the transcript
YUKA (YI): Hello and welcome to the Graywolf Lab podcast. I’m Yuka Igarashi, editor at Graywolf Press, and today we’re launching our second lab with a conversation about games. With me are the writers, scholars, and artists Stephanie Burt, Tracy O’Neill, Michael Salu, and Elissa Washuta. All four of you are writing and thinking about games in fascinating and various ways and I’m really excited to have you all with me here today to share some of your ideas and your work.
Thank you for being here. So, I’m going to start by asking you all to introduce yourselves by answering two questions. The first is, how does this work? How does your work relate to games? And second, what role have games played in your life? And you can answer them in either order. And let’s start with Stephanie Burt.
STEPHANIE BURT (SB): Hi, I’m Stephanie. I write a bunch of poems and a bunch of lit crit. And if you, watch me long enough, you’ll probably get a book about Taylor Swift, maybe some short fiction written collaboratively, which is the kind of game.
I’m going to give four quick answers, kind of like the four points of the compass, or the Four corners on a Dungeons and Dragons alignment grid. Because I relate to games in four separable ways. One is the idea that many of us, much of the time, want to make life more playful than it is. More available to pretending.
I would like to be what the Dutch medievalist and 20th century theorist Johan Huizinga called a homo ludens, by which he meant not a gay person but a playful person . . . a human who plays. So that’s one.
Two is when I think about poetry and I think about the poetry that I write, I hope it’s meaningful and carries emotions and holds people’s interest in a serious way, but I also want it to be and to sound playful. I’m increasingly interested, in my own work, in using rhymes and half rhymes and fun schemes that I mostly did not invent, in having a sense of verbal play in it, what W. H. Auden called tall tales and the luck of verbal playing. Only if you get playful enough can you see how much we are likely to agree. And Auden, in, the last half of his career, wanted to get playful through rhyme and through received forms.
I also play, just as much as I can, tabletop role-playing games. Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous. There are others that are even more fun, and anyone who wants to join a game of Masks, which is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, and you only need two six-sided dice, uh, hit me up.
Fourth and last, like many trans people, I am surrounded by video gamers. My friends play video games. A lot of my students play video games. People are constantly telling me that I need to learn from one or another video game. I do not play video games, but I keep thinking I should.
YI: Thank you so much, Stephanie. You had sent me a poem when we were going to have this conversation, mmhm, called “Hobbies,” which is from your book with the Graywolf book, We Are Mermaids. I wanted you to talk a little bit about this poem.
Do you all know what Holly Hobby is, by the way? Maybe you can explain, it’s kind of like a Hello Kitty, but American and in a bonnet.
SB: Yeah, nobody, nobody under thirty is going to know, I think. I’d love to be wrong. So, Holly Hobby was a doll, and a set of accessories for the doll, and during the 1970s a board game, and I don’t know if it was ever an animated television show, but it became at one point a live-action children’s show on country music television. It was very wholesome. And it was designed to appeal to girls and to girly girls in particular, Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ashley, Midwestern-ish white girls in particular, and it was that kind of fantasy of having tea parties in a very safe village and gardening and playing in the vegetable fields and like raising your pet goat. And if you want to think of it as Hello Kitty dressed up in Laura Ashley stuff, that’s not far wrong.
And, my wife found, a couple years ago, the Holly Hobby board game at like a yard sale and brought it home and I just started looking at it at the same time as I was reading new poems by the great Monica Yoon, who writes prose poems about no win situations and invisible structures of racial and economic domination.
And thinking about all the ways in which the Holly Hobby board game simultaneously reflected the idealized girlhood that I never got to experience, because people thought I was a boy until I was supposedly a grownup. So I’m chasing after scraps of possible girlhood now. And simultaneously, this is a game that reflects our wish, my wish, to inhabit an economic system not built on domination. And quite a lot about the paraphernalia of girlhood. A lot of the fantasies and play styles around girlhood are about creating situations where everybody feels comfortable and nobody loses.
YI: That’s a great line in the poem that says, we know she does not need to earn a living. That’s what makes her Holly Hobby.
SB: Uh huh. Thank you.
YI: Yeah. And then the second line is none of the wishes involve survival or safety or ambition or competition.
SB: Mm hmm. The wishes in universe in the game have tokens that you can use up or share. And there are wish cards for what you can get, and they’re all stunningly wholesome things. Things that, who wouldn’t want these things? Um, one of the A basket . . .
YI: . . . of kittens.
SB: Yeah, you can get a basket of kittens. And, you can get birthday party, you can get a letter, and you can wish for a best friend if you don’t have one.
And how wonderful and how impossible would it be to live in a world where no one lost, where no games were competitive, and where anyone who wants a genuine best friend can just get one.
Let’s move on to Tracy. And I want you to start by answering the same questions I asked Stephanie, which is: How does your work relate to games and what roles games have played in your life?
TRACY O’NEILL (TO): Hi. My name is Tracy O’Neill, and, I have written two novels, The Hopeful and Quotients, and then more recently, a memoir called Woman of Interest. And, for me, when I’m tasked with thinking about games, my first thought is about language games. So, I want to invoke Wittgenstein and the notion of language acquisition. as a mode that is a little bit like learning how to play a game, which is to say, picking up the rules as you go. In my life as a writer, so often what I am doing is learning the rules and learning how to play as I’m moving through a project.
I also think that another sort of useful, moment in thinking about language and games is Saussure. Saussure talks about chess pieces gaining their value through their position to one another. And that that is how pieces of language work too. And that’s another notion that I’m thinking about a lot when I’m writing, some of the other ways that I think about games and play. In my work I think that I have, fallen onto metaphors of games, in many points. So, Yuka and I actually worked on an essay together years ago about play and playgrounds.
And then more recently, in Woman of Interest, a metaphor that I come back to a couple of times in the book is going all in on a losing hand, which is something that I do actually do when I play poker quite a bit, unfortunately, and in life, which is to say that I think, that’s a reflection, uh, about my own character.
I think that there’s also a lot of characters that I have written that I have used the metaphor of ”own goals” with. This notion that you’re trying to win, you’re trying to succeed, but that’s actually how you end up sort of beating yourself. And I think that’s a really, alluring paradox for me. I’m interested in jokes and humor as forms of play. I’m also interested in the way in which, I think this is similar to Stephanie, the way that creative procedures or constraints can be a form of playmaking, in the work.
YI: Thank you for that, Tracy. I loved working with you on that playground essay. I still remember it. And I’m struck by what you say in relation to your memoir. Because one of the features of your memoir is that it’s written in the style of noir, you would say, or it’s a story of you searching for the woman who gave birth to you, who you didn’t know. And the way that book unfolds is that it’s sort of a detective story. It’s, you’re searching for a missing person. And to me, that’s a larger level of language play, where you’re using the rules of a certain genre, and playing with that or making a game of it. Do you think of that as as genre play is also a type of game?
TO: Yeah, I absolutely do. And I think that, you know, in that particular project, there’s also a way in which it’s operationalizing a double entendre, right? There is an aspect where there is, there is a real detective in the story who is trying to help me, at some point, find this woman, right? And so that is an active investigation. That feels a little bit more literal, but there’s also a process of internal investigation that happens in the book. Ideally in any memoir, I think. And so, to some extent, there’s that element of play there too, thinking about how investigation can work in different ways.
I also think that there are moments in life in which we, maybe fall back on something like genre to help us understand what’s happening in a given moment. And to have points of comparison when our lives feel like they’re very messy and maybe don’t adhere to rules. And so, there’s a yearning, I think, that is a part of our relationship to games and play. There’s a desire to feel as though there are maybe more rules governing the way in which the universe is working at any given moment than we can.
YI: Thank you so much, Tracy. I’m still going to think about own goals and all in a losing hand. Those are definitely things I relate to in my life as well.
TO: I’m sorry.
YI: I mean, it’s just good to name it. Speaking of language play. Let’s move on to Michael Salu.
MICHAEL SALU (MS): Right. Hello. My name is Michael Salu. I’m British Nigerian, now based and living in Berlin. I’m an artist and writer, I guess is probably the simplest way to describe what I do. I work in a very interdisciplinary way with literature and research very much at the heart of that. I published a book last year entitled Red Earth, which is published by Calamari Archive, and it’s, uh——how do I describe this——a kind of work which leans in this kind of very reverent way on epic poetry, but trying to think about contemporary uses for that form.
And that was actually something I was just thinking about as I was listening to you guys, because——realizing that I think play in itself is a big part of the way that I create my work. So be that writing, be that visual projects, be that film.
And I think that book’s a really good example. So, I’m looking at——somewhat facetiously——looking at, like, this landscape of podcasts, which has swarmed us, you know, the last few years. I started . . . can I create a podcast that kind of transcends time and space? And then can my guests be, people who might now be, you know, bodies that are resting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean——former slaves? Or would there be, you know, individuals that I can speak to in the future? How would I establish this kind of frequency? So, you end up with this kind of very playful project, but obviously tying in very serious topics.
And the other dimension to this in terms of play, I suppose, I’m thinking about the way that gaming and video games have been, or they were a really big part of my early life. So up into the age of twenty, I was an avid gamer, and I sort of abruptly stopped one day.
But I realized, I think, when you sent me these initial kind of thoughts, Yuka, that, there was a direct connection between play and solitude. So if having a childhood with significant absences from, you know, the kind of normal family structure, obviously you devise your own methods of playing. And solitude gives you that room to expand and set your own framework of rules. And then from that process——even whether they’re video games or board games and so on. From that process, then you devise this method to constantly sort of ask questions.
And I realized that that kind of structure has filtered out to the work I do today, which is in a way it’s very critical. I’m looking at how environments like gaming filter out into society, how they also——they’re wonderful, but they also uphold capitalist structures that entrench them. So, for example, you know, things like NPCs and so on. So, all of those kind of models come from gaming. And if you look at sort of the early eighties, I mean, this is kind of a time of Thatcher and Reagan. This is when that more sophisticated gaming, that kind of first-person perspective gaming started to really take root. And I think there’s something there, I think there’s some kind of relationship between those two aspects, which has kind of gone through all the different changes in gaming, but we’ve gone back to that default. So the majority of the games you see now are still, one, it’s still about that first-person perspective, it’s still about that hero.
And I think a lot of the work that I’m doing, whether that’s in writing or in art, it’s trying to unpick that, trying to unpick those commodified forms, be that in film or be that in games. Like, why are we still following that kind of hero dimension?
YI: You had shared with me, this film that you made called Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism——and we’ll put up some stills on the Lab site——and what struck me about that project is that you told me that this was made using the same software that is used to make games. And so, there’s a way that you’re hoping to take those structures that you talk about and put them to a different use, maybe, than the ones that they were originally for. Do you think that that’s an important aspect of the way you relate to games in your work as well?
MS: Well, I find it quite interesting that a lot of the big gaming companies or the gaming software development companies, they still, in a way, as much as it’s a huge multibillion dollar industry, there’s still this kind of tenuous association with the early days of the internet where there was this kind of open-source mentality.
So, a lot of those, main platforms like Unreal Engine and Unity are actually relatively inexpensive to use. They are sometimes even free. The only issue is they have very steep learning curves. So you probably have to invest some time to figure out how to use them. And I was always wondering why are people not making more expansive, adventurous, subversive works with these platforms. So I spent maybe about . . . let’s say about three years slowly working out how to use Unity, which is quite a complicated platform. But I was always looking at it, well, why aren’t people using this to make films? So, I spent a lot of time looking at that space, researching it, looking at the way virtual environments or virtual architectures are structured.
Looking at the way that these fantasy dimensions of interplanetary colonization, all of these things that are happening in that space. And the flip side to that is that there’s a lot of——obviously, as we all know——there’s a lot of resource extraction and it goes into maintaining environments like this. It’s energy-intensive and so on.
I’m part of a research collective working in London, and we’re looking at the legacies of extraction from South Africa from the diamond mines and the gold mines and the trace of material and resources around the world. So, we’re starting with the imperial archives from Cecil Rhodes, who is one of Britain’s wonderful adventurers, who’s quite integral to setting up what is today’s South Africa. And looking through those kind of archives, you get to learn a lot about, basically the formulation of capitalism today.
And so, this film is actually a response to that archival material and I decided I was going to create an environment which is somewhat in a way, it’s very Dante-esque, it’s got a kind of absence to it. The idea that the environments have already been decimated. We’ve already taken every form and we’re trying to figure out what’s left. So, what’s left are these kind of haunted kind of slightly repetitive souls that just wander through this environment. and with no kind of end in sight. So the film becomes this allegorical response to the kind of psychological aspects of colonialism, the decimation of both the mind and the body and your immediate environment, which obviously sustains community and so on.
So that’s kind of what the film is doing in this, in this very langorous sort of way. And that isn’t the kind of work you generally see, you know, within gaming environments with gaming software.
YI: Right. Let’s move on to Elissa. Elissa Washuta, same question for you. Games in your work and games in your life.
ELISSA WASHUTA (EW): Yeah, so I think, I’ll quickly touch on how games have shown up in my work and then, answer the other question and come back. I write essays, I write creative nonfiction, and my last book, White Magic, had two essays that were written about video games. Um, one of them was about Oregon Trail 2 for Windows 95, and the other one was Red Dead Redemption 2. And I have been writing about the media I consume and just like the cultural stuff of my life as long as I’ve been writing essays.
So I grew up playing video games. I would always inherit my brother’s consoles after he moved on to another one. And I played a lot of PC games. I played a lot of sim games. I loved SimTower. That was probably my favorite. I just loved creating a corporate skyscraper and being a landlord in the virtual space. And I played, quite a lot of like Zelda and things like that, until college when I got distracted by other things and people.
And I, I didn’t play video games again until 2018. I had started my current job, my first full-time job, after an assemblage of many, many other jobs at once. I was in a really challenging new environment for me as tenure-track faculty. And I was just so stressed out. My doctor said, I mean, multiple doctors said, you have to find something that’s fun or, like, you’re going to have serious problems. And I remembered how many hours I had lost to video games growing up.
Turns out that, you know, even though I did find something fun in my PlayStation 4, that did not stop me from having the health problems come on. And so that, that is a big part of how I’m thinking about games in my current work.
Right now, I’m working on, a book, another sort of essay collection/memoir entity called The Big Score. It started as a book, well, in a sub-genre I’m calling experimental business memoir about, buying a lot of GameStop stock and wanting to live inside of a movie of my own design in my head. And I was just writing about GameStop and WallStreetBets and people trying to game the system and these interesting characters that I was finding and that morphed into a book that was about games and about money, but really as much as anything else——and you know, now even more, as I continue writing it, more about video games, and the ways that money is represented in games, the way that economies are represented and experienced.
And I started thinking,approaching various games I was playing as though . . . I wanted to make the argument that they’re all business simulation games in some way.
The business of Grand Theft Auto 5 is these scores big and small and odd jobs and other money-making activities that happen in-game. But I started thinking sort of more broadly about that, and started thinking about what money and value mean in all of these different games I was playing, whether it’s——Cyberpunk 2077 is probably going to be in there, Elden Ring, and you know, there’s a bunch of games, that I’m thinking through. Red Dead Redemption 2, again, is going to have a big role in it.
A lot of my thinking now about the meaning that I’m finding in games has to do with being sick, being chronically ill. I got Covid in February 2020 and was very sick for the next three years, as in like persistently chronically ill, really limited in my movements and had a heat intolerance that didn’t really allow me to go outside in the summer.
So, at the time that I was starting to write this book, I was finding something else in these games that I wasn’t expecting. And I think of the writing that I’m doing about these games as being, I guess, about them, but also, and even more so, from them. Like, using these in game experiences as, material that informs scene-making. And it’s the place where I think, it’s the place where I make meaning, and I’m thinking a lot about just embodiment and work and reward in the games.
Right now, I’m playing Death Stranding, which is a game about delivering packages in the apocalypse, getting packages from one place to another. I’m reading a lot about games and feedback and rewards and difficulty lately. These games that I’m playing are designed to have these really satisfying game loops. When I complete the task as I’m supposed to, I get the reward, whatever the reward is in game, you know, unlocking the next level or whatever.
And I think another thing that has been really fascinating for me in regards to thinking about my little place in the economy, as a worker in these games——I’ve been thinking about failure and how, my orientation toward success and toward not failing, even though I’ll tell my students, this is a place where we all fail, like, you know, we all have to take risks and risk failure. But how much do we really believe that? And video games are not fun unless you’re failing. If it’s too easy, it’s not fun. You have to be failing in order for the not failing to be satisfying. So, these are some of the things that are just kind of wrapped up in a big ball right now in my work.
YI: I love the way you’re thinking about rewards and the effect that that has on the rest of life. I think it’s a question that——Elyssa, I can have you answer first, but I want everybody else to jump in too——it seems like we’re talking a lot about who makes the rules of the games that we are playing. And some of those rule makers are hidden and some of them . . . you want it to be you, but it’s not always you.
EW: Yeah, you know, that was really my way into the book that I’m working on. Thinking about Wall Street bets, gaming the system and unpacking the idea of that. I think the implication is that trading was not otherwise a game up to that point, which it is inherently. And the more I read about the particulars of the markets, the more I’ve realized that, in the genesis of computerized trading, there was so much thinking around gamification and the tools of games in creating some of those systems. The language of games is just so much throughout the financial world that I became so interested in this idea of, not playing the games according to someone else’s rules.
I guess just the idea of shifting rules. And we’re never——in these games, like these money games, we’re not ever in a situation where there are no rules, where they’re thrown out. There’s just, maybe a shifting of the game we’re playing or just a constant morphing of the game.
YI: What do you all think? Do you feel like you can change the rules of the games that you’re playing?
MS: I think I try to, but I think I would blame my absent father for a complete lack of respect for authority. Um, so I’m always asking questions about the rules. And I think that’s really driving a lot of my work: actually thinking about even the rules around writing and reading and what we read and where we read from.
This product I’ve been working on the last few years right off is about the kind of power dynamics that’s set up within language and then set up further kind of entrenched through competition. So I’m, for example, looking at a lot of computational languages around statistical models and looking at how those models are informed, and looking at what’s left out of that kind of conversation. You know, looking at writing from other parts of the world. Why is that not part of the common lexicon? Why is that not part of determining our moral value systems, that sort of thing? So, there’s a constant need to ask who is setting the rules. And not in any kind of conspiratorial sense, but just as in the rules that structure the way that we learn, the way that we think, the way that we read. I think it’s quite an important conversation to have.
SB: I’m thinking about goals and I’m listening to the other admirable authors who——thank you for bringing me here in this company——and I’m just listening to the number of people who talk either about single player games or about massively multiplayer games like the stock market, where the point is to get something for yourself individually, often while someone else mathematically has to lose. And I’m sad because my favorite games to play——not all of them, but most of them——are games that require collaboration. In which in real life no one loses. If you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, which is definitely a game with rules, half your party gets eaten by a marauding, gelatinous cube, but everyone had fun and got to have adventures in character. You all won and maybe you even saved the village. I want games like that.
YI: Tracy, did you have anything to add to that? Or any thoughts you’re having?
TO: I am also really interested in thinking about the idea of gamification and relationship to, um, let’s say, uh, different modes, modes of capital flows. You know, like, let’s say Bitcoin, right? I think that one of the things that we might think is that people are actually driven by profit when they enter into the gambling that is, let’s say investing. But I actually think that in many ways, there are people who use investing actually as sort of a social tool. Like, it’s really interesting to look at some of the discourse in places like X, where it’s like——you realize that a lot of the people who maybe are investing in different ways are partially doing it because they like talking to other people online about it and they like the sort of exuberance and fun, um, that they’re, that they feel like they’re making for themselves.
You know, like, you see some of the language, like, “Oh, let’s get Bitcoin pumping,” right? And it’s like a——this feeling of like celebration and partying and excitement around it, that people . . . but I think speaks to the way in which, it’s not actually just that people are trying to sort of pursue rationally like a greater number for themselves, or actually even something that could be, you know, used as, as currency to some extent. Like they might even think that that’s the case for themselves, right? But I think that a lot of people are also just having a ball with investing and with learning about these different modes of investment to that are many of which are very frothy or speculative.
EW: Oh, I’m really interested in what you’re saying, Tracy, about these communities, because I’ve really found that to be true in communities that I’ve become a part of through this work that I’m doing.
I’m really influenced in doing this work by, James Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games. And, I’m going to oversimplify, his argument, I’m sure, or get it wrong, but the way I understand it is: He talks about two types of games, finite games and infinite games. Finite games, have many properties, one of which is that the goal is to win. And infinite games, in playing those, the goal is to keep playing. And in some of these——like investing or building communities, in like Wall Street bets or crypto, I see people talk a lot about the goal being to just stay in it, to just survive. Don’t blow yourself up on leverage. Don’t lose everything. Like, the goal is to survive. And I started really thinking about how that goal is expressed through the video games I’m playing. Even little details like in Cyberpunk 2077: one of the characters often wears a hat says SURVIVE on the front. And I find that really interesting, the joy in just continuing to play.
TO: Yeah, I think that that’s true. And I think that idea of the infinite game is a really useful analogy for market investments, right? Because like in many of these communities, it’s not as though people want to win. They think they want to win, but actually they want to keep playing, right? If you sell everything, if you sell all your investments, even if you’ve made an enormous amount of money, then you don’t get to keep playing, right? It’s like, you have to go be a grownup who has applied their house . . . the money to like, I dunno, buy a house or get a mortgage or whatever, right? It’s like, that’s not fun in the same way that it’s fun to make a bet on a meme coin or whatever.
YI: Yeah, Stephanie, I think you, you want it to jump in.
SB: I’m hearing from a couple of us as the talk moves towards economic games, or games played with real money with real stakes, that no matter how real the stakes are, what people involved in these games want is to remain in the community and to keep playing. And where the stakes are real, we do get into some real dangers of intermittent reward and random reward and gambling behavior. And I was wondering if we could direct our attention to play and playfulness and communities of play, maybe away from stocks and risk and gambling with your house for real money. Uh, if not toward Dungeons and Dragons, which apparently nobody else here wants to play, towards physical sports, what people in the e-sports community called T-sports.
YI: A lot of our conversations so far has been about more virtual games. I know some of you are athletes and have played sports . . .but just to talk about sort of what games have to do with the body——go ahead, Stephanie.
SB: A big difference is that if you’re playing an actual sport——and reflex-based real-time video games are in this way actual sport——you need to pay attention to the state that your actual body is in, right? But the reason Simone Augustus can play for thirty-seven minutes of a forty-minute game is that she exercises a lot. And her coach notices when she’s tired and takes her out and sends her back in and makes sure she’s hydrated. And elite athletes in a lot of sports take ice baths and they do all kinds of things that are really unpleasant because their real bodies have to be in peak condition.
They also don’t get to trade their real bodies for bodies that are six inches taller or two feet taller or have different shapes or wings, right? There is obviously a disability aspect to this and, super obviously, a trans aspect to this. And my Wednesday night DM, who is, I think, a cis bi guy and a tax lawyer, speaking of money games, told me a couple months ago that he had somehow gotten through years of playing Dungeons and Dragons without realizing how trans this hobby was. And then one of the teenagers he was DMing explained that a particular rule that the DM didn’t like——had said, ”You can’t do this thing because it doesn’t balance the game”——the player explained to him that following this rule allowed the player character to change gender, and this was obviously a very important thing.
So games, sports have “your real body is real” aspects, which is part of what makes them amazing. People do these things with their bodies and you get to watch them. And other kinds of games have “your real body is not your real body.” You can be eight feet tall and have wings and a cyber eye if you wanted that, which is also great.
YI: Just to say DM is Dungeon Master.
SB: A DM is a dungeon master.
YI: Just to clarify that.
SB: Yeah. People say GM if they’re talking about a game that doesn’t have dungeons. Which, my favorite games don’t, but nobody wants to play them compared to the large community for Dungeons and Dragons. So, thank you. Sorry about that.
YI: And does anyone else have, anything to say about embodiment or . . .
EW: Yeah, yeah.
YI: Bodies and games.
EW: I think it’s interesting, you know. I think I’ve been trying, for a while, to figure out what the relationship is in my mind or in my life between all these games I’ve been talking about and playing and games that I watch. I have Columbus Crew season tickets. Best game in the MLS, best team in the MLS. And so I watch a lot of soccer. And I don’t . . . feel that it has much of a connection in my mind at all with the games that I play. I think what I love is, it’s aesthetic. Just watching, like, a beautiful game and the environmental——being there for it. I strongly prefer being in the stadium to, you know, I don’t really watch on TV. I’m like making noise and I’m singing, at the stadium, but I don’t feel that I’m part of a sort of large guild or role-playing game the way that I do with some of the other video games and non-video games that I am playing in life.
And as far as embodiment goes, I think, just quickly, it’s interesting to me to observe what happens like in my body when I am playing a PlayStation game. I have a lot of energy to burn. I have a treadmill now in front of the PlayStation and like a seated elliptical thing. I’m energized by the play, and it’s something that’s possible for me and has been possible for me, even when I really could not walk around outside the house very much.
TO: I was a figure skater when I was growing up and, um, you know, I think that one of the things that’s really interesting about different forms of play that you do with the body is that in some way, it’s like this safe way to encounter the limitations of the body, even though in many ways it might not be safe, right? Like you might be doing things to your body that are actually dangerous, but, you know, most of the time, we presume at least that it’s not as dangerous to say, you know, dying.
I often think, too, about . . . what it is that we get out of it. Because those individualistic forms of play are also, I guess, infinite forms of play, to come back to that idea, right? Because you actually don’t know. You can’t——you can’t win, right? Because it’s like, you learn how to do one trick, right and then in theory, you might be able to learn another trick, but you might never learn how to do it, right? And there’s something there that——I do see a sort of analog within other aspects of our life, like there are other things that we never know we will be able to do, and we just sort of keep doing them, like writing, right?
But the last thing that I will . . . say about this is that I think that in terms of the body, too, it’s like: Another place that we often think of game playing, right, is in the sexual economy. So many of our fears, I think, that we have in the social world or in, like, in the sexual economy have to do with the idea that there might be a game and you don’t know that there is a game. You think that you aren’t playing, somebody else is playing, so there’s also this sort of negative connotation that has to do with, you know, being cheated, being tricked, being, you know, somehow not having the same information that other people have.
MS: I was just going to make a little bit back to the sport, embodiment. Um, and thinking about what you’re saying, just about the infinite game. Because I used to play basketball, and the thing that I struggled with . . . so, I loved play, I loved the physicality of the sport, the skill of the sport, the dynamism, the elegance . . . it’s a beautiful sport. And there was a disconnect for me, even at a really young age. It was a disconnect between that and the wonder of that and the winning. And I sort of had this problem with like, well, if we win this game or we lose this game, what difference does it make to my life? I’m still going to go home and do my homework or, you know, whatever comes next. And that was, I think that that was my failing as an athlete, because I didn’t desire the winning. I didn’t pursue the winning. And I was always kind of curious to know what it would be, what would need to be wired in me for me to have that dimension as an athlete. So, you need that to succeed because I had everything else, but I didn’t care enough about winning or losing. So, it’s like that kind of that aspect of competition, I guess, rather than play is always what kind of slightly turned me off.
And I think that we, like when we introduce sports to children . . it starts with the play and then the competition feeds in. But what is the competition? Where does it come from? And how do we make it? How do we give meaning to it? How do we give meaning to it and give that to children?
YI: So in some ways it’s why we’re maybe . . . it’s why we’ve all landed in this space called literature, which hopefully involves more play and less, less competition to some degree. Thank you all so much for all your thoughts and for talking to each other today.
Our music is from “Expiation,” from the album Terrain by Jacob Cooper. There’s a short feature on Jacob’s music on the Lab site. Check it out, and check out all things Lab, on graywolflab.org. Thanks to our podcast producers Edie French and Paul Auguston of IDream.tv. And thanks to the donors who have generously contributed to Graywolf Lab.
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