So Heather doesn't have to answer for everyone:

I'll put this here:

I'm seeing a bunch of people telling other people who are at risk as marginalized targets of hate groups to move to red states "for the good of the country" 

We are NOT required to set ourselves on fire so the rest of you can stay warm. 

I've put up with enough direct violence BECAUSE of anti-Semitism and misogyny in a "Blue" series of states that I'm wondering why the heck I'm supposed to endanger myself "missionary style" and sacrifice what level of "being able to live my life without being everyone's pet liberal Jew who will answer questions for you" that I get to have agency about "for the benefit of the working class"

Like I haven't been working class before?
Like my living there is going to do jack squat?
Like anyone is giving me hazard pay? 

And that doesn't even count things like "what is the risk to my family? My kid got physically harassed for being a Christ Killer at Easter here in Philadelphia when she was in second grade - those kids didn't learn that from "growing up poor in a red state" and they didn't figure it out from their own exegesis of the King James Bible. 

And hell - I'm pale and most people haven't even really met a Jew (we're less than 2% of the population) You're asking non-pale people too? 

Maybe the reason the population is higher in coastal areas is because shipping is real and people would rather live where there is a chance that talking to the parents or police won't be "well you know Jews DID kill Christ so it's understandable that the little ones are gonna be like that"*****

Maybe fewer people CAN live in states where their chosen government refuses to create centralized human and civil rights protections. Maybe the ones left are still there because they LIKE being there but really are the people who encourage violence against the people who don't want to be there because there's violence against them.

And maybe - just maybe in our capitalist society EVEN WITHOUT redlining and other illegal practices in banking and land ownership people voted with their feet and got the hell out of places where it isn't safe to be, for places where they had a shot. 

And you won't fix that by moving government organizations to the Midwest if you don't force Federal Laws that keep women, PoC and LGBT* safe IN SPITE of state laws - Scott Walker gutted a legal infrastructure like that in Wisconsin with Koch money and austerity, Pence destroyed health and human services in Indiana, Toomey and Tom Corbett managed to simultaneously destroy education in both Rural AND Urban areas in PA causing Corbett to lose in a landslide (you can go after rural OR urban but the idea is to play the off against each other so they have an illusion that you're on at least one of their sides)>

PA as a "Blue" state has been a laughable experience - but it's frankly as far "purple" as I'd be willing to go. 

Let white midwestern people stop being assholes who make oppressive laws and theocratic decisions where people WANT to risk moving their entire lives to add to their economies.
The "one person can make a difference" requires it to be emic not etic. You need INSIDERS to change so outsiders are welcome and you need strong fully enforced laws to protect the marginalized if you think you are going to do it by "injection method" 

I worked in places where lots of transplants exist - all that happens is they double down on the negatives when they are actually racist, sexist and homophobic. A popular TV show that looks like near minstrelsy five years later usually has more to do with breaking down resistance than all the "personal contact" in workplaces and neighborhoods in my personal experience. 

Will and Grace mattered. Fresh Prince mattered. Heck even "The Nanny" mattered in my own being accepted in workplaces vs their own acculturated prejudices. 

You all know that there's a whole world of people in the US when looking at how mobile they can be for work check the network of their group and say "Is it safe for us" and the answer is often "for about 12 miles outside of X" 

I gotta tell you all - Missionary work is a Christian based thing. It's not a great sell to anyone outside that culture who reads about the results. 

******Thing that actually happened

Today I'm wearing white.

It's election day.

I want to talk about workplace harassment.

When Bill Clinton ran for office people would try to convince me he was a loser because of his wife. The liberal men who theoretically had no problem with me, told me there's no way he can win because Hillary was a feminist.

Hillary's "I chose to follow my profession" line was actually used at workplaces to tell me not to be too assertive when I was at work; "look at what happened to her."

Democratic men who were actively sexually harassing me at work were ready to blame losing to Bush on Hillary. And then expected to lose to Dole because of Hillary.

Hillary's name has followed me everyplace I've worked because I'm constantly compared to her - or the complaints about me (or the random accusations against me that would have to be investigated because there are laws that require those accusations to be investigated) followed the same pattern - mostly because they were the same accusations as hers scaled up or down for whichever workplace I was in.

Since after a certain point the way to "go after" me became clear in every workplace, I would go through a sort of "sampling" of how they would normally harass other women until they landed on the ones that might work against me. "Accusing her of sleeping with the boss isn't realistic" the various "ungenderings" happened. Accusing me of doing shortcut things for my numbers or projects to be making their milestones even though I had "the worst teams" or I "was a bitch to work with" or whatever nonsense someone thought they could get away with spreading (Hint - yes someone actually accused me of hating dogs too). It didn't work- because I always had my full paperwork, and theirs, and the clients. It never worked when people worked with me directly - mostly because I'm a pretty collaborative leader and protective of my team and I don't need to be "liked" so I'm hard to emotionally blackmail

Even that harassment I understood more than when they literally just made stuff up. I bring proof. I lose nothing. If you're going to try to harass me using procedure or accusations of mishandling things you better be prepared to defend every email you sent me while telling me you didn't.

I'm glad there's a meme for that now. I always have the receipts.

There is only one unique thing about my work history that could make this consistent - I was often the only female manager. I was often specifically hired when companies were in chaos or projects were going south and they were "taking a risk" by "bringing in new blood" - supposedly about my resume - because I worked the same jobs but cross-industry.

I have made mistakes while running projects, I have occasionally made bad staffing errors. I have a really good track record of running on time and on budget and I have made lifelong enemies because I have not "played the game" the way some other people have.

And I don't blame them. The current American workplace is not a place where people are allowed to be kind to each other - I am doing the work to find out why - its literally why I went into anthropology.

I have survived some harassment better than other harassment. I have reported to HR and not reported to HR. Once I got older, I always handled it face to face and could nuke it before we all got into the system. Winning the harassment confrontations just made me subject to different kinds of "illuminati" type whisper campaigns, and that's OK too - because there is literally no place it didn't happen and there is literally no place I ever had to do anything more machiavellian than just do my job and protect the work of my team so they could do theirs, for us to succeed. Haters gonna die of stress exacerbated heart conditions.

And probably blame me.

So a long while back - many folk made assumptions about who I would be "happier" to vote for - both people running and people not running.

And to be honest, I really want people to be involved in the democratic process and make their own choices. I publicly started taking an anti-Trump stance because of his courting of active hate groups and my experience with those hate groups ALSO being directly involved in workplace harassment (including of me! How grand it is to be in America!) so when we are down to two real candidates, of course everyone knows I will vote for the Democratic candidate as opposed to the one who retweets groups I'm studying for my work with online hate.

But it's the day of - and I need to tell you and everyone who was ready to throw blame on Hillary for losing the White House both times Bill won it anyway.

The only reason I liked Bill Clinton is he chose Hillary. I told everyone of those assholes in 1992 that I was upset I had to vote for him instead of her.

I had to move my support in 2008 from her to Obama and my trust in him - like my trust in Bill is in the way she chose to speak about him when she lost. I can tell when she's being careful - she was never careful when she campaigned for him. It was full out.

Because I know all the cadence, and all the words, and all the shades of meaning in where her shoulders are as she threads the needles, and knows what the upcoming meeting is going to be like. All the things men have told me they don't like about her voice or presentation or the way she presents information are often the very reasons I find her trustworthy - because I have done them, I have been there, and frankly often they are the kind of men who were the reasons I had to do those things.

I know what it's like to care more about the product and the team than your own rep - because you learned long ago you're not a person - you're the projection of whatever the person accusing you of nonsense is concerned about - you're just the "safest" woman nearby to take it out on. And you can't care about it other than to isolate or cauterize it. It's white noise.

I've had her name thrown up at me, against me, forever. It's been used at me as an insult, as a warning, it's the middle class white male co-workers way of trying to keep me in my place and make me afraid. It' not dissimilar from everyone telling me "don't sound too smart you'll never get a boyfriend" "have friends" "no one likes smart girls" "don't be stuck up" which means don't be smart.

They were always wrong. It wasn't an insult - it was a compliment.

And the comparisons were probably accurate, just not in the way intended -

I'm with her.

In the words of another supporter "Don't call it a comeback I've been here for years"

Things I am uninterested in - Men telling me which categories of feminist other women are and whether or not I should pay attention to those women as being good for me.

Do you all know what intersectionality means? It means that different women are going to need different things at different times but it's bullshit that we have to ignore one type of feminism making headway because of some intersectionality and stop them instead of making that an opportunity for a discussion of more.

Intersectionality means internal purity tests are automatically bullshit - progress isn't a curtain going up. Its rocks being knocked out in different places at the same time in a rock wall.

We need corporate feminism -we would just like it to include PoC women and trans women and QUILTBAG women and disabled women and frankly just MORE women. All of 'em Corporate - All Middle of the Road. All God-damned boring and status quo and not waiting for the magic day when men let us participate equally because they just magically decided to.

It's not feminism until women get to be just as mediocre as men get to be.

Just the same way we need all the other "kinds" of feminism because no one is telling me that we need just one type of man.

Oh and stop pitting generational movements against each other.

None of those movements was ever monolthic or evenly agreed upon either - you're probably erasing the contributions of the very women you're complaining aren't represented by accepting the media presentations of who they let speak 20 years later.

The only "feminism" I am against is the ones shutting down other women - not the ones that are only succeeding for some - no one is going to "break through" in a capitalist society until women are fully represented at some level IN that capitalist entity.

And you can keep Camile Paglia, Anne Coulter and Sarah Palin, and Michelle Malkin - I think those are the women you were thinking of when you expected me to be upset about not supporting other women.... right? No... OK?

Play Entry 29

"you can't role play empathy" 

I read this article on unrestricted play for children which I do have lots of thoughts about - however the two features of the article that stood out to me were the quote I put up at the top and the impulse to interrupt play to "correct it"

And also the fact that children surprised adults by resolving differences just not on the time table the adults wanted.

It's almost as if adults were conditioned to believe if it isn't resolved right away and in front of them it isn't resolvable.

Almost like a management issue with adults......

But so many of our creative or introversion advocates use "role-play" which is really imaginative play to try to "teach" a thing - but they set all the rules and interrupt the play for adults too - all those "role-play" corporate games have "right answers" and people who don't work with competitive players as coaches might not know how we train cognitive shortcuts in our best players to achieve goals - that's a positive thing not a negative one - it frees up automatic things for use in strategic things. But if you don't let something grow unrestricted and then give it contraints you get a different thing ( that can still be beautiful) than if you constrain a thing and then let it grow. Bonsai and Redwoods are both trees topiary and non topiary plants are both plants.

Something tells me that the intersection of "time" and "play" are things relevant to organizations and management of workspaces.

It's important to realize that one of the reason we are training our children to be indoors all the time is we expect our adults to contribute their productivity and citizenship responsibilities but being indoors all the time.

Bonsais are still beautiful -  maybe it's the interrupting we should work on rather than the glorification of one space or the other where adults vs children are, unless we find ways to free our adults. I don't think it "unfair" to raise up children to function in the culture we've created for them and there are strong arguments that all these "negatives" of ranking and sedentary-ness are realistic disciplines that children will be subjected to because that is what we offer as western educated industrialized democratic cultures. Making them full of compassion and joy might take a different thing than the nostalgic past. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/12/11/why-adults-have-to-stop-trying-so-darn-hard-to-control-how-children-play/?postshare=4471450357277630&tid=ss_fb

Play entry 28

Yesterday while reading Subject and Power by Foucault I realized he has in effect 2 paragraphs on the exchange of subject/object power relations in the language of "games" and I'm going to have to go back and unpack it carefully when I managed to get some "post-semester-finals" sleep.

Also I need to make sure that I write up an entry on the idea that material objects have an intent that is intrinsically housed in themselves and exists regardless of whether or not a human interacts with them.

I am still unsure if that intent exists if it is an unmediated object - right now I think maybe it's only mediated ones and therefore a function of "designed objects"

Also here is this article in mainstream press that I want to go look at later to see the divisions of play as they are being experienced by western US humans and what they are thinking about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/12/11/why-adults-have-to-stop-trying-so-darn-hard-to-control-how-children-play/?postshare=4471450357277630&tid=ss_fb

Play Entry 27 - Oh Hell, I've been down this road before

Once upon a time - a long, long time ago I used what I now recognize as focus grouped ethnography to playtest toys and write toy reviews.

I tackled the difference between adult play and child's play then - right there- published and everything:

"If you want a glimpse into a strange new world, eavesdrop on a pre-schooler playing alone. You will discover a range of voices, character traits, and truly alien thinking that will put to shame any hidden notion you have of your own superior imagination. The biggest lie we science fiction adults tell ourselves is that we have retained the sense of imagination and wonder we had as children. But we are cynical. We imagine the impossible because we have so clearly defined for ourselves what is possible. We hope for the improbable because, well, we’re weird. But children have yet to draw the line between possible and impossible. They still hope for the impossible.

When we adults play, we are practicing the suspension of disbelief. Children, on the other hand, suspend nothing. Even when they are very reality-based during their period of play, they practice belief. For the duration of their play, they believe their doll is hungry; they believe their T-Rex hand puppet is bad and should be smacked on the snout for trying to eat boo-boo bunny; they believe that they are the teacher and should be listened to. I hope that by encouraging this type of play over video games that the kids we deal with will have a little less disbelief to suspend when they are older and weighted down by reality like we are."

I've moderated my own stance considerably on video-games over time, but part of the reason is that video games have changed too - that's personal/editorial - I think what's interesting to me is that this is commercial writing for niche market and before I went back to any form of school. For example: In an earlier column I discuss how "I don't know much about Art History" and it was true then, and it is deeply false now.

I am more consistent than many would be over a span of decades but I obviously still care about the same questions for different reasons.

That insight of "belief" is a thing I struggle with in anthropology - recognizing that the impulse to consign to "suspension of disbelief" already privileges rationalist hierarchies and colors other systems as "fictional" or "unbelievable"

The reason I encountered my own work is an internet security search I do every so often -

I may have to cite myself at some point - http://www.strangenewworlds.com/issues/kids-12.html

I'm glad I'm not static, I'm also glad my past self doesn't make me cringe too much. But that said I'm already writing to adults about Nostalgia Play vs Play, where the act of playing at all is nostalgic and subversive in the literal sense.

Play Entry 26 - There is no spoon - but what about a box?

I am thinking about the Matrix and imagination and imaginary worlds and why imagination is said to be desired in workspaces to solve problems but then discouraged if it imagines anything that is outside the current paradigm.

It is important to note that "think outside the box" already creates the space and the binary of inside or outside the box.

What is the thing "inside the box"?

Boxes are actually playthings - they can be all the things  - they can be the possibility of things.

Why are you asking to define things by box positionally as belonging or not belonging?

Box is being seen as the "container of things" not as the material FOR things.

When we play WITH the box what we are doing is rejecting the paradigm that automatically benefits the person/entity giving us "imagination instructions"


I am thinking of the man who can read the matrix and see the patterns and knows because he took "the right pill" the moral one of truth - but there is a cost to being outside the box and knowing and seeing all the patterns and he is the one that eventually betrays the group - to take the "wrong" pill and be in a world where he can't see outside and inside simultaneously anymore.

The strain of seeing the matrix and not having quite enough power to fix both inside and outside the box is real. Then the box is a game, there are rules, you solve games. "Play" is engagement.

But what if you look at the matrix and it is YOUR box- then inside and outside are irrelevant

My box is a world, my box is a lion, my box is a refrigerator that produces small gods I will sell to starving clergy that need them.

It is a plane or a tank or a table or a snowflake.

I won't take a pill or choose to think inside or outside I will take the box. I will open the box so it can be inside and outside simultaneously. My box is a shaman, it is in its own world and ours at once.

That is just play. It may not help solve the game problem set by the "imagination overseer".

All of the imaginary play in this case is transformative and it might also be transient replacement. The language of play is informed in the request to think outside the box - but it is appropriated language.

What does a business solution look like if I "play with the box" instead of think outside it?

What is the power exchange made by linguistically distracting me from playing with the box?

Would the man who just wanted a steak dinner have betrayed any of our "heroes" if he looked at the matrix and thought about it as a box he could play with instead of be in or out of?

Play 25

This is ethnographers "playing"
http://blog.castac.org/2015/11/24/twitter-field/

Play Entry 24 Openness, Chaos, Replacement

Yesterday we were dealing with Design in org behavior class and moved to make a design vision board for our consulting offices - this is of course part of my former world and the vision board part of it wasn't the hard part - it was being an anthropologist in a room of social workers.

"What do you want your client to experience when they come to see you"

They need to be in very different spaces than I do with that - they are looking to help people achieve specific mindsets and goals and healing or achieving things.

Anthropologists go where people are not have people come to them.

Consultancy - which is the other thing I would be doing would be convincing people that I share their symbols and and values while actively working to change them.

I am working on the idea of Play as Viability - a survival impulse - I am looking for people who come in to my space to be open in replace some of the things they know with things the do not know- I'm pretty sure in my working definition of play one of the concepts will be play as transformational - you cannot be unmarked by "play"even if it feels unserious.

I contend the "unreality" of play as intrinsic to it's definition and find that is more of a linguistic instinctual backlash trying to maintain the hierarchy that is currently "rationality" -

Openess - all things may be possible for at least a nanosecond because you thought of it
Chaos- Chaos
Replacement - if you touch chaos for a moment it will take a piece of space where chaos wasn't.

If you're playing with me we're changing things together.

*****

Conversation at a bar with my brother-in-law -
"Who GAVE you matches!"

I was talking about an essay I handed in - my thesis proposal is due this week and it meant that my writing for my other classes was a little less filtered and my thought processes and sense of humor was more present because my brain was working so hard on meeting stringent structured requirements for the proposal.

I mentioned my birthday matches in that essay.

This exclamation engaged us in a playful conversation that literally became about play.

The thing that I take away from it several hours later is this - the exclamation became a moment of trust "Oh my god he DOES actually know something about 'real me'" rather than simply the kinship space I occupy for the family - the rest of the conversation ( which he agrees for adults counts in play) is play not because of the "joking relationship" that would be described by Radcliffe-Brown but because the recognition OUTSIDE the role meant that it was "safe to play" - at that point play is connection. Transformatively the relationship changed incrementally - I am known in a way I did not think I was known - interactions will be slightly different - trust will be slightly higher - if he gifts me matches it will be a reference to that moment.

I wrote about the way rationality and credibility force "positives" into transient moments instead of permanent objects because once a thing is proven it no longer becomes "proof positive" but an "objective fact" and thus neutral but in discussing the essay - the playful act of gifting me matches become referenced and semiotic in several spaces making a transient moment a returnable referent.

It is also generative - sharing the moment of play ( or in actuality playing with the moment of play) reproduces the moment and then leads to more moments of "good" and play.

If rationality makes "good" no-thing, a moment before it becomes an objective neutral then seems like play might take that moment and make it "a thing" and removes it from neutrality - so its not simply emotional reality but also moved into an objective positive existence.

If I were a novel, it would matter that it is the act of providing me with matches that is acting as a way for me to realize I am being seen. I don't think we actually exist that far outside of literary theory.

Also I still have matches. And I made Anarchy Chickens in my class at Grad school

******* A thing I observed on some-else's FB threat about not-getting Wesley Crusher Hate in Star Trek Next Generation.

Adrienne Reynolds Older men in SF hated that character the same way they hated Barney (the pre-school dinosaur) and for the same reasons - they didn't get that it wasn't about them - but there was also the problem of him being used for deaux-ex-machina. 

And that Barney reference isn't random - I was running and SF magazine and the sheer amount of time, investment and hot air older SF fans spent hating Barney at conventions was ridiculous. Now when I think about "disliked things" in the 80's and 90's it always looks like "hey this isn't catering to ME" kinds of things where before the space exclusively catered to them or they were power tripping - hating Barney in SF spaces was about some sort of something ....

Play entry 23

Earlier this week was my Anthropology History and Theory presentation on Post- Structuralism

So I convinced my team ( to no resistance) to teach and discuss habitus and Foucault's Discipline with legos.

This was very successful - and though I will be writing a reflexive essay about the act of negotiation and designing the exercise *one of very cool effects is the three of us all then worked through designing the exercises we cared about most by not behaving in the manners or physcical space usage of past classes.

Improvisation and adjustment happened - cause and effect suspended and morphed. If it is not transforming something is it play?

Over the last two evenings I have finally "played Magic" each with an individual friend ( one new,  one pre-existing)

Here are things that are true:

My first friend is "new" and he has been unable to play Magic for two ( possibly more) years - he brought his own cards. The last time he played was during my favorite time to play - for those who don't play magic, set releases are tied to a story that provides "flavor" which is then also executed through art and game mechanic shifts. Innistrad from Sept 2011 which was legal to play in Standard through September 2013 is my favorite standard legal environment. It's horror film inspired.

The end result is that I got to play with a number of decks that I hadn't taken apart for pieces because I love them so much. I got to play "less competitive" decks because my friend's collection was being looked at for the first time and his deck construction was unclear - we talked about what it means to play and keep up with building decks.

He enjoys the building part and his builds are from his collection. He did not play competitively so the act of economics is based in collections through boosters - playing "kitchen table" with me allows his collection to be "at will" there's no need to keep up or buy more advantageous cards.

However I interact with the cards from a collection/competitors positionally - my goal ( less intense since the release of Gatecrash ) is to collect at least one of each set. The more I play competitive play, the weaker that impulse of engagement becomes.

In the process of identifying my interactions with play I should unpack that - "fun" used to be collecting and putting the cards in binders that could then page through later. Binders would still be the "dream" way of storing sets of cards for me - however they are space inefficient, and expensive to maintain a collection of over 14,000 cards that way.

So thinking about the relation of consumer to community member: the consumption of the material objects to participate in the activity - combined with my personal "joy" in that consumption created an effect where I no longer can do the joyful thing in a pragmatic way.

An emergent property however will be this - I am not a deck builder - I'm more of a tinkerer: some of this is also about time constraints - and I have now found there is a whole study of women and leisure time to cross compare use of leisure. However my friend the engineering student would build decks but has economic constraints as well as deep time constraints - my surplus cards however could be used for him to make decks that live at my house where we would play. I keep my decks forever when I love them or didn't get a chance to play them as much as I'd like.

There is also the issues of card management - the tool that I use to update and record the circulation of my collection** stopped opening this weekend. I am not the only person who had this issue when I went to report it to the developers.

Being unmoored from the record of my collection made me realize how I am both connected to the material collection and alienated from it simultaneously - my ambivalence in play and my disconnect from my preferred methods of storage actually mean that I have accumulated a surplus of maintenance work that could be pleasurable but now is perfunctory to an opportunity to play.

I should come back and flowchart this relationship.

However the surplus is creating an opportunity for a community member to re-engage with a form of play that includes discovery and creation and give him "joy" and then presents and opportunity for us both to play.

We played with existing decks on Friday.

On Saturday while I ostensibly asked for help with work - ( developing a survey) what happened instead was play - we played with coffee, we played with shopping at the anniversary event of my local games store, then we played with cards. She had brought a mixed proxy deck from the same Standard environment that my friend on Friday night had. Because she and I had previously played together - expectations of skill set were less "cautious" but she also hadn't played in sometime.

We discussed things we practiced "not to look dumb" like shuffling and card placement.

I think it's significant that our "Kept" decks for all three of us are disproportionately in that timeframe even though we have VERY different core motivators for playing - all three of us are unhappy with playing the current Battle for Zendikar set. The reasons for our reduction in play however are all differently motivated so therefore not causative between that disconnect.


All three of us expressed how nice it was to play without playing with strangers, performativity, or economic concern. Two of us however dropped a bunch of $ when we went to the game store anniversary - one for gifts for others involving miniature gaming and me for "non-study" desired singles for a modern deck - putting together the modern deck has no aspect of "play" to it - it is solely at the economic exchange issue for the "hope of play" later. Now that I have re-established two friends who will come over to play without the other psycho-social burdens of playing the modern deck elsewhere I may proxy my missing cards to play the deck while continuing to acquire the legal cards for future opportunity to play.

The economic constraints of building the modern decl literally mean I am not playing the game - I will not be able to acquire a fully legal deck for the better part of a full year due to the costs of the components.


*(my own habitus and my participation in structuring structures was explicit - once again moving through Holt's knowing but also through Rabin's trickster categories - is incorporation of bodied play "uncanny"?)

** this is a lie - a collection does not "circulate" if I never trade or get rid of cards .... or if it does circulate it circulates internally through my own usage/storage patterns.

Play Entry 22

"The best known element of Homo Ludens is Huizinga’s statement of five defining characteristics of play. 

• First, play is a relatively free or voluntary activity in which people set the terms and timing of their own in- volvement. 
• Second, play is distinguished from routine affairs by its absence of material consequences. 
• Third, play is separated from other activities by its use of exotic rules, playing spaces, ideas of time, costumes, and equipment. 
• Fourth, play is marked by the way in which it both honors rules and yet encourages transgression and disorder. 
• And fifth, play promotes the banding together of participants in “secret” or otherwise outlandish societies. 

The Nature of PlayAn Overview •
Thomas Henricks 

This is a apparently controversial because Huizinga was focused on adult play and dismissed solitary play and seems to be a kind of "great man" theory of play.

This is probably relevant to my thesis because the intentional construction of premier competitive play in Magic the Gathering buys into the theories described in Homo Ludens and specifically utilizes them for market purposes - creating economic capital through creating social capital.



Also this entire edition of the American Journal of Play: http://www.journalofplay.org/issues/6/2

Play Entry 21

I still have not managed to play anything like what I consider "a real game" of Magic

Part of this is the problem of the current set - it is difficult for me to read and therefore difficult for me to play. The other problem is the general problem of "play" as an adult in general.

I went and carved time out to play last Weds but preparing to play made me remember the disability issue - I could not "risk" playing because of the academic workload coming up over the weekend and could not afford the neurological side effects.

On my birthday we agreed to play, but the person was caught in their group work - his original desire was to play in "Organized Play" but that starts at 7 - there is no way to move from work to "play" without some mental preparation ( plus material preparation) as it was he joined us at the home event three hours late -

In that time my other friend and I had taken the opportunity to sort cards - specifically land -  by matching the artwork in it. This is in preparation for something like a cube - a fixed form of the game that emulates the booster pack based draft environment.

During the sorting of cards there was a feeling of "play" we talked about what the cards meant - imagined stories about the art, recognized and matched artists and art themes. Joked and remembered stories, made vulgar references ( ah trickster class)

This form of play - pattern making and improvisational/adaptive - seems to interact with Bordieu's descriptions of habitus and the idea of "discovery" of things that seem natural or original within the context of cognitive and social interactions being "the forgetting of history" - by which he meant the individual acculturation of discipline and the world that existed before the person did, through the structure structuring itself.

We are sorting cards that were based on archetypal semiotics and specifically reference the art history of landscape painting and the MASSIVE structure of hierarchy and discipline that those paintings rest upon.

We are using tools not designed for our task, and the inversion of what the items are is part of the play ( I use a very fancy tea caddy to sort cards)

not the land cards

So the camaraderie happened - my friend and I waiting for others "played" without rules but patterns were all underneath what she and I were doing with a shared knowledge of the "pieces" - or what the game was doing and why these most basic pieces of the game had aesthetic, value but frequently no economical value - 

The card sorting was also a side effect of the study - these were the cards that were being categorized for collection and circulation data - so one of the places where my work self/play self are explicitly combined in native participation - there is no separation of anthropological self in the acts of sorting cards - there is only the knowing consumption of the activity (Holt) 

The gathering that night was birthday based and where normally my birthday goes by with minimal "marking" due to the difficulties of balancing "down time" with some work I am doing as an adovacy rep, I let my social circle know that it existed. There were three separate gatherings of friends with overlap and they all involved food, sharing of things they like and the trying of those things by me. 

The acts of "play" in the gatherings were in the choosing of what to mark me with- and what I should share with them. There is aspect of joking relationships - One of my gifts was matches, a very large box of matches - I do no smoke. I understood the matches ;-)

The acts of play also include the plans of boundaries - and discovery outside the Bourdieu habitus sense - or maybe inside if we look at it through improvisational adjustment lens. 

The culture of one of the Gatherings included "birthday shots" among the group that was there ( and the hostess particularly) - as a rule I don't generally drink shots because if I like something slamming it back quickly simply to create a physical effect seems counterproductive - and improvisational adjustment was negotiated - I would try something new once they discovered I would drink whisky shots if it was a good sipping whisky - the person most invested in the birthday shot tradition was excited to share her favorite whisky with me - and the ordering of birthday shots meeting the outlines of that social space could continue according to it's rules while I interacted with it through application of my own - the gathering went on for over 4 hours - during which I sipped through 4 shots slowly. Having been at other gatherings with the Birthday shot tradition I am aware that those 4 shots would have been consumed in rapid succession if I were game or still standing at the end - so I am also aware that the rituals of ordering, viewing, shared toasting, anticipation of effect and proposed ideas of future misbehavior, then consumption would have been in a much tighter timeframe and had very different  effect - so the improvisational adjustment was also on the part of my friends.

I would argue that we "played with" the birthday shot ritual in that we warped its "rules" 

The status game discussed by anthropologists in terms of social and cultural capital uses the word "game" which drags along the word "play" as a verb to describe the action of engaging in the game. 

Playing - simply means engaging here - play as verb 

Play as a noun however is still running around loose. 

The end result of the night is we all have a way for me to participate in future birthday shot rituals that is now "Known" -Drinne WILL drink shots with us she just won't throw them back 

In this crowd getting me to participate in rituals around alcohol shows personal knowledge

I do intentionally not share some of this knowledge - the social pressure for that is protective to them - my tastes are significantly different than what is often ordered or shared and I don't want anyone to feel judged nor do I want anyone to go to extra expense to get something specific to my tastes. 

I need to give some thought to this - my reticence is based in making others feel comfortable when I share information there is a social and cultural capital exchange going on based in economic capital 

Friendship and name kinships are involved in this specific group - knowing things about each other "outside" is a kind of cultural currency. 

But the "play" aspects of a party involve very little "play" outside the rituals themselves - so they seem to be "leisure" in the way that they are simply "not work" only inversions of rules or creations of patterns seem to be "playful" - and I'm inclined to think of them as "things of transient effect" but on reflection they aren't transient at all 

My cards are sorted by art - everyone present now knows the different arts and on particular piece of art will forever be called by this group "the Vulva Land" 

The group that celebrated with me  now knows I drink whiskey and scotches and that can be a site of future sharing and ritual - 

Those are not transient. That's emergent effect from play and tiny, but transformational 

However, it does match with the idea of "forgetting of history" as discovery - those things are transmitted through play. They existed beforehand they just weren't shared with each other and they were utilized through activity. 

Play Entry 20 - Gender thoughts - operant conditioning through play

OK seriously weird thought experiment based on patriarchal culture :

Historically children were treated as unisex in western european based cultures until t least the age of three - then gender separation would happen later 

(- shades of this are seen in toy industry categorizations when I was working as a toy reviewer in the 1990's - Unisex was a pre-school category, "all ages" was only for games and every other toy was gendered boy or girl THEN categorized by type) 

So the thing I'm thinking is this - by defaulting children to unisex but keeping them in the control of the feminine sphere of a patriarchal binary gender schema socializing to police them into gender roles "waits" and is mostly through cultural osmosis. 

But what if we took patriarchy ALL the way through and treated every child the way we would treat and train a male child until they developed secondary sexual characteristics. So their first 10-12 years everyone would be taught to possibly assume the roles in society that men would be assumed to have - and they'd have to LEARN how to fill in the support roles that their gender performance makes them "unsuitable" for AFTER being treated exactly like the people that would be running things. 

How would feminine and non-gender binary people fill those spaces and performances if they were not indoctrinated to them until 10-12? What would 'manhood' look like if ALL forms of play are supposed to happen in male space and adulthood is what makes others not-male? 

Can anyone even picture this without assuming that things currently coded male will exclusively stay that way instead of things being childish?

Play -Organizing the inquiry

So it ends up there is an organization or three devoted to the anthropology of play.
http://www.tasplay.org/about-us/history-of-tasp/

I understand that my questions are actually about the connection between the state sanctification of some forms of play and the impulse to regulate play as "dangerous" in the same manner that the state regulates sex.

Both forms seem to have issues for a body of governance in that unless they are directed they could somehow disrupt the social structure favored by the state - I want to hold off a little bit more before I think about/discuss kinship through sexual contact vs play through shared contact.

Or maybe I don't - I should probably mark here that the explanation from "auto ethnography" that I wrote for a friend studying masculine identity and performances in Tinder specifically deals with my real life experiences of watching people redefine "infidelity" in my lifetime and my confusion with the sexual possessiveness of claiming mind and thought literally equivalent to bodily contact - and how "sex" was redefined through political media need.

If 80% of a culture doesn't think X is Y and .002% of a culture wants to make people hate someone because they DO think X is Y - was X ever Y if you need to create an entire cultural shift?

Is X then Y after? How does that end up as a social fact in the Durkheimian sense ?

There is a popular writer that is lawyer who has written about sex and punishment
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Punishment-Thousand-Judging-Desire-ebook/dp/B007VC29EK/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446910004&sr=1-3&keywords=eric+berkowitz

Ok so here is the anger - I have asked lots of people about anthropology of play - there was not a chance that I was the only person observing these things - this is perhaps a frustration of undergraduate exposure - when I look at having all of Belle and Beast's library of academic work in front of me direction from professors is crucial, but they aren't necessarily equipped to point me to functionally useful ways to find expertise and pre-existing work so I don't spend too much time reinventing the wheel.

In any case the Proquest Tool and keeping up with actual regular media is what saves me almost always when an academic study peeks out a tiny disorted portion of itself and I can follow a name or a fact.

Here's where I'm at for the Magic ethnography though:

There is semiotics in all the forms of cultural interaction and cultural actors - this should be looked at through activity theory, habitus, and theories of value.

Community building and identity formation are literally constructed through playing with these cards or supporting these cards being played with or having someone in your life who plays cards - this is the ethnographic space - chosen identies, communities of activity, consumer identities and construction of work/leisure identities are here - I owe Zolani a written version of my identity discussion from class here.

Material objects - cards, accessories waste assmbleges if game materials, transformation of deck lists - semiotics of deck lists.

Relationship formation and maintenance

Non-WotC Content and Media creation - articles, crafts, art, alters, writing, fanfic, cosplay

What does it mean that story is both primary and tertiary to a property - Vorthos interaction and filling in the gaps.

Why even with exposure to play theory - MtG still maps poorly onto video game and fandom studies and feels more like it maps more accurately onto sports?

The illusions of value/the making of value/what would MtG lose if it stopped appropriating the linguistics of economics and wall street.

"Smartness" from the Karen Ho Liquidation ethnographic study - does that map with poker players and hedge fund managers

How and when do we make time to play. - also suburban development - destabilized middle classness - ties into the Consumer Republic and the consumer Citizen - Elizabeth Cohen's work -

Do women really "get" time to play - how quickly are we pressured to give up childish things as soon as secondary sexual characteristics become apparent in the west?

Note to add - check theory of objects/

Play Entry 19

 Roberts and his col- leagues found in analyzing several hundred of these distinct culture summaries that, first, games of strategy tended to exist in more complex cultures and, second, a more positive attitude toward games of chance tended to accompany more positive religious feelings.(Sutton-Smith 2008; 101) 

http://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/1-1-article-sutton-smith-play-theory.pdf 

Play Entry 18 The Play Museum

http://www.museumofplay.org/research-publications


"Twister, Mr. Bensch said, was notable for using people as the game pieces. When Twister was new in the 1960s, Sears Roebuck refused to list it in its catalog — “They said it was selling sex in a box,” he said — and without Sears, sales languished. He said the company that made Twister, Milton Bradley, was set to discontinue it."

http://nyti.ms/1HcgQUW

Play Entry 17 Victor Turner

Why didn't anyone tell me about Victor Turner?

And I mean that honestly, is there a reason I should stay away from his work? Because OH MY GOD social drama, metaphor, liminoid......

I think this might be super relevant to how tech workers create self identify and myth and maybe why they identify through play identities but I super feel like this might have something to do with the subversiveness of play in western culture if I can sit with it long enough ....

what are the problems with his work? Is there a strong dialouge with it I should look at?

Play Entry 16 who plays these "games"

The last few days are complicated and I need to process them to post about play but this is a thing that happenes

http://www.wbur.org/2015/10/27/reality-gaming-boda-borg-boston

Play Entry 15 Qualisign

Mr. Rabbit reminds us that qualisigns must be embodied in something in parti- cular. But as soon as they do, they are actually, and often contingently (rather than by logical necessity), bound up with other qualities—redness in an apple comes along with spherical shape, light weight, and so forth. In practice, there is no way entirely to eliminate that factor of co-presence or what we might call ‘bundling.’ This points to one of the obvious, but important, effects of materiality: redness cannot be manifest without some embodiment that inescapably binds it to some other qualities as well, which can become contingent but real factors in its social life. Bundling is one of the conditions of possibility for what Kopytoff (1986) and Appadurai (1986) called the ‘biography’ of things, as qualisigns bundled together in any object will shift in their relative value, utility, and relevance across contexts.

W. Keane / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 409–425 

Play Entry 14

University of Leicester media professor Alison Harvey argues that “campaigns of abuse and harassment can be understood as the creation of value” on social media platforms, where “hate—like sex—sells.” 

from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/10/hate_speech_harassment_and_trolling_online_some_history.html

A conversation I had with a friend about my work involved a discussion about how convention based fandom and coding were both women created/based spaces that were discovered by men as suddenly creating value and then colonized by men in performance positions but most of the labor is still done by women, their labor is then made invisible and perceived not only as a sole male domain that needs women to "break into" as opposed to "reclaiming" but gaming ( video, D&D, "mind-sports" ) was a male space that IS being broken into and settled by women.


This most likely makes a difference in the way the participation of women is received - minimizing women is necessary through the devaluation of the things they do that are still needed to make coding and conventions work. They were never not-there, they were never gone - its only that things men were willing to do now carried prestige and the men took over the visible spaces and visible women were assumed to be supports or attached-to the men.

When women brought female based expressions of fan enthusiasm ( crafts/cosplay) it was treated as new and outsider - as though the Costumers Guild and Masquerades had never been part of the female created fandom since it's inception. There have always been Hall costumes, there have always been costumers, there has always been interpretations of movies, book covers "reproduction" and original designs of costumes for characters. There has always been fanfic - the art shows were very different - more democratic - Deviant Art serves that space now.

The concept of "new" is age coded - I have heard women who found a place and don't consider themselves invisible deride "fake geek girls" on the fact that they meet the beauty standard and "real geek girls" don't care. that is complicated and I need to unpack it later - but the idea is that somehow it is "easier" for those girls in this world and that suffering or outsiderness in mainstream life is necessary for belonging to this group. But mostly it's generational because it listening to men their own age discuss these women that creates this concept - the women are perceived through the reaction and frankly the consumption of the women by the men and that consumption "cheapens" the experience of the woman willing to label another woman a "fake geek"

Before it was codified as specifically male in these spaces there was still that conflict but the terms and social positioning of those feelings were firmly rooted in the same kinds of social words that would be used outside of the genre play: a woman who traded on her looks to create male competition for her was marked out with derogatory comments that would be the same ones now used against Kim Kardashian by specfically mainstream moralizing. The conflict between standard arrangements of monogamy and the free-love non-monogomous movement that has always  been part of counter-cultures going back at least as far as the 1800s was always part and parcel of the convention circuit. Women being threatened by other women who do not agree to the same sexual-social rules has always been part of the social space to be navigated since the 70's - I would argue experientially it's more codified, there is an actual expectation of respect and etiquette as opposed to a more haphazard mashing together of interests under the unifying space of "fantasy/sf" appreciation.

To me it sometimes seems like bringing together all the people who like to drink milk with coffee and expecting them to somehow be different from non-milk with coffee drinkers and very, very similar to milk with coffee drinkers.

But once you put milk with coffee drinkers together they will share experiences - they will be told they are all equal but they will build structures, create value - like the element above - it will not be separated from the value creation and mores that the grown individuals bring to the table

So this seems important to me

"On an Internet built on the assumption that every contribution is equally valid, harassers are just as valuable as their victims. But as the harasser flames his victim into silence, he becomes more valuable than his target. In a recent essay, fantasy author Ferrett Steinmetz argued that, to a social media company’s “cold bottom line, a troll calling women names all day gets more advertising hits. He is a devoted user. And so they are loath to ban anyone, because these companies make money off of large user bases, and kicking someone off risks trouble.” By 2004, Barlow had recalibrated his brand of technolibertarianism to take aim at how corporations were co-opting digital culture for their own benefit. “Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business,” he told Reason. “I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.”