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Peter D. McDonald, "The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
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Peter McDonald
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rudolf Iinders
Hi everyone. Welcome back to New Books and Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this very channel, we explore new scholarship that unpacks what games mean, how they are designed, how they are played, and how they resonate far beyond the screen. I'm your host, Rudolf Iinders, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences that's a sciences Neue Ulm, Germany. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover us. And of course feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming group of your very choice. Today we are joined by Peter McDonald to discuss his new book, the Impossible Reversal, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book traces the cultural history of play from Fluxus experiments to SimCity, and examines how playfulness became central to creativity, design and the modern economy. There's a lot to unpack here. So, Peter, it's great to have you to begin. Could you briefly, Well, I guess reintroduce yourself and tell us how this project came about?
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Peter McDonald
Thank you so much for having me on here, Rudolph. Yeah, I'm Peter McDonald. I teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, which is a little bit of a funny place for me. My background is actually in English literature and as a game designer and teacher of game design. So the project has been with me for quite a while. It originated as my graduate school work at the University of Chicago, and maybe even further back than that. It, I think, comes from my reading of Mary Flanagan's book Critical Play, way back when that first came out, which has been like a deep inspiration for my entire career, I would say. And in that book, Mary Flanagan talks about a number of experimental kinds of game design practices, among them Fluxus. And I found that just a fascinating introduction into kinds of games that I had never seen before that pushed my thinking to the limit of what even is a game, and that made me want to go out and make weird things. That book and the flux of practices more generally deeply influenced my own game design practice for a while, through the alternate reality games that I made at the University of Chicago, as well as some Fluxus experiments of my own. And slowly I started sort of wrestling with the questions that those Fluxus games pose to the broader field of game studies, the ways that they make us rethink play, and to some of the historical nuances that come with that art movement. So those are kind of the crux for me of how this project began, though it took several twists and turns subsequently.
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Rudolf Iinders
So you reframe play as a historical and cultural construction rather than a timeless human instinct. What led you to take that approach?
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Peter McDonald
So I think that it's a pretty common approach in game studies to think of play through its definitions, right? To try and define play as something that's always free, that allows us to experiment, safety, failure in a safe space that has boundaries in time and space. But I've always found that a little bit of a frustrating approach because I don't think it really looks closely at what we're doing when we actually play. It treats play as either a yes, this is play, or a no, this isn't play. A kind of binary switch that we can check off in a box. And for playfulness, that often gets framed as what I think of as festive playfulness, a joyful, spontaneous, humorous kind of playfulness. When I started looking at the Fluxus works that I was just talking about, many of the critics call these playful games. Right. They talk about the artworks as playful, but it means, I think, something quite different in each one of their cases. So I started trying to kind of wrestle with what does it actually mean to call the work of Yoko Ono playful. One of her famous works is the All White Chess Set. A lot of game study scholars have talked about this, where the board and all the pieces are painted white and you're meant to play until you forget whose pieces are whose. It's a kind of symbolic work about anti war protest work. But it's also something that we have to play. We have to experience it to know what it's like to forget where our chess pieces are. That's not really like a joyful, spontaneous or humorous. Maybe it's humor in. In a dry sense, but it's not a. A jokey, big kind of humor. And so I wanted to kind of wrestle with the ways that playfulness means a lot of different things. And so that was sort of the impetus for this kind of more cultural construction of play. And once you start seeing play as plural, as multiple, then you start to have the tools to look and see where those differences emerge and change historical. So that was. At first, I didn't sort of think in that historical lens, I was just looking at the variety of Fluxus practice. But over time, I started to see that the Fluxus artists were doing something quite different than the surrealists, say, who had come before them. And they're doing something different than the avant garde games and play that we have today. And so that started to push me down this road.
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Rudolf Iinders
Now, the. The very phrase the impossible reversal, which, to be honest, reminded me of a. Some Kind of favorite A Teams episode on tv. That seems very striking to me. So what does it signify in the context of the book's argument? And sorry again for all listeners, because you maybe such young folks don't even remember what the A Team is all about, but please look it up on the dictionary. Yes. Of your choice.
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Peter McDonald
Yeah, I love the A Team as a reference here. I think that there's something to that. Um, so the. And I'm glad the term is Striking to you? I. I chose it as one of four terms for these four styles of playfulness that I examined in the book that I think is. Is a pretty striking one. And I characterize this style of playfulness, what I call the impossible re reversal, as different from that festive, joyful, humorous playfulness, because it's more, I think, trusting. It's hopeful, but it's passive. We don't do very much in this kind of play. So the kind of old versions, the versions of play where this has long been with us are riddles and gambling games. So in riddles, right, we don't actually do anything. We're stumped by this impossible thing, the Sphinx's riddle, right? What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? It's impossible until there's some small shift in our perception that makes us recognize that's a metaphor for humans. So this kind of playful experience of a passiveness that gives way to a sudden transformation is at the core of this style that I'm tracking. And it undergoes a change in the mid 20th century. I think I'm arguing where it starts to get associated with machines in a new way, rather than just riddles and gambling games. So I give examples in the book of pinball tables, of Goldberg devices, and of the puzzles of Fluxus artist George Brecht. So all of these are cases where this older feeling of playfulness takes on new relevance in the 1950s and 60s.
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Rudolf Iinders
Now, you were already mentioning the different styles of the four styles. So, yes, you identify these four styles of playfulness that mark what you call the era of design play. And that's a very interesting term. How do these categories help us rethink what play means today?
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Peter McDonald
Thanks for bringing up the term because I think it's a useful one to frame some of the bigger historical stakes of the argument. In part, I call it an era of design play to mark a difference from how games were produced in the 19th century, or at least the dominant way that they were produced by, which I think is characterized by inventions. So patents were given for games as inventions. Game creators were credited as inventors. And the way that people thought about what a new game should be was as a kind of machine, right. Or as a kind of creation that had to do something that shifts, I think, in the 1950s, where design as a epistological framework, as a general science that brings together practices and principles from architecture and graphic design and fabric design and all these different fields is really just getting formulated for the first time. So to talk about the era of design play gets us into this new framework and also helps to focus what I think is characteristic of the games and ways of making that happen in time, which is that the emphasis falls on player experiences. What's getting designed is not just the best way to shape a pinball table or the rules for a board game, but how do we actually make someone feel something? How do we make them have an experience in the way we want to? That's the starting place. And I think that framing gets me a couple of different things. By historicizing these things that we take for granted about game design, it shapes the present in a way that makes it feel more changeable. It could be different than it is. There is. There's a line of causality that is kind of accidental, and it could have gone differently. It starts to frame play as a technology. This is the second thing. Not just as something, say, ephemeral and subversive, but something that is increasingly calculated and integrated into mechanisms of power and resistance us. And then the third thing it gets me is that it's, I think, a lens that other scholars can use to supplement my categories, right? Not just to take these four as the defining things, but to explore older mile, older styles of playfulness, to add on to what I've given, and to see where the current practices of game design might start diverging or doing something different.
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Rudolf Iinders
Right? So maybe some of our listeners have. Have already been wondering. And of course, this has to come up now because you were already talking about these binary states of play. And whenever we talk about the introduction of game studies or game design, we talk about Huizinga and the Magic Circle, of course. So I have to ask, how does your account complicate classic theories of play from Johan Huizunga or Koa?
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Peter McDonald
Thanks for bringing this up. I've written about these folks pretty, pretty extensively in other essays, and they. They show up in, like, bits and pieces in the Impossible Reversal, but they are deeply in the background. And my argument is that while Huizenga and Kaiwa have been used to support a kind of formalist theory of play in both writers, I think that way of thinking about play actually obscures a lot of interesting stuff that's going on in them that's different from that. So I would. I would call that like an interpretive approach within Huizinger or Kara. So the first chapter in. In Homo ludens, right, gives this formal definition of play. But then the second chapter starts out by saying, but wait a minute. Don't other languages have different definitions of, of the term play. And I think that we often, when we're reading that, sort of ignore that, that argument, like take it as that HOA is just making a, a kind of rhetorical move to come back to his definition. I think he's actually exploding it and saying, like, there's all these ways that we might think about play that we now have to take a more situated approach to judging in our everyday lives. When is it play and when is it not? Not just a formal category, but like thinking about in the moment, how do we make that judgment? I think about this as like, when a dog is running at me, how do I know that it's going to either jump up and lick me or bite me? Right. I have in the moment, I make a decision about whether it's being playful or aggressive. And I don't consult like the Magic Circle to know that at least in that case, in some cases the Magic Circle might be relevant. So we have to look and see what is actually relevant in that moment of judgment.
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Rudolf Iinders
It's such a great example, really. I will tell that my students, it's great. Now you also drawn on examples ranging from Fluxus performances to Tetris. What unites such diverse forms within your vary analysis?
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Peter McDonald
So mean. I'll answer this in a kind of flipped way. Part of my goal here was developing a method that avoided putting boundaries around what objects might count. So I did that partly because I think that there's like just so much potential for the interaction across fields that deal with games in play that is going unrealized right now. Right. So in play studies, there's a huge range of things that might count as play studies. Right. So anthropology of different cultural practices, educational theories around how children play, the sociology of leisure in advanced industrial societies, literary criticism of postmodern novels, historians doing work on childhood and how that has changed over time, animal people studying animal play and the nuances of that. And not only do they not talk to each other often, all of these people don't talk to people working on video games or tabletop role playing games, or at least not often enough. And so my goal with this project was really to start like, crisscrossing as many boundaries as I could. And to do that, I start from these individual cases, I look at a Fluxus game and try to really pull out the core feeling that makes that one, one thing playful. And then rather than saying there has to be some, you know, a link that leads from Fluxus to, you know, a mass produced toy, I just start trying to track the feeling might lead me to some sites that are seemingly unrelated, but because they kind of echo with each other around the. This shared feeling of playfulness, there is some deeper level structure that I think links them. Or that's the sort of methodological claim that I'm making right now.
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Rudolf Iinders
Let's get one step further. The corporate role playing examples, highly interesting, by the way, in the book, suggest a link between play and productivity. And how do you see that dynamic unfolding? Because I think it's very. Maybe it's just me, but I find it very complicated to really grasp what is going on in that dynamic.
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Peter McDonald
Yeah, Let me say a little bit about what this example is. So when we think about role playing, we often, you know, at least in game studies, start from Dungeons and Dragons and think about the evolution of that sense and the origins of it in tabletop World war gaming and military war gaming more generally. The lineage that I'm tracing in the impossible reversal is a little bit different. It's the kind of role play that we might talk about when we are helping somebody practice for a job interview, where I sit down and I say, I'm going to be the one interviewing you. You can practice your answers with me. And that, when I started the project, felt like something that didn't even have a history. Just felt like something everybody knows how to do, right? That we all kind of do this, like, implicit role playing with each other. And the more I dug into it, the more I found, like, there's actually a really specific set of links that leads back to a therapeutic practice in the 1920s by this. Developed by this guy named Jacob Moreno. So I track some of the evolutions of that into military usages, into educational spaces, and then into corporate role playing, where it's used in some interesting ways, right? It's used in some sense to just practice, like, technical skills. Like somebody trying to sell a dictionary door to door might do some role playing to, like, better get their banter down. But the more interesting case to me is, like, often managers would themselves do role playing in order to help them train to, like, fire their employees because they felt like too connected to these people. Like they, you know, are working with them every day. They don't want to fire somebody that they know and love. And so they do a role play exercise to get some emotional distance and, you know, practice for crises that might be not about technical aspects but about, like, their ideal self as a manager. And that is, I think, a really complex and interesting thing because it's not just getting you good at a skill. It's really introducing the idea that we are performing social roles all the time. I think role play in the mid 20th century is reshaping how we understand our social selves as public performers. So productivity is one part of this, but I think it's actually a smaller part than a much wider set of shifts in the way that play in games are integrated into the fabric of American life in the 20th century. That a lot of my examples are ways that to, for instance, think about what it means to have a fair, free market, neoliberal thought, we need to do a kind of game like simulation of what the conditions of. Of that new social arrangement might be. So there's like a bigger sort of messier argument here about the role of play in. In contemporary society. Not just one of productivity, but as a kind of like integral technology to how we structure the state and our own lives.
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Rudolf Iinders
I mean, given. So this. Yeah, this leads me to the next question. Because given today's pervasive gamification from education to work, can play still offer resistance or has it become an instrument of control? Because when I was reading about this in your book, I was instantly thinking about this type of counterplay that was very en vogue in the late. I think the late 2000s as a term, you know, within game studies.
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Peter McDonald
So you probably could guess from my. What I was just saying that I think it's not really a question of like either subversive or an instrument of control, but always both simultaneously. And that's why I think tracking the nuances of play and playfulness becomes much more important. So rather than just saying that play itself is subversive, that we need to pay attention to the ways that we're playing and the feelings that come up in it and the styles that we engage in and who's engaging in different styles of play. Because the styles of play that were experimental and resistant and avant garde in the 1960s have, I think, become pretty ossified and rigid today. But new kinds of playfulness are emerging that push back in interesting ways. And if I have kind of one uncritical belief in the power of playfulness, I think it's prolific. It's just always creating new things and new ways to play. And, you know, there's a. The kind of idea that capitalism is always like outpacing the forms of resistance and reincorporating them. That, you know, what is a punk subculture one day, is pop punk the next, and is being commodified. I kind of think that there's A flip side of that in play. That play is always itself, outpacing the ways that it's getting structured and torn down and tamped into place. So if there's any hope, that's my hope.
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Rudolf Iinders
So that leaves us with a bigger question. What role might digital culture play in shaping the next transformation of playfulness?
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Peter McDonald
Just giving me the easy questions today, eh?
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Rudolf Iinders
Right. I mean, only the experts.
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Peter McDonald
So I should say that the impossible reversal really stops its analysis in the mid-90s. The sort of genealogies that I track around these four styles of playfulness are taken to the point where the what is experimental in them becomes kind of mastered. Where we now we're like, say someone like Yoko Ono is trying to figure out how to create a feeling of kind of like violence and withholding and confusion that still feels playful. And some of her works do it and some don't. And there's a lot of messy experimentation around that. By the 90s, I think that game designers have sort of like figured out some of some at least easy answers to that problem. And so I end where those answers are kind of like becoming part of a canon of game design principles. So I don't in the book answer your question of like, what is the next shift where. Where does digital culture kind of really take this? I have some thoughts. So one that I have worked on for a while are alternate reality games and more, more generally pervasive games. Because I think alternate reality games in some sense have come and gone. They were really popular in the 2000s and 2000s in part, and this is only one part of them. Because it was possible to create fictional Personas on social media tools. It was easy to create a Facebook account who was a character in a game. And that way of using digital culture playfully, I think it's kind of closed down in a lot of ways. So I don't know what to say about that. But I think that was one avenue of a more experimental playfulness in the present that shifted into other forms of pervasive play. So I just. There's a sort of online theater company called Circsa that I just participated in one of their games where you are a student going to a space station and Jupiter virtually. And I won't spoil what happens, but it's a live interactive theater performance done through zoom. And I think there's a lot there to sort of carries on that tradition. A second strand I think is like the tabletop role playing game space is just so vibrant to me today. So some of the kinds of Role playing that I talk about in the book have shifted pretty profoundly with things like cartography games, um, where we're collectively designing a map, or solo imaginative role playing, like solo journaling games. Um, and I think these. I don't know what to say about them exactly, but I think that there's something new. And then the last one that I'd point to is like, I think all the forms of parasociality are a kind of spectatorial playfulness that I'm really interested in. So, you know, I. I love dropout, um, and the improv games and game design techniques that they use there and the, you know, actual play stuff that they do. Um, and I think that some of the ways that we're engaged with folks through as if they're part of our community in those spaces. Take practices of playful voyeurism from, like, sports, say, or boxing matches, or have you. And shifted in some really interesting new ways. So I would sort of, yeah, point to some of these as potentials, though I'm sure other folks have a lot of other ideas too.
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Rudolf Iinders
Well, finally, Peter, so let's get back to the book for one last question. What do you hope readers, particularly those working in the game and media studies, of course, but not only those, of course, take away from the impossible reversal.
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Peter McDonald
So this is probably not a surprise, but I think the two headline things that I want people to walk away from this with are, first, that play is not a single thing. Playfulness is not a single thing, that we need to think in nuanced ways about different kinds of play. And that that really requires some new techniques for trying to describe what defines play in these different ways. Like, it's not enough to just say that there, this community has a different style of play, because that doesn't tell us all the things we need to, you know, describe, to accurately capture it, to find out what it's. What the chants that people sing and the gestures that characterize their. Their, like, particular playstyles are, and the. The strategies that they deploy and all the myriad things that don't fit into that formal definition of freedom and boundaries and risk. And it's not. Not only a single thing in its plurality, but it changes historically. So I want people to really start taking that double move seriously and at a more personal level. I hope that that opens up people's attention to their own play practices in ways that we can get excited. I think about the weird, peculiar ways that we each play and what that might say about the communities we belong to and the historical moment that we live in.
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Rudolf Iinders
But by the way, unfortunately for our readers now, they can't see because I'm holding your lovely book right now. And I just have to say, this is a wonderful cover. It's so elegant. And have you been involved in creating the COVID as well, or was it.
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Peter McDonald
No, it's. The University of Minnesota has done an amazing job with it. I was super happy with what they've done. It is beautiful, but I think it's also really thoughtful. It focuses. It has a cootie catcher on the COVID And that kind of analog physical play is really important to the book. And I think they capture something with it.
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Rudolf Iinders
Thanks so much for joining us, Peter. Your book offers a fascinating look at how play has quietly structured so much of modern cultural life. And I'm sure this won't be your last stay with us. I hope so, at least. Thanks again for being here and yeah, take care. See you the next time. And to our readers, of course. Stay tuned. There's more to come, more episodes to come. At least one in the pipe already. So stay tuned for even more.
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Peter McDonald
More.
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Rudolf Iinders
Take care and goodbye.
- [29:59]
Peter McDonald
Thanks, Rudolph.