Went to Denmark to visit Olli, Hanna and Bjarke… and of course to also attend the Ludic Aspects of Everyday Life seminar that Olli and Hanna were organising.
I wanted to go into a bit of detail about Michel de Certeau as I’ve been thinking through his Practice of Everyday Life quite a bit recently. As it emerged from the seminar, so had quite a few other people.
The short version of my argument is that de Certeau is important for understanding games and game-like activity, through his concepts of strategy and tactics. He says that there is an everyday art to the tactics one employs to negotiate the overarching strategies. If so, then I say there is an aesthetic experience of those practices and that aesthetic experience is related to the experience of game play. Hence many everyday practices seem related to games in the personal aesthetic experience of them, i.e. navigating the city, personal relationships, finding a car park, getting a good cup of coffee on the way to work, etc. At the end I also raise a question about the claims made by many that we are living in a Ludic Age, that there has been a Ludic Turn. There is no real proof that we are, besides manifesto style claims by gamers, game researchers and game designers. But if we are, then I think we ought to be re-interpreting de Certeau, who was writing in an era of resistive thinking, rather than in a possible Ludic era.
Jaakko Stenros has another brief review of events over on Pervasive Games.