Define “Games” (and Fail?)

I just got wind of an interesting event happening at The New School here in NYC tomorrow, September 26th, from 4-6pm. From the New School website:

Shifter magazine, in collaboration with writer Avi Alpert, is leading a series of public discussions, each concentrated on unraveling a keyword – a term that carries with it both a sense of urgency and agency in our present climate. By inviting artists, writers, activists, philosophers and others to propose terms and lead discussions, we will open up our editorial process to the motivations of others.

For our next meeting of The Dictionary of the Possible, Colleen Macklin, Associate Professor of Media Design, and Will Lee, Fine Arts MFA student, will fail at defining “games.” And because failure is one of our primary experiences in games, we’ll have fun in the process. We will look at knotty words like “fun,” “play,” and “gamification” and consider if we are in what Eric Zimmerman deems a “ludic century,” that is, a reality in which everything is now experienced and conceived as the interaction between complex game systems. But what if we find ourselves in a game rigged against us? What if the rules, movements, and potential outcomes are already predetermined, engineered or designed to beat us? What would be our counter-attack?

More details on their website here: https://events.newschool.edu/event/dictionary_of_the_possible.

Image by nchenga.