to understand how we relate to these systems. And my core argument in the book is that we mostly relate to them by playing. So playing is a way of making sense of all of these systems around us. That is another of the provocative arguments of the book, where maybe I'm not right, but I'm actually claiming that it is the most important way of making sense of these technologies by playing. So playing is a way of making sense of what software does to our world
- [29:55]
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- [30:25]
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- [30:54]
Rudolf Indus
We have talked about, or you have talked about, the argument that digital play is different from analog play. But you also argue, and that's the second argument that actually arises from your thesis then is that by playing, we shape software agency as well as our agency becomes shaped by software. So how is this to be understood exactly?
- [31:16]
Miguel Sicad
Right. So when we interact with, when we play with software, when we are in this kind of playful engagement with software, we need to think about it as an entanglement where agencies get entangled together and they shape each other. What I can do, I relate to software in a playful way and I make it act playfully. But I will only be able to do so in the ways the software allows me to do so by its own agency. That is, I restrict the agency of software by playing with it, and the agency of software restricts my agency by playing with me. I guess the book came out maybe half a year too early, or I wrote it half a year too early. Because the best way of illustrating this right now is by looking at generative AI systems. So when we right on the prompt of say, chatgpt anything, we are shaping it, suddenly it becomes a writer, for example, of an essay. But at the same time, the prompt itself, the output of the prompt, shapes what we are looking for. By writing a prompt, we are testing the boundaries of what it can do with the reply. The system is also shaping our agency. This is what you're getting. Act with it. We are trying to do all kinds of wrong things with these generative AI systems because what drives us in our interactions is to play with them. The reason why ChatGPT and Dall E are so popular and Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are so popular is that they are not sort of academic, abstract look at what a neural network or a deep learning system can do. Nor it is this is a search engine or this is an autocorrect system. It's really just like an open invitation look at what this thing can do. And then by entering it through this playful perspective, we are figuring out its rules, how it wants us to act, how it acts, and then we adapt to it. But at the same time it is making us adapt to it. So the second prompt we write to ChatGPT is fundamentally different from the first one because we, our agency has been modified by that output, that it's the visible side of the agency of the system. So that's what I mean by that. Kind of like our agency shapes, but we are also shaped by the agency of the system. Yeah, I could literally rewrite the book only about generative AI because it's like. And maybe I should, I don't know,
- [34:16]
Rudolf Indus
for the second edition, of course, then.
- [34:19]
Miguel Sicad
Exactly, exactly. I'LL just eliminate everything else and just talk about all these generative AI systems.
- [34:27]
Rudolf Indus
I'm sure that MIT Press will be more than glad. I was wondering whether this especially playful way of interacting with ChatGPT, for example, now is also a good example, because maybe, for instance, university authorities are full of suspicion when students start to play, to literally play around with a program because they don't see the. They don't. They actually. They fear the possible outcome, but not the process itself.
- [35:03]
Miguel Sicad
Right, Exactly. I really appreciate all these systems. I love them, I really enjoy playing with them, but they are a whole mess. We've unleashed something in the world that we have no idea what kind of implications it's going to have. And one of them is this about what qualifies in learning as learning. We used to be the essay, the term paper is super important, but it turns out that it's so formulaic that an AI can actually produce resonant bullshit. They are not good essays, but they are well structured essays and they can pass as sort of decent stuff. Right? They are clearly not good. And I'm sorry for everybody who thinks that they would pass those tests. They wouldn't. They would probably get like a low grade. But they are not on the level of a good essay. And maybe future iterations will. But what's interesting is maybe, maybe. And you're hinting at it a little bit in your question, I'm going to be provocative. I'm going to get in trouble. Let's see, maybe the term paper and this kind of enshrinement of the term paper as like the way we have of making people, or making sure that people have learned and know how to build an argument, maybe it doesn't work. Maybe by forcing this kind of mechanistic output, sort of almost computational output, that an AI can actually perform. What we've lost is the play of learning and the play of ideas. So, like, I'm super interested in my free time, whenever I have free time on the notion of the play of ideas and how in the university world, in the school system, and in general in life, it's not just learning, because that's almost like you have a goal and a quantifiable output and so on, but a way of living in the world in a productive, rich, creative way is to play with ideas. And I think maybe, maybe we at universities have realized that if ChatGPT can do the bullshit that we have been asking our students to do, then maybe we are not asking them to play with ideas. And so maybe we are scared because it's actually showing us that the emperor is naked that we should definitely think about. If the term paper is important, why is it important? And what does it tell us about this capacity of reflecting about ideas in the world? And at some moment, maybe we will end up thinking that what we need to do now that these generative AI systems are in the world is to teach people to play with them in order to play with ideas. So that's my hypothesis right now.
- [38:08]
Rudolf Indus
You also introduced in your book, and you already mentioned her name, Maria Lugon's concept of playfulness as world traveling as a way of understanding playful relations with software. And this then leads to your framework towards an ethos of digital play. Maybe let's deep dive a bit into her and your thoughts and ideas.
- [38:32]
Miguel Sicad
All right, this is my. I love it because I love talking about this. And I have a whole course here at the ITU where Luganes is the basic framework. So, like, how long do we have? All right, so.
- [38:50]
Rudolf Indus
Let's keep it playful, but not too playful.
- [38:53]
Miguel Sicad
Okay, so I'll try to be synthetic. First of all, Maria Luganes has nothing to do in her work, and particularly in her article about playfulness with digital world. And I even disagree. There's a point of disagreement where she doesn't like make believe. And I love make believe as a framework. But those two things set aside, Luganes claims, and I think makes a very good theoretical argument that playfulness is world traveling. That is traveling to others worlds to meet with them there and to establish a relation there. So that requires a capacity from us as agents to loosen ourselves a little bit, identify who the others are, identify them as others, and be willing to meet them in their otherness. And in that process, she calls it world traveling. And I sort of extend it to the idea of world creation. So for her playfulness is, I see others, they have a world, I will go to that world, try to understand it, and in that way, try to understand others. So that's the first foundation in the argument that I build in the book. I take that idea and I say we understand software as an agent in the world. It does things in the world. If we want to go philosophical, it's not strong agency, it's like weak agency. So it's like it acts in the world. Therefore we assign it agency. We don't necessarily think that it has feelings or emotions or whatever other things. We may build that layer on top of it as a way of make believe, as a way of being able to relate to that agency. But we don't necessarily claim that whatever, ChatGPT has feelings, but we identify its agency and then we travel to its world. We travel to the world of software agency with the intention of relating to it and playing with it. And in that travel, we create this new world, this new situation where my agency and the software's agency get entangled together. A more mechanistic way of seeing this, a more sort of classic games or place studies way of seeing this is like I have my agency and I see this software that has an agency, and software has agency through rules and procedures and methods and all of these things. And therefore I try to understand its rules and procedures in order to see how it works and how it works with me. That's a really nice and productive perspective, except it's way too mechanistic. It does not explain really why we play with it. So we play in this kind of classic agonistic way of, oh, I understand the rules and I try to break the rules or play by the rules, blah, blah, blah. But the Lugones way really requires us to both have an understanding of ourselves and an understanding of the others and to have this willingness to meet with the other. And that's why when Luganes talks about world traveling, playful world traveling is loving world traveling. And I love using this word of loving world traveling because it has a very implicit ethos. We are vulnerable when we travel to other worlds. We are vulnerable when we open ourselves to being in somebody else's world or to. To create a world with others. And therefore, we need to have an attitude that allows us that vulnerability, that allows us that laughter, that allows us that creativity, that joy, that fun, that pleasure. And that's what she defines as a loving attitude. So we should have this kind of loving attitude towards wherever we are going. And loving, I mean, this kind of makes me sound a little bit perhaps sort of optimistic. I don't know exactly what it makes me sound, but I can see that maybe also a little bit naive, but I think that even the times where we try to break a little bit, things like ChatGPT or Dall E, where we do things like Prompt Injection, I think that is loving in the sense that we understand the agency of the other and we try to expand it in different ways, but that's kind of like an extreme interpretation through the concept of loving, then I can draw an ethos of this form of play. Because when we travel to these other worlds, when we travel towards these other agencies, we need to be respected, we need to be treated. They also need to treat us as others. They also need to love us as much as we love them, as much as we have this kind of feeling towards them. Right. So when we try to use software to abuse the world, when we try to abuse software, or when software abuses us, there is world traveling, but it's not loving. And therefore, that's when we can start sort of drawing an ethos of digital play that it's not necessarily about how bias and all of these other concepts that are very important, but it's more like, how does it travel to us, how does it shape our agency, how does it let us play? And then Luganes has this idea of what is good playfulness. It's almost like a normative argument. So there's a disregard of the importance of the rules, there's laughter, there's a willingness to make mistakes, there's a willingness to do shared exploration. And then everything that has to do with conquering or winning or limiting agency, that's negative or not loving world traveling. So this concept, which is admittedly relatively vague, and it requires, I think it requires more work. I think I'm going to be working on this form of playfulness for the next decades or so, but I think it's a very productive way of saying, sure, it has rules and processes and so on, but we shouldn't understand them as play. Studies classically allowed us to understand magic circles, rules, order and so on. We should understand it as agency we travel to. So maybe that's okay. So maybe that's actually what the book does. Maybe what the book does is it says we should not understand software in the sense of a construct of rules and processes that brings order as play brings order in the classic Huising way. But software as a form of agency, we need to relate through by playing. And that's also why the title of the book is called Playing Software, not Play Software or Software and Play and so on. It is this sort of active process. It's very much about the activity, the continuous activity of playing rather than play. So, so there you go. So that's my brief. I don't know what was a 10 minutes answer, but that's.
- [46:16]
Rudolf Indus
You did it.
- [46:18]
Miguel Sicad
I did it. Great.
- [46:20]
Rudolf Indus
You did it. Maybe Order then is also a good keyword for our next point because you also mentioning that playing software. Playing software, yes. Can also, and I quote you right here, be an instrument to perpetuating inequalities, exploitation, abuse and isolation. And I'd like to hear what you actually, what are your thoughts here on what maybe you can give some examples, some instances. This seems to be really important to also reflect upon this side of the whole context.
- [46:58]
Miguel Sicad
Yeah, so because software has this sort of procedural order creation nature, it sometimes and we travel to it with the intention of playing. If we fall too much into agonistic play, if we let it think that it's all about playing by the rules and that these rules and the systems are fundamentally true and important, if what we value is, what we give importance to, is the rules and the processes and not the agency, the acting, the playing part, then these computational systems can be used to make us play. And in doing so, play would become an instrument to continue performing inequalities or exploitation. For example. And it's an example that I write about in the book. Around two years ago, there was a lot of very good investigative journalism around the use of gamification in Amazon warehouses. And of course this is terrible and workers do not necessarily like it, they are not necessarily enthralled by it. But the logic of the capitalist is very much games and play driven. Look, they say this is a terrible job and you have to perform all of these activities in the shortest period of time and you don't have restroom breaks. But if you do so as a game, we are going to give you points. And because you like doing these things with points, at the end of the day you are going to be able to win something. We are going to exploit you. But wait, the exploitation is actually a game. You like playing, you like doing things with rules, and because you like doing things with rules, there you go, you are playing, you're not working and we are not exploiting you. And I think this is a good example of how these systems, They are presented to us not as something that has to do with agency, not as software that makes us do things, software that shapes our agency, but actually software that rewards our agency. I think that's where it all breaks down. That's where it is actually a game that's used to oppress us. Because the game is shaping our agency, we cannot shape its agency and it's telling us what to do and rewarding us for it. But we are not relating to what the software tells us to do. The way the software shapes our agency, we are not world traveling to it, we are actually being imposed a world and some rules and telling us to act by it. But because this pool of classic theories of play, this pool of agonism is good, it's so important, then we are stuck in this kind of closed worlds, closed logics of Playful interactions. I make a similar argument to, to try to understand the seductive elements of conspiracy theories online, how conspiracy theories online propagate because they often use this media that present themselves as game like structures. So we become again part of a competitive world where we see these rules, we don't see how they are shaping our agency, we just see as something that we need to tick some boxes and we can win. Right. So that's the argument of exploitation.
- [50:51]
Rudolf Indus
Well, I got three more terms for you as our last talking point and there seems to be a connection somewhere and I hope you can explain this to me. And two of them are names, Bollock, Lemieux and metagaming. So how do those three connect?
- [51:12]
Miguel Sicad
So Stephanie Pollock and Patrick Lemieck's Metagaming is one of my favorite game studies books of all time. I really think it's a thought provoking book and I think what I like about it is that. And maybe I'm misinterpreting them, but hopefully they are fine with it. If not, if not, hopefully they will forgive me. But I think what metagaming tells us is the way I like to use their way of metagaming is that they say provocatively, look, video games are not games. They are totally different objects, video games. What they really are is software we play with. And that activity of playing is closer to metagaming, to gaming about the game, gaming about perhaps what I would call the software agency rather than traditional gaming. So what metagaming did to me, and if I hadn't read that book back when it was released in 2016, my own playing software would be totally different. So what metagaming showed me is that actually when we are playing video games, we are not playing games. We are interacting with software in a specific way. And both our concept of games and our concept of play do not fit well with what software does in the world. And therefore we need to think differently about playing software. So a lot of the it's not that present in the book. Perhaps on the last chapter, on chapter seven, there's a little bit of metagaming where I try to sort of plot how the future would be. But what I find, maybe what's going to be driving my follow up work is going to be the idea of trying to figure out, trying to synthesize what Bollock and Lemie write about metagaming and try to turn it into, I don't want to call it meta playing, but the equivalent to meta playing. So what kind of tactics can we use to playfully play with Software. So for playing software in ways that allow us to be more creative, break away from these sort of computational discourses of oppression. So I think that the book did those two things. It illustrated me how software is a very different thing than whatever we had before. And it's now still influencing me on ideas and how we should act differently and play differently in a world of software.
- [54:00]
Rudolf Indus
Well, I have to definitely check this book if you praise it on such a high note. So I have to get my hands on this book. This is my homework now. Yeah. Because I will have to read this because if you really follow up your plan and rewrite playing software, I have to be ready and for a next conversation. This is my homework now.
- [54:34]
Miguel Sicad
I think you should just start by reading Metagaming. I don't know if I have the energy of. I mean, the book is out. I shouldn't be talking about rewriting the book. Right. But it's more like I do have. I have had. I have just started a mailing list or what it's called a. Not a mailing list, but a newsletter. That's it. A newsletter. That's the word. When I'm trying to put into paper or whatever. Put into Beats these thoughts about how does the framework of playing software allow us to think about generative AIs. So maybe it will not end up being a book, but a newsletter or a website or. I have no idea. Maybe a sign. I have no idea. But I definitely think that I would have written playing software very differently if I had these generative AIs. So one of the things that I'm a little bit. I think plain software could have done with more concrete examples. And I think part of the problem is that now the examples exist. They are out there. They are chatgpt, they are Dall? E. They are all of these and all of the weird things that are peripheral to these systems. So, like when people try to make ChatGPT generate sound, Dall E generates sound by doing, drawing images of the sound. I mean, there's so much shit going on that's amazing and super scary and terrible and phenomenal. And I think that I could easily just exemplify each and every chapter of the book with a generative AI example. And it would be a lot of fun. So I don't know, maybe, who knows? Who knows? Maybe the second edition or the third, a revised edition or maybe playing software. The generative AI edition.
- [56:21]
Rudolf Indus
Well, yeah, for our listeners, maybe. Maybe a hint. I received. On a weekly basis, I receive a newsletter called Web Curious and It's a really great newsletter and if you're interested in all things concerning AI, what's going on. Actually, at the moment, he's dedicating a whole. His very first segment of the newsletter is full of those. Those hints and tips, where to go, what to look at, and it's really astonishing and I really cannot cope with all the amounts of entities out there. So I think you're definitely right. We have talked about then your maybe probable way to go for academic endeavors. But of course. What will you be playing next, Miguel? Tell us. It's also important.
- [57:17]
Miguel Sicad
Will I be. It is important. What will I be playing next? So I have. I have. I. That's a very good question. I have a couple of dating sims on my phone. I have a long trip ahead of me on. On a plane in a couple of weeks, and I may end up playing some of these weird dating sims just because, I don't know, somebody recommended me these games. Maybe, maybe I will get into. I think one of them is called Obey Me. I want to get in more into Vampire Survivor, which was a sort of an interesting. An interesting new type of game. So I'm going to be on mobile a little bit this next. These next few weeks, and then what am I. I'm not really looking forward to anything, so I don't know. I actually have no idea what I'm going to be. I'm probably going to be playing some weird indie games. I'm subscribed to this newsletter called Warp Door that does a very good job on highlighting weird games from each IO and I think I always end up playing one of two of those every week. So probably that's what I'm going to be playing. I'm sorry, I cannot give you sort of a more satisfying answer.
- [58:45]
Rudolf Indus
That's not the goal of our podcast. It's just a friendly conversation about dating sims.
- [58:49]
Miguel Sicad
So, yes, that's. That's. That's always a goal in and of itself. Yeah.
- [58:55]
Rudolf Indus
So it has been very nice talking to you. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, not less for you being on the show today. And it's also was a nice, nice tune because I really miss cop Copenhagen and I need to go back. It's been six or seven years since I've been there, so that's a while.
- [59:14]
Miguel Sicad
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Copenhagen is lovely. Great this time of the year. If anybody listening wants to come to Copenhagen, come in May. May is awesome. May and June are awesome. Don't come in February. February is the worst.
- [59:32]
Rudolf Indus
That's a nice fartzit, as we say in German. So everyone, I hope you enjoyed it. Take care and goodbye Miguel.
- [59:40]
Miguel Sicad
Thank you very much. Take care.
- [59:43]
Rudolf Indus
So, dear listeners, I hope you like this episode. If you are an author and or an editor in the field of game studies or play studies or game research yourself and want to talk about your latest publication, do not hesitate. Please do not hesitate to contact me under Rudolf.inderst Alternatively, please send me a direct message on social media. You will find me under Rudolf Indust. Almost everywhere. So, see you in a bit. Take care and goodbye.