{"id":198,"date":"2010-11-18T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=198"},"modified":"2019-06-25T20:02:30","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T00:02:30","slug":"a-note-on-the-word-practomime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=198","title":{"rendered":"A note on the word “practomime”"},"content":{"rendered":"
If you do me the honor of reading my posts here on Play the Past,<\/em> you’re going to see me use the word “practomime” a lot. \u201cPractomime\u201d is a word I made up. I made it up because there was no word in any language I know that refers to what I have come to believe is an essential connection between games and stories–indeed, an essential and exclusive identity between them, in that they are both performative play practices. I read an article on Art + Interior<\/a> about making up your own words, and I thought I would give it a shot. <\/p>\n

So really I mean by \u201cpractomime\u201d exactly what I meant by “performative play practice<\/a>” (PPP) when I developed that discursive methodological tool earlier<\/a> in my game-criticism; the word \u201cpractomime\u201d is a way to embed those methodological concerns concisely in my critical discourse. It’s a way to assert a priori <\/em>that games and stories are two kinds of the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From a pedagogical angle, too, the term has proven very helpful, now that  my UConn team (which includes Kevin Ballestrini<\/a> and Karen Zook<\/a>, both also contributors here on Play the Past<\/em>) and I are hard at work on developing game-based curricula<\/a>. We’re designing these curricula specifically to take advantage of the affordances of games\u2019 and stories\u2019 identity to engage students in courses<\/a> the same way they engage in games. <\/p>\n

Practomime, that is, is the thing that both people playing games and people telling and receiving stories do\u2014playing pretend in a context where everyone agrees that playing pretend is what you do. I’m seeking to replace my own reflexive use of the word “game” with “practomime” in any context where I consider it important to bring the performative element of the practice to the fore.<\/p>\n

I made the word from two authentic Greek roots, \u03c0\u03c1\u03ac\u03c4\u03c4\u03c9 (pratto: do, act\u2014the word that of course gives us \u03c0\u03c1\u03ac\u03be\u03b9\u03c2 praxis, which is what Aristotle says tragedy enacts) and that all-time fave of mine \u03bc\u03af\u03bc\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2 (mimesis: performance-as [often misleadingly translated “imitation”]\u2014this is what Plato and Aristotle say tragedy is), so I think it’s sturdy enough for my purposes, at least.<\/p>\n

As I try to figure out what the things people call games are doing and what they can do, I increasingly feel the need to make the connection to mimesis (see this post<\/a> for a bit more detail). For my own purposes, I need a term that captures certain connections that I have proven to my own satisfaction at least to be fundamental. That doesn’t mean I think those connections are by any means exhaustive, and I still think it makes sense at the very least to talk about “game elements” in what I’m relabelling, for my own purpose, “practomimes.”<\/p>\n

But the category of human experience that’s being touched on in these practomimes is so far beyond the semantic range of “game,” as I see it, that for me a new term is necessary. That new term needs to capture the greater depth of certain “games'” (think of Bioshock<\/a>) aesthetic relationship to Hamlet than to Monopoly. Note that I’m not saying that they’re not fundamentally related to both those things, and I am saying that both Hamlet and Monopoly are also practomimes.<\/p>\n

Consider New Super Mario Bros Wii<\/em>, which I found, with my aged reflexes, fiendishly difficult. “Is this really a practomime?” I have said to myself, as whatever exiguous story there is in the game faded into the far background to reveal the stark horror of failing over and over to make a particular jump. “Yes,” I thought to myself, “but just as calling DragonAge<\/em> a game doesn’t get me anywhere interesting and can in fact serve to impede my critical progress, calling NSMBW<\/em> a practomime doesn’t capture what’s most interesting about the game.”<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I do think it’s fascinating, from a practomimetic perspective, that NSMBW <\/em>is, like a re-composition of the oral epic tradition, a virtuosic variation on what’s near-exactly the same story in so many earlier games. That’s the sort of thing that for me simply can’t be discussed with any degree of facility if we call it a game. But the critical language I’d use might be something like “As a practomime, NSMBW <\/em>possesses several interesting features that tend to be obscured by the understandable tendency of most critics to frame it primarily as a game.”<\/p>\n

Do you have the same kind of trouble with referring to games like Bioshock <\/em>and DragonAge <\/em>as “games”? How do you get around it? I\u2019m not wedded forever to \u201cpractomime\u201d if an alternative can be found.<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this post appeared on my blog, livingepic.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you do me the honor of reading my posts here on Play the Past, you’re going to see me use the word “practomime” a lot. \u201cPractomime\u201d is a word I made up. I made it up because there was no word in any language I know that refers toContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[17,16,18],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-play","tag-practomime","tag-stories"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6519,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions\/6519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=198"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}