{"id":421,"date":"2010-12-14T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2010-12-14T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=421"},"modified":"2011-02-22T15:48:21","modified_gmt":"2011-02-22T20:48:21","slug":"toy-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=421","title":{"rendered":"Toy Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why is it that when we set out to talk about history and play<\/em>, we always end up talking about games<\/em>?<\/p>\n

One thing that attracted me to the blog you\u2019re reading right now, besides the terrific set of co-conspirators Ethan has assembled, was its title and the broad set of topics that title implies. Play<\/em> the Past, not Game<\/em> the Past.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t misunderstand me: I love games. I identify, at least when cornered, as a gamer. And I know that “game”\u00a0is a capacious label, covering everything from peek-a-boo to Axis & Allies.<\/em> Yet more and more today the word “game” describes a commercial product, a highly structured and packaged, usually digital, experience. (Let\u2019s not even get in to “serious games”–I\u2019ll save my issues with that term for another post.)<\/p>\n

The world of play is so much bigger than the world of games. Can\u2019t our thinking about history at play be equally broad?<\/p>\n

I commend to you the romance of the action figure and the playset.<\/p>\n

\"Castle<\/a><\/p>\n

I trust you know what I mean by a playset. It\u2019s a toy building or vehicle, often opening up to a cutaway view, a proscenium stage on which our little plastic heroes perform their scaled-down dramas. The Ewok Ghetto from\u00a0Star Wars.<\/em> <\/em>Barbie\u2019s Malibu Dream Bordello. G.I. Joe\u2019s Jungle Bunker with Spiderhole. (“Action figure,” by the way, was a term cooked up in the 1960s to sell G.I. Joes to boys without having to utter the dreaded word “doll.”)<\/p>\n

Game scholars sometimes distinguish between two modes of play,\u00a0ludus<\/em> and paidia<\/em>. (The terms come from\u00a0Wikipedia<\/span> French sociologist Roger Caillois<\/a>, and are always a hit at parties.) Ludus describes structured, rule-driven, competitive games, while paidia describes unstructured, improvisational play. Professional sports are mostly ludus; playing make-believe is mostly paidia. Too much ludus and a game can become a grind; too much paidia and an activity can feel pointless. Left to their own devices, children and others skilled at play will typically introduce paidiaic whimsy into ludic games (arf arf, my Monopoly dog is biting your Monopoly hat!) and ludic challenges into paidiac play (you can\u2019t step on the black tiles\u2013they\u2019re lava!). The two modes are really poles on a spectrum, and maximum fun seems to be a moving target somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

\"Boba<\/a><\/p>\n

The playset, for me at least, occupies a sweet spot on\u00a0the spectrum from ludus to paidia, and also on the spectrum from abstraction to specific representation. A playset is not a game. It doesn\u2019t come with rules or an objective. But its combination of character and setting, or action figure and ground, is pregnant with a million possible stories and adventures. At our house, it\u2019s the playsets that are in constant use. Not the structured board games, not the electronic toys that play for you, and not the austere modular blocks.<\/p>\n

Commercial and cultural factors have, I think, pushed the computer game industry way over towards the ludic end of the spectrum. Hardcore gamers want and expect ludic challenges. Yet many breakout hits (think of\u00a0The Sims<\/em>,\u00a0Guitar Hero<\/em>, even\u00a0Grand Theft Auto<\/em>) leave room for highly paidiaic forms of play. Will Wright describes his greatest hits (SimCity<\/em>,\u00a0The Sims<\/em>,\u00a0Spore<\/em>) as\u00a0\u201ctoys\u201d rather than \u201cgames,\u201d<\/a> and their freeform possibilities are a lot of what make them open and accessible to a wide audience.<\/p>\n

\"Ave,<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Chabon has a lovely essay on Lego (it appears in his book\u00a0Manhood for Amateurs<\/em>) where he calls “the old familiar crunching” of Lego bricks and blocks “the sound of creativity itself.” After noting, and at first lamenting, Lego’s shift from the chunky, lo-res bricks of the 1960s and 70s to the Technicolor precision of today\u2019s “trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined” kits, Chabon has a surprise ending:<\/p>\n

I should have had more faith in my children, and in the saving power of the lawless imagination. \u2026\u00a0Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of the things we give them and the things that derive from the peculiar wiring of their heads. \u2026 When he was still a toddler, Abraham liked to put a glow-in-the-dark bedsheet-style Lego ghost costume over a Green Goblin minifig and seat him on a Sioux horse, armed with a light saber, then make the Goblin do battle with Darth Vader, mounted on a black horse, armed with a bow and arrow. That is the aesthetic at work in the Legosphere now\u2013not the modernist purity of the early years or the totalizing vision behind the dark empire of modern corporate marketing but the aesthetic of the Lego drawer, of the mash-up, the pastiche that destroys its sources at the same time that it makes use of and reinvents them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This kind of bricolage (get it? Lego? bricolage?) is what I imagine when I talk about\u00a0playful historical thinking<\/a>. You root around in the drawers of the past. You pull out whatever seems useful, or interesting, or beautiful and pointless. You reenact the narratives of your culture and you tell new stories with the resources at hand. You mix and match, snapping Skeletor\u2019s head on Barbie\u2019s body, or swing music onto Nikola Tesla<\/a>. You snap together action figures and eras, playsets and paradigms, myths and memes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I want from historical play. Not a first-person shooter that immerses me in a way-cool World War II movie. Not a world systems simulation that trains me to think like Walt Rostow. I want emergent, infectious, recombinant histories.<\/p>\n

Games are great, don\u2019t get me wrong. But where oh where are the history toys?<\/p>\n

\"Star<\/a><\/p>\n

[Parts of this post were revised and adapted from two<\/a> older\u00a0posts<\/a> on my weblog, <\/em>Old is the New New<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why is it that when we set out to talk about history and play, we always end up talking about games? One thing that attracted me to the blog you\u2019re reading right now, besides the terrific set of co-conspirators Ethan has assembled, was its title and the broad set ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"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":[34,25,17,35,18,33],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-macdougall","post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-action-figures","tag-history","tag-play","tag-playful-historical-thinking","tag-stories","tag-toys"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","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\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=421"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}