Better Problems

Abstract

Games saturate our contemporary lifeworld. Entertainment media often center around games of competition and chance: Reality game shows test everything from knowledge, physicality, and romantic compatibility to drag, baking, and topiary in “last one standing” formats; fictional TV series, novels, and films regularly take games as a theme or motif;1 e-sports mark the expansion of sporting spectatorship into virtual worlds. Outside of entertainment, games serve as military training simulations,2 metaphors in economic theory, and a frame for political “races.” In our day-to-day lives, applications facilitating exercise, language learning, task management, and even sleeping adopt the ludic.3 Simultaneously, both so-called analog and digital game industries boom. Video games alone reportedly had 2.7 billion players in 2020.4What to call this twenty-first-century prevalence of the game? Names abound: McKenzie Wark’s “gamespace,” Joost Raessens’s “ludification,” Eric Zimmerman’s “ludic century,” Steffen Walz and Sebastian Deterding’s “gameful world,” and Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola, and Frans Mäyrä’s “ludic society.”5 As Mathias Fuchs proposes, we might rehabilitate “gamification” similarly.6 “Gamification” typically denotes the design technique, popularized circa 2010, of applying elements associated with games—points, badges, leaderboards, and so on—to nongame contexts to change behaviors or motivate productivity. Instead, gamification can be thought akin to other “-ifications” and “-izations” introduced by the social sciences over the past few decades, such as McDonaldization, Americanization, Californication, and Disneyization. Recast thus, gamification describes a more pervasive “historical paradigm that brings games to the forefront of social, political, economic, and aesthetic thought” (EG, 35). It characterizes a historical situation conducive to and conditioned by the ubiquity of games.Over the past decade, the work of media theorist, literary scholar, and game designer Patrick Jagoda has addressed digital games in this fashion: as media entangled with the aesthetic, epistemic, and socioeconomic structures of our historical present. From unpacking how Guy Debord’s passive “society of spectacle” becomes the interactive “society of the game” to conceptualizing video games as technologies for generating new concepts, and from parsing how games function as art enabling novel aesthetic encounters to collaborating on prosocial alternate reality games (ARGs), Jagoda’s oeuvre explores the game’s multivalent manifestations and connotations.7 In doing so, he furnishes a language for engaging games as means of both intensifying and intervening in power relations.Jagoda’s latest monograph and the subject of this review essay, Experimental Games, marks an accomplished synthesis of his interdisciplinary practice that marries the critical and creative. Indeed, pitched at the “intersection of media aesthetics on the one hand and social, political, and economic theory on the other” (EG, xi), Experimental Games bids to square the medium-specific analysis of games with their sociocultural operativity in our current conjuncture—what Jagoda terms, not uncritically, neoliberalism. This essay presents the central moves of Experimental Games, highlighting its interventions into discourse around games, neoliberalism, affect theory, and posttruth politics—the last of which the text does not explicitly touch on. Throughout I pay particular attention to the historicity of Jagoda’s argument. Undoubtedly, the timeliness of Experimental Games is one of its strengths; the critical stakes of thinking with games derive from their affinities with the neoliberal worldview they typically reinforce. The game can be a site for reimagining concepts endemic to neoliberalism including choice, control, difficulty, failure, and improvisation because these concepts are also endemic to games. By unpacking the affective poetics of games, Jagoda’s close readings convincingly demonstrate that they can function as experimental machines for making “better problems” that complicate neoliberalism’s narrow solutionism, entrepreneurialism, and individualism—potentiating new affectivities and collectivities (EG, 219). Nevertheless, the essay considers another approach to the task of reinventing the game Jagoda establishes the importance of. Certainly, Jagoda’s claim that games “unfold in but are not entirely of the neoliberal era” (EG, 276) suggests a question not pursued by Experimental Games: If the “age of gamification” harbors a ludic paradigm commensurate with neoliberal epistemology and world making, do other ages or cultures harbor alternate modalities of play that express distinct ways of inhabiting the world? To conclude, the essay proposes a complementary practice of strategic achronicity—attention to apparently untimely games—as a means of reinventing the present state of play.This year, 2021, marks the twentieth anniversary of “computer game studies, year one.”8 Until then, Jesper Juul recounts in a monograph formative for the field, game-related research had “mostly been concerned with using games for studying other matters”:9 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s game theory, Alan Turing’s imitation game, Claude Shannon’s computer chess, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Michel Foucault’s games of truth, and so on. Game studies, in contrast, was to be about studying games—including video games—“for their own sake.”10 The now-heterogeneous field of game studies has since expanded its initial, principally formalist purview11 to enfold a range of concerns and methods in addressing the social reception, cultural context, and political economy of analog and digital games.12 Yet while the implications of studying games for “their own sake” has proliferated, the distinction Juul made in Half-Real has remained. How games have served as “epistemic mediators”13—metaphors, models, and practices—instrumental in producing knowledge and experience across the sciences and the arts throughout the twentieth century and beyond seems not to be the concern of game studies. Despite game scholars being uniquely trained to think about games, they tend not to address how games have been formative of how we think.Chapter 1 of Experimental Games, “Gamification,” sutures this field-founding cut. Therein Jagoda recounts a brief intellectual history of games in twentieth-century economics, military strategy, and social policy. Attending to these contexts reveals how game form frequently took on an epistemological or communicative function and, therefore, that it is instructive to think simultaneously about game form and the historical context in which that form was mobilized. Jagoda pointedly ups the ante of addressing games “for their own sake” on account of (not in spite of) their role in “studying other matters”; attention to game form becomes attention to situated knowledge-making practices.Jagoda begins with Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s use of the game as an image of thought in their 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Early game theory bade to mathematically model optimal rational decision-making, where an economically rational agent (or player) is one that can assess and rank alternative outcomes and calculate paths to those outcomes probabilistically, and is motivated to choose the most-preferred outcome given the other player’s actions. In other words, game theory can tell you how to maximize your cake consumption if you are asked to cut it in two and your friend is picking the first slice (you cut down the middle) but can’t tell you how to be subtly generous. Game form—as an abstract logical frame—mediates this scenario, helping render it goal driven (maximum cake), competitive (against the slice chooser), and bounded (no relevant external factors). This common understanding of game principles facilitates understanding the principles of economic behavior Von Neumann and Morgenstern make a case for.In addition to an abstract logical frame, games became sites for concrete practices in institutional contexts during the 1950s. Rather than modeling rational decision-making mathematically, tabletop war-gaming at RAND Corporation, for example, served as an analog simulation generating empirical data. As discussed in A. M. Mood and R. D. Specht’s 1954 “Gaming as a Technique of Analysis,” the inclusion of the human as a contingent variable provided access to real-time decision-making in a controlled, safe environment. Though this latter approach seems aberrant to game theory—indeed, neoclassical economics and operations research are often interpreted as opposed intellectual traditions—they are united in their use of the game. We need look no further than AlphaGo to see the continued prominence of games in cutting-edge research contexts, but Jagoda’s contention is that the game-based military strategy and economic theory during the Cold War in the United States served as historical a priori for the broader sociocultural proliferation of and faith in the competitive game as a model for reality.As S. M. Amadae tracks in Prisoners of Reason, the instrumental rationality of game theory provided a “blueprint for the neoliberal world order” in which everyone acts in accord with the logic of maximized utility.14 The 1970s and 1980s theorists of neoliberalism most clearly bridge this rational, economized, and individualist mentality incubated in Cold War institutions to thinking about the social more generally. Significantly, these thinkers do so with the aid of games. Games recur as metaphors throughout the foundational work of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman to express the market as a state of free play within a mutable set of fair, voluntarily agreed-on rules—a state unburdened by totalitarian governmental intervention.15 Even critics of neoliberalism such as Pierre Bourdieu and Maurizio Lazzarato adopt the game to express neoliberalism as the inverse: a carefully controlled, artificially produced structure that favors the dominant players.16 We know what it means to have “skin in the game,” to play fair, to have fun, or, on the contrary, to play a fixed game (EG, 57). Hence the game metaphor lends an affective texture to the abstract logic of the market.Beyond discourse, Jagoda’s concern is with the practicalities of inculcating the neoliberal mentality into everyday life—a project most clearly articulated through behavioral economics toward the turn of the century. As Wendy Brown explains, neoliberalism’s quotidian “normative order of reason” connotes an economized mode of self-cultivation geared toward the accumulation of one’s “human capital.”17 Behavioral economics developed practical techniques to “nudge”—the title of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s exemplary text18—this mode of lived common sense that unfolds on the level of habits, attitudes, behaviors, preferences, and desires rather than self-reflective rationality. As Jagoda puts it, “If neoliberalism is a constructivist and world-making paradigm, then behavioral economics introduces techniques for creating and enforcing that particular world” (EG, 60). Here the intellectual history Jagoda traces links back to gamification as a design technique. It is not as simple as popular entertainment osmosing into other spheres; the application of game elements to nongame contexts marks an extension and intensification of the quotidian “choice architectures” behavioral economics pioneered.In summary, whereas the earlier mobilization of games in game theory and war-gaming assisted in modeling and predicting, behavioral economics and gamification work to modulate daily life. From this perspective, Jagoda furnishes a nuanced interpretation of how video games can be said to “condition a subject to accept the logic and practice the habits necessary to sustain competitive entrepreneurship of oneself” (EG, 44). “The [video] games that inundate the present”—such as Candy Crush Saga and Stardew Valley, with which Jagoda concludes the chapter—“are action-oriented mediations that shape everyday experience through neoliberal principles” (EG, 12). Playing normative games from the idle clicker to the fast-twitch first-person shooter ritually enacts and inculcates neoliberal common sense, a common sense difficult to disaggregate from the game itself as “beyond mere simile, neoliberalism can be said to adopt game form” (EG, 279).The payoff of this intellectual history is an intervention into games research that typically figures a one-directional colonization of games by neoliberalism. On the contrary, Jagoda demonstrates that gamification “names a formal and cultural counterpart to neoliberalism” (EG, 44). More accurately, Jagoda tracks the mutual constitution of a particular kind of game—one that ritualizes problem solving, control, “competition, repetition, and quantified objectives” (EG, 12)—and the propagation of economized epistemology, values, and habits. I want to suggest that by historicizing this conception of the game that supports neoliberal common sense, Jagoda denaturalizes it, recasting it as only one, albeit hegemonic, articulation of what a game is and what play can do.Throughout Experimental Games Jagoda advances the thesis that “games, including video games,” not only “serve as a form for staging, encountering, processing, and testing experience and reality in the twenty-first-century” (EG, xi) but also constitute it. Put another way, it’s not that games merely simulate reality—even “models of the world [are] in [the world].”19 Rather, “games make realities” we live with and through, forming our experiences, habits, and attitudes (EG, 8). Although, as chapter 1 demonstrates, games are more likely to “serve as a medium for . . . producing [the] reality” of neoliberalism than they are to afford speculative artistic praxis (EG, 93), Jagoda’s argument regarding the game’s world-making capacity ultimately proves affirmative.Chapter 2, “Experimentation,” takes a critical approach to its eponymous concept. Jagoda draws on the historical connotations of experimentation in both the sciences and the arts (e.g., experimental literature and film) to present all games as uniquely experimental media. For Jagoda, “Games operate as experiments insofar as they combine a stable foundation of starting conditions, rules, and objectives on the one hand with the contingency and possibility of play on the other. This balance encourages the provoked observation that is experiment: a designed repetition that produces difference” (EG, 28). By attending to the heterogeneity of experimentation—historically at home at RAND as much as in avant-garde art—Jagoda does not, as game scholars have in the past, succumb to the facile celebration of playful experimentation as a priori subversive or resistant to power. On the contrary, he emphasizes how the experimental quality of games primarily manifests as commodified “replay value” and a trial-and-error practice of problem-solving conducive to postindustrial labor (EG, 28–31).Importantly, Jagoda does not succumb to the antipodal, stultifying logic common in theories of neoliberal power—one that, in leveling the “charge of complicity” at the experiment and the game, disqualifies them from supporting radical action in toto.20 As Anna Watkins-Fisher puts it, in our time, when all “the political tools on hand appear co-opted in advance” and “control and resistance have become nearly indistinguishable,” it is all the more imperative to theorize tactics of “complicit resistance.”21 Jagoda addresses the problem of neoliberal co-option by parsing and inhabiting the ambivalent, often complicit power of the experimental game to test and produce reality; games mark “internal pressure points that suggest ways to exploit [the neoliberal] worldview” because they typically reinforce it (EG, 33). Instead of finding what Watkins-Fisher conceptualizes as “the play in the system,” Jagoda argues that neoliberal articulations of ritualized play participate in generating the everyday reality of the system itself—playing the system into existence. How, Jagoda asks, can reimagining and remaking games otherwise potentiate playing alternate realities into existence?The end of chapter 2 and the following four-chapter section “Concepts” consider this question through close readings of games that stage affective fields nonreducible to the principles of neoliberalism. To do so, Experimental Games leverages a unique affect-theory framework. Jagoda brings together two traditions: the vitalist tradition of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Brian Massumi, and the often opposed embodied, phenomenological tradition in queer and gender theory advanced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Elizabeth Povinelli. The former allows Jagoda to think the viscerality of subconscious, nonrepresentational currents during play that often elude subjective thematization as “emotion.” As Jagoda explores in his first monograph, Network Aesthetics, digital games participate in affective flows and abstract computational processes proper to digitally networked environments more generally—flows seldom readily cognizable by the human’s innate perceptual faculties. The latter helps Jagoda elaborate how video games uniquely render these flows sensible to the playing subject through an affective poetics. That is, to reformulate John Brenkman’s thesis on affect in poetry, “[gaming] enables affect to be studied with some precision because affect resides . . . not in [playing a game] about feelings but in the very [playing] and way of [playing].”22 Hence, by doing away with the split between affect and emotion—nonconscious and conscious—common in affect theory,23 Jagoda reveals a “profound pedagogical value” of the digital game (EG, 28). The moods and feelings instantiated through gameplay feed new vistas of experience forward to players,24 reorienting them within their milieu.Specifically, the affective resonances Jagoda explores rework four concepts central to both neoliberalism and games: “Choice,” “Control,” “Difficulty,” and “Failure.” Here Jagoda is at his best. Highlights of the attentive close readings include the nuanced analysis of Jonathan Blow’s Braid as a procedural meta-experiment foregrounding the experimental quality of video games in general; teasing out how Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic does not so much depict the experience of a marginalized identity as it has the player stage an experience of marginalization; and unpacking how the multiple registers of Tomorrow Corporation’s Little Inferno work to “produce and maintain an affect of doom without respite” (EG, 249). Overall, Jagoda elaborates on how video games including Galactic Café’s The Stanley Parable, Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, Alex Ocias’s Loved, and McKinney’s SPENT complexify the commonsense implications of each concept in turn. For example, whereas game theory renders choice the conscious decision of a rational individual, chapter 3 parses how the video games it considers recast choice as the culminating achievement of multiple (non)conscious and (non)human agencies. In particular, Toby Fox’s role-playing game Undertale thrusts the player into a present with a fraught past they initially know little about. Through trial and error, they come to realize that the seemingly rational decision to attack or kill enemies they encounter is an ethically dubious habit inculcated by the conventions of the RPG genre—a state of affairs the game poignantly foregrounds by portraying these decisions as setting the player on the game’s “Genocide” route. To pursue the other of the two major routes, “Pacifist,” the player has to make a sustained commitment to that trajectory even when it does not immediately present itself as an option; in some instances, players must refuse to hurt their opponent multiple times before the game will accept their commitment and present a nonlethal option. Hence Undertale reconceptualizes choice both as primed by habits trained through extended exposure to generic convention and as nonreducible to a singular point of decision. Rather, choice must be invented through an extended practice of experimentation, discovery, and repetition. In this way, instead of engendering a problem-solving exercise, Undertale and the other games Jagoda discusses instantiate an “alternative form of experimental art-science” (EG, 113) that he calls problem making.Not only does dwelling with the problem-making game defamiliarize concepts central to the neoliberal worldview but it also seems to train the player differently. Whereas the problem-solving, normative video game serves as a training device inculcating habits and sensibilities that actively prime the player to engage everyday life in line with neoliberalism’s “normative order of reason,”25 the aesthetic experience produced by the radical experimental game moves the player out of line. Though Jagoda does not speak of the problem-making game explicitly in terms of training, the logic follows that it cultivates a sensibility in the player not self-identical with the neoliberal regime. Entering into complicity with the non-goal-oriented but still purposeful—teleonomic not teleological—contingencies of the problem-making game thus engenders “alternate ways of being and acting” that endure beyond the practice of play itself insofar as the practice of play informs the player’s lasting perceptual capacities and habits of thought (EG, 115).The social import of the radical experimental game becomes clear as the book reaches its conclusion. Chapter 7, the first of the short “Design” section, centers around a performance-studies theory of improvisation and largely focuses on Jagoda’s own large-scale, transmedial alternate reality game (ARG) conducted at the University of Chicago in 2017. Out of all the games discussed, the parasite most resoundingly moves past the problem-solving “instrumental design approach” of gamification toward a properly “problem finding or problem making” mode (EG, 255). “To solve a problem through improvisation,” writes Jagoda of flexible, post-Fordist labor, “means using emergent tools and techniques to execute a preset plan. By distinction, problem making is a process of experimenting with both processes and objectives” (EG, 256; emphasis mine), a process Jagoda admits is difficult to engender through the preprogrammed, algorithmic medium of the video game.In general, the ARG relies on players shuttling between various platforms, technologies, and live interactions in a manner continuous with the quotidian reality of our contemporary media ecology. Mobilizing collective rather than solely individual improvisation, belief, and habit to generate and uphold a novel “consensus reality,” it actively modulates that world of which it is inextricably a part (EG, 259). When run by designers tightly controlling the game’s unfolding—so-called puppet masters—the fairly predetermined game strongly resonates with groups characterized as taking posttruth politics ad absurdum. Today, from QAnon to Flat Earth, collective fabulations of reality are well known to animate and bond numerous social groups through shared affect and interpretive frames, bringing together multiple subject positions with starkly distinct investments into a fraught unity. The commonalities between these groups and ARGs have not eluded critics,26 but, perhaps because of the acknowledged limitations of the university context, Experimental Games does not foreground them. That said, Jagoda’s argument invites the question of how design teams, who hold asymmetrical jurisdiction over the ARG’s “shared world making” (EG, 274), might be uniquely positioned to tactically effect progressive social change through the very fabulation that seems the preserve of reactionary politics in the twenty-first century.The progressive dimension of the parasite emerges from its openness to being transformed by “dissensus” (EG, 284).27 The very structure, objectives, and narrative of the game frequently metamorphosed in the process of its unfolding on account of various contingent events: from idiosyncratic interactions between participants to student trickery unveiling designer plans for a much later part of the game early on. Jagoda proposes that the parasite be understood as a “ludic laboratory” (EG, 257), one that exemplifies “an experimental process that limbers up thinking, increases sensitivities, and opens participants up to coexisting potentials” (EG, 256). In contrast to the paranoid logic immanent to a group like QAnon, the parasite manifests a more constructivist enterprise. Rather than a comforting means of cohering reality by placing the subject at the center of an elaborate conspiracy, the parasite actively perturbs reality, prompting players to encounter contingencies as opportunities for creativity. To crib from Donna Haraway, the problem-making game is all about staying with, not resolving, the trouble it artificially generates.28The three-and-a-quarter-page “Coda: Joy” feels unnecessarily “modest” (EG, 286)—to use Jagoda’s own assessment of the book’s contribution—in synthesizing the experimental game’s political implications. It advocates for exploring how games proffer not “fun” but Spinoza’s joy—an increase in our power of acting.29 In chapter 7, Jagoda draws on Brian Massumi to sketch the “affective politics” of the ARG, one that involves the invention of freedoms not predicated on autonomous individuals but on “care for the event of encounter, sensitivity to dividual-transindividual complexity” in which the “conscious, cogitating I . . . would . . . recognize the rationality of affectivity, . . . experience itself more as collaborator than master of these forces . . . [, and] practice strategic self-surrender to them.”30 This excerpt from Massumi that Jagoda mobilizes appositely grapples with what it means to express a modicum of agency as an individuated consciousness participating in affective flows, but not what it means for fostering collectivity. Indeed, the ARG invites other leftist mobilizations of Spinoza that address the role of the imagination and shared affect in producing and maintaining community. In Spinoza and Politics, Étienne Balibar emphasizes how the relations of dissensus that constitute stable social formations rest on a psychic economy that is at once very powerful and highly unstable: this is what Spinoza calls “the imitation of the affects” (imitatio affectuum). . . . If men were entirely reasonable creatures, the communities they form would be cemented entirely by reciprocal utility and thus by difference in similarity. But since men are all, though to differing degrees, imaginative creatures, their communities must also rely upon mechanisms of identification, that is, on an (imaginary) excess of similarity.31Contra stultifying polarization, Jagoda figures the ARG as a means of cultivating a habitus open to the complexities of political problems, predisposing players to inhabit the world in a manner sensitive to social difference and the ongoing labor of environmental change. In this book, pitched at game designers as much as media philosophers, he stops short of pursuing how Spinoza might help us think the ARG as a means of binding people together by engineering what Balibar terms an imaginary excess of similarity. Nevertheless, by bringing Spinoza into conversation with the ARG, Jagoda opens up a trajectory for the future—one that considers the efficacy of not returning to rationality in the face of so-called posttruth, but rather embracing the ludic fabulation of alternate realities as the ground for innervating a progressive politics.Of course, it is apt for Experimental Games to conclude by staying with the problem it maps as opposed to advancing a succinct solution. By the text’s denouement, games are clearly “capable of so much more than what the majority of people experience when they play video games today”—experiences of problem solving, mastery, meritocracy, control, and comfort that ultimately tacitly reproduce and uphold neoliberal common sense (EG, 285). Precisely because this particular conception of games and play is so central to ritually enacting the everyday reality of neoliberalism, game designers and players occupy a kind of cultural vanguard. Indeed, Jagoda allows us to recognize games as a site for struggle over that common sense, extending an invitation to reinvent game design and play—“mak-[ing] better problems” a means to affect “our historical present from the inside” (EG, 219). However, just as the radical experimental game cannot be delimited beforehand, Jagoda offers no program. Instead, he furnishes coordinates for the journey these experimental games to-be-made necessitate and establishes the urgency of embarking on it. The designers and players of the future will “determine the being to come in exploring its path.”32 To reformulate a line from Spinoza that Jagoda invokes: we know not what a game can do. The task is to stage inhabitations of this indeterminate potentiality, setting ludic experiments in motion without any intuition as to what is to come out on the other side.In conclusion, I want to suggest that Experimental Games implicitly poses another, “better problem” for games research too: attending to the history of play as a means of reimagining its present. To reiterate, Jagoda’s articulation of gamification as a twenty-first-century historical paradigm that “brings games to the forefront of social, political, economic, and aesthetic thought” provides the backdrop for and stakes of reinventing the game (EG, 35). As Jonathan Crary puts it, “How one periodizes and where one locates ruptures or denies them are all political choices that determine the construction of the present.”33 Jagoda’s prehistory of gamification, which passes through epistemologies and technologies intertwined with the military-industrial-university complex, delivers a convincing construction of the present state of play. Even so, although the present global scale of the game’s ubiquity may be totally unprecedented, Jagoda elides how games and play have saturated societies throughout history. As Mathias Fuchs explores, commentators hailed the eighteenth century as “the century of play” for the European aristocracy and bourgeoisie, in part on account of the prevalence of parlor games.34 In Play as Symbol of the World, Eugen Fink joins numerous anthropologists in discussing “cult-play” as a practice of orienting lived reality in relation to cosmology.35 Art historians have addressed the importance of games and play to art collectives including, to name a few, the surrealist, psychoanalytic mobilization of play to access the unconscious, and Fluxus’s multifarious implementation of games.36 In all these cases communities articulate and enact play in a manner arguably distinct from the gamification paradigm concomitant with neoliberalism, designing games instead entangled with alternate epistemologies, ways of living, and regimes of practice.This move—turning to the past so as to look on the present anew—resonates with contemporary approaches in cultural theory and philosophy bidding us to reinvent the capitalistic, extractive logic of modern technology by thinking with non-Western cosmologies that understand technology differently.37 Akin to Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “untimely meditation,” this strategy of departing from fashion to meditate on times, cultures, and cosmologies that appear dissonant in relation to contemporary trends proves generative insofar as that which “act[s] counter to our time . . . thereby act[s] on our time.”38 Work on the plural history of play already exists,39 but Experimental Games establishes the stakes of convening with those histories in a bid to redesign the present. If, as Jagoda suggests, neoliberalism predominantly provides the conditions for and is conditioned by one play paradigm—gamification—practicing strategic achronicity facilitates the process of reinvention he calls for by introducing a vector from outside that historically situated paradigm. We might not know what a game can do, but we can push the horizons of the thinkable by spelunking in the archive of play, allowing it to act on us.