 What if all this time we have been focusing on the wrong thing? What if games are not important? Many, myself included, have argued games are an interactive art form that allows us to explore the human condition, that they exist on the bridge between the arts and the sciences, enabling us to peer into the machinery of our minds. But again, what if none of this matters? The claims made by advocates for games, that they engender systems literacy, that they can be good for our psychological health, that they can teach us nuanced political ideals, our noble claims, that they can do these things, but is that why most play them? What if what actually matters is not games per se, but the activity necessitated by their existence, play? In his book, Play Matters, Miguel Cicard makes this argument that games are distracting us from what is really important, play. He says, Games don't matter. Like in the old fable, we are the fools looking at the finger when someone points at the moon. Games are the finger, play is the moon. Play is an attitude that can be brought to bear on any activity. It is less so a specific set of actions, and more so an attitude for creativity, for divergent flair, for the artistry of imagination, the authentic expression of one's very mode of being. Studied extensively as its own field of study, play is thought of in different ways. Johan Huizinga argued it exists in a magic circle, separate from reality, but informs it all the same. Brian Sutton Smith claims it expresses itself differently in different cultures, and Thomas Henrichs says it can be consolidated under the concept of self-realization. Psychologists say play aids development. Sociologists say it binds communities and mutual ideals, but ultimately, play helps us find ourselves. Cicard states, play is an activity between creation and destruction. Play is always dangerous, dabbling with risks, creating and destroying, and keeping a careful balance between both. Cicard argues there is playfulness in addition to play, which transforms the context it exists in. Playfulness re-ambiguates the world. Through the characteristics of play, it makes it less formalized, less explained, open to interpretation, and wander in manipulation. Put simply, play adheres to rules, but playfulness transforms them. How do we communicate this distinction to a culture that primarily understands play through games? This is Mirror's Edge, a game about parkour. It is designed to enable a specific kind of play. The geometry of the world frames a series of obstacles that are carefully calibrated to create a sense of engagement. The game has a sense of parallel and momentum all at once, de-familiarizing the active movement and empowering players all the same. Yet, it is linear. It expects a specific series of actions. It is strangely constraining, like the dystopian world the game takes place in. However, what of real parkour? The art of using the environment around you for expressive and swift movement. See, playing Mirror's Edge is play. It is a defined context, but real practitioners of parkour transform the context they exist in. They take the banal structure off an industrial cityscape and turn it into a playground. They are being playful by reinterpreting the world around them, unbound by any real rules. In fact, they often reject the rules of the city and forge their own. So what Mirror's Edge does is take this playful attitude and traps it in a game, giving it a place to live, but suppressing its subversive potential. We are distracted by the game. To partake in parkour is not simply to follow rules, but to create your own context for adherence. The same is true of skateboarding. Often dismissed as a punk pastime, only partaken in by miscreants. Skateboarders once more turn the city into a playground. Rails, staircases, pavements. These are not the architecture of the city, but a tapestry for the skateboarder to architect for themselves. But when we make skateboarding games, what exactly happens to this spirit? Is it authentically translated? Or has its essence been depleted? Tony Hawk's Pro Skater gave us a fairly open environment, but there are objectives to be completed littered about. Once more, the expressive ambiguation of the world has been subsumed by the dictates of rules, protocols, objectives. There is a way to engage in insubordination. It is being trapped by the structure of games. In Jet Set Radio, the game starts with a disclaimer that they do not endorse graffiti as it is an act of vandalism, but they also say it's art. What is this double-speak? Graffiti is another playful act. It gives life and vitality to dreary city streets in more visible form. In the game, you skate through the world marking your territory with graffiti, whilst taking down a tyrannical bureaucratic order with your artistry. There is a subversive revolutionary power to play, but the game Jet Set Radio is afraid of its own players. Hence, it reminds us that we must follow both its rules and societies. We must submit to the oppressive reality of private property rights. We can use an editor to create our own graffiti. We can celebrate the avant-garde and the dispossessed, but we should not take this to the real streets. Playfulness and play are being subordinated to the game. Play reinterprets and appropriates the world. It creates its own purpose. Sucarte continues, designing for play means creating a setting rather than a system, a stage rather than a world, a model rather than a puzzle. Whatever is created has to be open, flexible and malleable to allow players to appropriate, express, act and interact, make and become part of the form itself. He concludes, Game design is dead. Long live the architecture of play. But again, how do we conceptualize this using the scaffolding of our existing understanding of games? Brian Schrank makes claims about the subversive potential of play in his book Avant-Garde Video Games. An example he uses are the Black Panthers, who reorganize themselves in ways that aim to reframe people's perception of African Americans. They use the form of play, role play, performative play or theatrical play. The world becomes a stage they appropriated as an ingredient in their subversion. The problem with political games isn't so much that they aren't popular, or are presented to people who wish games to be inoculated against their infringement. Political messaging can be wrapped up nicely in a bow and be expressed in a game like September 12th, sure, but the real problem is this takes play and subordinates it to the game. Political play is about transaggression, it is about altering the context you exist in, not being presented a context with some preordained meaning. Activists through the ages that have fought for social change have made sacrifices, sometimes with their lives, to disrupt a social order. They change, they reconstitute, or they re-ontologize the world to make the arc of history bend more slightly towards justice. Political playing games is impotent. Playing speck off the line doesn't teach you about imperialism or colonialism, nor does it make any change in the real world. But the actions of human rights advocacy groups and movements for peace try to create public pressure to effect change. Flower has a beautiful ecological message about the unity between nature and humanity, but it is only when real people build sustainable communities, lower their use of fossil fuels, and fundamentally reorganize how they interact with the world does play escape from the confines of the technocratic structure of games. Playfulness doesn't need a context, it creates its own. It can turn banality into whimsy, dread into joy, boredom into stimulation. However, it is also transgressive. Sometimes this goes too far. The non-game version of GTA's subversion is harmful, this is chaotic disobedience with no direction. Playfulness still has rules then, but it is beholden to moral ideals that transcend the structure of society it exists in. However, in a world now governed by computers, and one where play's most prominent presence exists in video games, play and computers are both competing to structure the world to their whims. Human interaction existed as face-to-face meetings for eons, but now computers have re-ontologized the world. They create a new context for interaction that increases connection and disconnection. We are alone together. We've seen what computers have done to banking too. High-frequency trading sends shocks through the economy. Computers in the hands of humans have both creative and destructive potential. Computers put in the hands of those trying to play with the world are given new tools. The Arab Spring leveraged social media to coordinate subversive political acts against the state, allowing people to navigate past the authorities' attempts to exercise complete control. WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Hackers, they all exist in the same ilk. They can use computers to extract information, to upend social order. And then we have gamers playing subversive games, like Bioshock or Undertale or Metal Gear Solid 2. They design a context that argues for breaking out of its structure, its rules. The book LudoPolitics makes the claim that video games are the aesthetic of control. This is their real politics, the rule-governed technocratic artifice of digital computers that impose specific rules for us to follow. But the paradox is that it functionally extinguishes playfulness. Video games are both computers and play, yet have the transformative playfulness of neither. They do not change the world. They do not re-ontologize. They do not reconstitute our conception of reality. They turn play into an algorithm. Breaking free of the game is not simply a matter of inviting subversion within the fiction of a game, but dissolving the magic circle entirely. Johan Wozinga said play takes place inside a magic circle, with its own rules and context. But what if the magic circle does not exist? Play being subordinated to the game is the dream of any technocratic bureaucracy. It creates a society of control that makes people compliant voluntarily. Games don't cause this, obviously. They are a product of the time we are in, where power is being consolidated, information is being accumulated, where behavior is controlled not explicitly, but by restricting access. And this is where the real parkour shines over Mirror's Edge, where the skateboarder subverts when a simulation does not, where protest and civic activism trumps political games, where computational literacy beats subversive theming. So in what way can games be playful? Can they contribute to this revolution? What have games done in the past? There are an art form that allows us to make discoveries about ourselves, puzzles have led to treatises on math, chess has given us insights into artificial intelligence, games of chance led to the invention of probability theory, global sporting events can bring people together who were previously at odds. Games can inspire thoughts about our thoughts, but also affect change in the real world. This is what it means to architect play, to inspire playfulness. But that's just it. Games that are playful are those that have an impact outside their own structure. The magic circle must be broken for play to be free.