Introduction

Game structures are the skeleton of all spontaneous, improvisatory activities that go by the name ‘play’. Their primary function is to anchor social, economic and ludic behaviours, and to matrix artistic, philosophical and scientific experiments. Whether referring to the spatially and temporally delimited behaviours of small actants – bees or particles – or to complex, pan-historical systems – such as religion or swarms – game structures are dynamic systems of configuration. They appear in many forms: as methods of communication (languages, inter-species play), as cognitive practices (koans, riddles), as creative procedures (frottage, exquisite corpse), as sensorial titillation (seduction), as military strategy (game theory), as forms of resistance (culture jamming).

The term ‘game’ is just as polymorphous. For philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, famous for his move-dependent theory of language, a game is a labyrinthine system without a precise beginning and end, with no first teaching that may explain the various sets of rules arising from and operating within the various contexts (2001: 50, 69). For sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a game is a dynamic relational matrix that weaves the tapestry of social reality through the interplay of doxa (the ingrained, self-explanatory way of doing things), playing field (an agglomeration of past practices) and habitus (the player’s system of predispositions) (1977: 83). For economist Roger Myerson, games are simply ‘mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers’ (1991: 1). For media theorist Kenneth McKenzie Wark, the term is so pervasive as to have become a ‘form of life’: ‘[g]ames are no longer a pastime, outside or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, itself’ (2007: n.p.).

Although game structures have been used as generative, perception-changing procedures in art, science and philosophy throughout history, three historical epochs stand out: the interwar period, the post-1960s period and the first decades of the new millennium. All three are also marked by a technological, socio-political and philosophical transvaluation of values. Originating in the Dadaist collage and the Surrealist automatism, of which Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (a residue of language games, jokes and chance operations) and Salvador Dalí’s paranoid-critical method (an obsessional reassembling of everyday life) are good examples, the ludic spirit of the interwar years was an attempt to subvert both the epistemic and the concrete violence of the techno-military logic whose powers of devastation were terrifying. It was also an attempt to mend the wounded bio-social tissue by rearranging the existing networks of knowledge and by reshuffling the relations between rule, goal, tool, activity, meaning, protocol and result. It therefore comes as no surprise that the intellectual path of the future games studies’ founder – Roger Caillois – was distinctly cross-disciplinary (Caillois went from biology to psychoanalysis to game studies), as well as rooted in a cross-disciplinary theory, which he referred to as ‘l’extase illuminante’ – illuminated ecstasy (1994: 121). Designating the identification with the totality of material and immaterial contents of the world, illuminated ecstasy was, in Caillois’s opinion, the sole force that could oppose individual consciousness, seen as a distinctly impoverished form of existence (ibid.). Etymologically, the word ‘game’ does, of course, derive from the old English gamen, which means joy, entertainment and fun, as well as from the Gothic gaman which, consisting of the prefix ga and mann (the Gothic word for ‘people’), means ‘people together’ (Liberman 2008: 15). Important to note, however, is that in Liberman’s account, as in Caillois’s, togetherness does not refer to the totalitarian one-ness. Rather, it refers to a spontaneous, ‘vertical’ structuring of social relations, which, as Victor Turner has argued, forms fleeting communitas. Unlike community, or even commonality, communitas is a ‘mode of coactivity’ (1969: 132), associated with freedom and spontaneity, and opposed to a stable, horizontal social structure, to ‘obligation, jurality [and] law’ (114). Freedom is also key to Johan Huizinga’s educational theory of play whose formational and ‘civilizing’ function depends on ‘freely accepted rules’ that operate ‘outside the sphere of necessity’ (1955: 132), much like it is key to Herbert Mead’s interactional theory of organization of life, which calls for a spontaneous, impromptu structuring of social rules (1934). But perhaps the most precise in elaborating the notion of creative, re-structuring freedom, where play is not merely a temporary exit strategy (as well as closest to Caillois’s ‘illuminated ecstasy’) is Giorgio Agamben’s notion of profanation. Here, play is a subversion of god’s sovereignty:

Most of the games with which we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere. The girotondo was originally a marriage rite; playing with a ball reproduces the struggle of the gods for possession of the sun; games of chance derive from oracular practices, the spinning top and the chessboard were instruments of divination. (2007: 75)

Playful re-purposing of procedures and objects defuses the sovereign power by dissolving the unity of the myth (that tells the story) and the rite (that stages it). ‘As ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive’ (ibid.). In other words, play undoes or deactivates sovereign power by re-arranging and re-purposing its tools, goals and procedures. Unlike the impoverished individual consciousness that Caillois is referring to – caused, in the interwar years, by the loss, destruction, disillusion and growing systematization of human time, effort and labour – play is both creatively and socially productive. It cues social effervescence, euphoria, even ecstasy. In re-arranging rules and re-defining goals, it also re-shapes space, time and modes of interaction; it has both an overturning and a restorative function.

In the 1960s the very notion of structure and function came under scrutiny. In mathematics and in physics, where formerly order was seen as a stable, classifiable and quantifiable state, in which cause and effect were related in a linear way – while disorder was seen as a state of utter unpredictability – non-linear dynamics appeared as a third possibility. Initially articulated by Edward Lorenz’s 1965 discovery of strange attractors, non-linear dynamics stood for two processes: the process by which order emerges spontaneously from chaotic systems, and the process by which hidden order can be seen amidst chaos. As Katherine N. Hayles observes:

Strange attractors exhibit a characteristic of bounded infinity and are both confined within the finite space of a basin of attraction and display non-period patterns of behavior. This means that although a strange attractor never returns to a point or shape it previously occupied in space it is nevertheless recognizable as an attractor. (1990: 252)

This iterability, in which time and space are not seen as separate, was narrowly related to many contemporaneous poststructuralist ideas – for example, to Michel Foucault’s notions of the cultural-symbolic order one is not allowed to disobey, and to Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, which redefined writing seen as any signifying practice that orders the world by instituting paradigms. One such signifying- ordering system was the logic of ‘the centre’, seen as ‘a point of presence’, ‘a fixed origin’ that ‘governs the structurality of structure’ (2008: 352). Having both archia and telos – the two ‘key’ points in the linear continuum of time – the centre dictated both the spatio-temporal circumference of all actions and the rules and logic of interaction and engagement. Profoundly influenced by the theories of undecidability and non-linear dynamics, Derrida replaced ‘structure’ with ‘play’, ‘a unity of chance and necessity’ (1982: 7). The ‘structurality of structure’ here became a de-centred playing field, while strategy became ‘blind tactics’, a continuous, processual negotiation between a multiplicity of factors (ibid.). This made all signifying practices indeterminate in spatial, temporal and interactional terms: every sign acquired a different meaning each time it appeared in a new context, thus blurring the boundaries between text and context, foreground and background, purpose and accident. Unsurprisingly, many art practices of the time experimented with games by resorting to iterative processes. Play was no longer seen as related to alternative structures. Rather, it became synonymous with indeterminacy, perpetual re-configuration and the qualitative processuality of change. John Cage’s use of I-Ching reconfigured the sequence and circumference of sensorial perception, as did Luigi Nono’s and Iannis Xenakis’s musical strategies that encompassed complex ecosystems. The Fluxus artists cast the existing games – football, chess, table tennis – in the role of dramaturgical ready-mades and in this way re-conceptualized social relations. In literature, Alain Robbe-Grillet and William Burroughs created dechronological novels through the use of mathematical games, translated into narremes. Karl Martin Holzhauser, Gottfried Jäger and Walter Steffens used physical laws – gravity, motion, thermodynamics – to create musical-graphic works. This emphasis on procedures – that constitute logics and define the operation of bio-social, cultural, economic and political systems – reflected the enmeshed-ness of the linguistic and sociocultural forms of production in an economy that was increasingly moving from the production of commodities to the production of services. This shift from a spatiotemporally anchored structure to variable process and iteration, perceived as liberating and de-commodifying in epistemic and methodological terms, was not without its problems, however. Given the accelerated production of commodity- and service-related social and cultural values, which, according to Herbert Marcuse, was inextricably entwined with the performance principle – simultaneously a subjugating, disciplinary and pleasure-enticing force (1987) – the ephemeral iteration was no longer external to hegemonic processes. On the contrary, it was through the production of bio-social matrixes that harnessed energies, that play – as process and performance – became part of the hegemonic structure.

In the third historical epoch – the one we are currently living in – games and play are durational and pervasive. No longer spatio- temporally confined to what Huizinga referred to as the ‘magic circle’ (1955: 10), but extended in space and time, digital games permeate all spheres of life. Capitalizing on the extension of art in life, which the above-mentioned practices achieved through the abolition of the order-disorder, serious-playful, art-non-art divide, the current epoch is characterized by gamification and ‘ludification’ (Raessens 2006: 52-57). The former refers to the increasing structuring of daily activities with game principles, and the latter refers to the transformation of identities cued by digital technology. Faced with the increasing social, economic and environmental pressures, the global markets relentlessly demand the gamification of work, health and politics (McGonigal 2012) in order to maximize efficiency and increase profits, much like they demand the gamification of education and governance (Zichermann and Lindner 2013). The dissolution of firm symbolic orders and the increasing personalization, one could even say arbitrarization of social and cultural rules, are inextricably entwined with the growth of digital networks and the proliferation of actual-virtual practices, which, as many have argued, harness the ‘productive capacities of the hyperconnected man [sic]’ (Terranova 2004: 100) and perpetuate ‘machinic enslavement’ (Lazzarrato 2014).

Although today’s artistic practices employ the re-structuring capacity of play to generate social swarming – as do Blast Theory – or to practice simulacric culture-jamming – as do etoy – many gamified practices also re-write neuronal circuits by overlaying daily sensorimotor activities with tight goal-rule-feedback grids, which cannot not have a profound influence on future social ecologies (Lushetich forthcoming). Grown-ups equipped with NikeFuel, runtastic apps or fitbit toys, count their steps as if they were children in a playground. Alongside playing motorcycle racing on their Kinect consoles, the elderly are encouraged to shoot pink and blue animated rabbits to stay fit. Gamification evangelists tell us that the time has come when everybody can be young. But one may argue inversely that the process of ‘puerilism’ that Huizinga was so worried about (1936: 177), has turned the world into a playground and responsible adults into a bunch of playing kids. In this day and age, game structures are part of the superstructure that is both reflective and constitutive of the way that we think about facts, knowledge and all forms of engagement. They regulate what Jean-François Lyotard has termed ‘truth games’ (1979: 35;84). While offering ever new ‘promesses du bonheur’ gamification intensifies exploitation and drudgery (Fuchs forthcoming). Extended via gamification mechanisms, the ludic performance principle accelerates the formation of such ‘psychotechnical’ nexuses as ‘hyper- attention’ and ‘affective proletarianization’ (2010: 45). Bernard Stiegler writes:

Systems of … segmented audience capture … replace the psychic apparatus that should be constructing both ego and identities with a psychotechnical apparatus that controls attention yet no longer deals with desire but rather with drives. (2010: 13)

At this point, neither play nor games are associated with freedom, but, instead, with extreme subjugation – although this is by no means to say that there are no positive, dis-interested aspects to gamification and ludification.

Given the continually – and profoundly – changing relationship of ‘game’ and ‘play’ to ‘structure’ and ‘structuring’, the aim of this issue is to articulate the assembly and disassembly of diverse ideas, methodologies, and shared social realities. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, which gathers contributions from artists, art theorists, economists, philosophers, translators, ludologists, designers and performance scholars by way of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblances’ (2001: paragraph 67), this issue seeks to shed light on questions such as: how are creative ecologies morphed? What is the relationship between recursion, iteration, thinking and contemplation? What are the ludic tactics of social and cultural contestation? What is the role of structuring processes in communication? How do playful combinations of image, text and movement resonate in the existential register? Given the disciplinary diversity of the contributions, the issue is anchored in a tripartite structure, which serves as the issue’s skeleton. Part one of this (recursive) structure focuses on goals, rules, obstacles and constraints; part two examines space and time; and part three addresses systems and metasystems.

In investigating rule-regulated procedures, their generative and deconstructive potential, part one also investigates the impact that these procedures have on artistic and social practices. This section opens with Ken Friedman’s poetic-scholarly text ‘A Game with no Rules’ that juxtaposes the Fluxus scores, events and concerts to the sociological notion of ‘game’. Intersecting micro and macro concerns cross-temporally – dripping water, part of George Brecht’s 1961 score, with the recent environmental disasters and the Hans-Georg Gadamer-inspired hermeneutical merging of horizons with the current audit-culture- induced erosion of public debate – Friedman draws attention to the temporal oscillation in the meaning of the word ‘play’. Primarily associated with spontaneity, play also refers to a disciplined course of practice – as in playing an instrument – in which the initial freedom and ease are regained through the internalization of the practice-specific rules. This rumination on the cycles of freedom and constraint is followed by Piotr Woycicki’s investigation of recursive game structures in the zero-player games (games with no human players). Situating the computer-music- generating algorithm Iamus’s choice structures within the post-capitalist economy, Woycicki engages with two contrasting theories: Paul Mason’s optimistic view of the post-capitalist condition as based on information-centric collaboration, and Franco Berardi Bifo’s pessimistic view of the hegemony inherent in the hyper-abstract digital networks. By interrogating the import of liveness and fallibility, Woycicki initiates a debate about the status of computer labour in the post-capitalist economy.

Jumping to a very different epoch – ancient Greece – in ‘The Ludic Logic of Tragedy’ Freddie Rokem stages a recursive argument concerned with Aristotle’s and Sophocles’ logical principles. Examining the syllogisms, which lie at the heart of all dramaturgical developments and agonistic contestations in Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, Rokem shows that, contrary to received opinion, rationality is not the defining feature of humanity. The theatrical use of the syllogism not only contradicts the presumed rationality but subverts the syllogism, too, while simultaneously following its rules. This paradoxical view of agon is further developed by Petrović Lotina in his reflection on the agonistic creation of objects in the choreography of Mette Edvardsen. Taking his cue from Chantal Mouffe’s theorization of agonism, as an antidote to the politics of consensus and the key ingredient in reclaiming the sphere of the political, Petrovic Lotina presents the following argument: the agonistic oscillation between the ultimate grounding of the being of objects, and their contingent, socio-historical nature, galvinizes democracy. The generative theme is continued by Oliver Bray. His focus is the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), the legendary cross-disciplinary French group that consisted of conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp, mathematicians like Claude Berge and engineers like François Le Lionnais. Taking the OuLiPo’s practice of self-imposed constraints to generate ‘accidental’ texts into the domain of performance, Bray engages with the notion of clinamen-performer. Defined by the group as ‘a deviation from the strict consequences of a restriction’ (Mathews et al. 2005: 126), the clinamen is, in this case, a form of embodied deviation. This mirroring of rules and constraints in a different realm is further developed by Florian Vauléon in his examination of chess through the game’s chief eighteenth-century proponents: François André Danican Philidor and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Focusing on the discrepancy between the Enlightenment’s egalitarian interpretation of chess (as a game in which a pawn can bring down the king), and Rousseau’s adverserial argumentation, Vauleon shows that the structure of Rousseau’s Dialogues (in which Rousseau defends his multiply attacked writing, person and honour) is, in fact, indebted to the formal rules of chess. The last article in this section, authored by Joanna Bucknall, explores the liminoid in immersive micro-performance, a strategy for re-moulding social customs. Relying on Turner’s concept of liminality, regarded as ‘a realm of pure possibility’ (1967: 97), Bucknall investigates the interplay of performance and performance efficacy in a practice-as-research project Wish Box.

The second section – ‘Space and Time’ – continues the examination of the liminal through Sondra Fraleigh’s ‘Butoh Translations’. Tracing butoh’s cross-temporal and cross- cultural morphology, Fraleigh’s text is a porous meditation on butoh’s engagement with ecology through affect, atmosphere, image and, above all, pain. Pain in the form of bio- social damage caused by hyper-work is also the subject of Barbara Roland’s ‘Worker: The iteration game or coming out of the eternal return’. Reflecting on a performance that she realized as an iterative response to a period of work in a retirement home, Roland argues for an involuntary appropriation of gestures imbued with machinic enslavement (Lazzarato 2014). Impregnation is also the theme of ‘The Obscure Object of Desire: John Nash and the general theory of the second best’ authored by Abhay Ghiara and Matthew Goulish. Based on a single game mechanism – an economics question posed by Matthew and answered by Abhay – this twelve-year-long correspondence, which connects many sites, epochs and fictional situations, is a poetic rumination on the theory of the second best, dedicated to John and Alicia Nash, who died tragically in a car accident on 23 May 2015. In the following article, entitled ‘Philosophy Becoming Para-Textual: Plato’s Phaedrus, a memory pharmacy’, Aaron Finbloom engages with the notion of space and time in light of Pierre Hadot’s practical philosophical precepts, derived from ancient Greece. Resurrecting the embodied mode of philosophizing, comparable to Gadamer’s ontology of play, Finbloom traces the iteration of Plato’s Phaedrus in the form of a rhizomatic online game. The last article in this section, Conor McKeown’s ‘Alternative Trajectories: Structuring play through videogame physics engines’ takes a very different view of space and time. In reference to the often-made comparison between video games and the military objectives, the article takes a closer look at the computation of physical forces in video games. By problematizing the phenomenology of the player’s embodiment and her embedded-ness in the game, McKeown poses highly pertinent questions about the current techno-cultural entwinement.

The third section – ‘Systems and Meta- systems’ – is concerned with critiques and meta critiques of operational, commodified, computable and linguistic systems. Continuing the theme of ludification, Vincenzo Idone Cassone theorizes ‘playbour’ (Kücklich 2005) – an amalgam of play and labour – as a theatricalized and exploitative strategy derived from the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1998). This is followed by Markus Rautzenberg’s ‘Phantasms of Computability’, which poses the question of the existential dimension of computer games. Equating the spectacular with the religious – and, in this way continuing Susan Sontag’s debate about the mythological phantasmata – Rautzenberg queries play as a coping mechanism that protects the individual from the burden of contingency, and as a disruptive element in the otherwise oppressive order and monotony. In the following article, Mi You’s ‘Taqiyyah, Language and Game, L. Abu Hamdan’s Contra Diction: Speech against itself’, an old esoteric Shi’a Islamic jurisprudence is analysed. Practised by the Druze Islamic minority, Taqiyyah is a linguistic means by which ‘a believing individual can deny his faith or commit otherwise illegal acts’ while ‘at risk of persecution or in a condition of statelessness’ (Abu Hamdan 2014). Re-writing all notions of truth and falsity, this practice dissolves the structural divide between the form of expression and the form of content in language. In the last article, Peter Hewitt’s ‘Language and Worldviews’, the relation between the individual and the general in language is debated via Humboldt’s interrelated system, formed through the sedimentation of social values and views, Apel’s as well as Wittgenstein’s language games, and Gadamer’s paradoxical notion of language as both a bridge and a barrier to communication (1975).

Last but certainly not least, is Matthew’s and Allen’s intertextual project entitled A Collaborative Game in which the duo play with citations in Twitter-like messages limited to 140 characters. This is followed by Gabriella Daris’s Holy Corners Golf Club that places the patriarchal semantics of golf in dialogue with pornography. Finally, Zoe Svendsen’s World Factory, a hybrid of performance, game and business management, explores the bio-social domain of consumer capitalism by focusing on the intimacy of clothing. This ensemble of articles and artists’ pages, accompanied by Erwin Wurm’s logical acrobatics, shed light on the interplay of ludic elements, rulebased frameworks, repetitions and iterations that form bio-machinic, social and linguistic life worlds.