Toward Provocations for Playing with Games as Technologies

Abstract

Abstract What does it mean to engage play as a method of inquiry into games? More importantly, how might we, as arts educators, invite others, particularly our students, to engage play as a method of inquiry into the politics of games as technologies? In this article, I work toward building a few short provocations to engage play as a method of inquiry into the politics of games as technologies. By reflecting upon my past pedagogical experiences alongside scholarship in critical game studies and science and technology studies, I start from the premise that all technologies are political, to argue that to approach games as technologies is to foreground the politics of games, whereby questions about their materialized arrangements of order that manifest gender, race, disability, and class politics are centered. With that understanding, I argue that to engage play as a method of inquiry into games is to disrupt what we know and can know about games, especially through the power relations that games mediate. Under this context, I end by offering a few short provocations for fellow arts educators to invite students to make sense out of nonsense and to make nonsense out of the commonsensical with regard to games.