10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17269
application/pdf
2038-3460
17269
2
en
Giacomo Poderi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Miguel Sicart, Play Matters, The MIT Press, 2014
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Book Reviews
2016-01-29
2023-06-19
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
184-186
TS
Giacomo Poderi
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17269
184
University of Trento
2038-3460
2
en
186
Miguel Sicart, Play Matters, The MIT Press, 2014
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17269/16127
6
Book Reviews                                                      Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

References
Bijsterveld, K. (2014) Format theory or revitalizing Science and Technology Studies,
        in “Metascience”, 23(3), 539-542.
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) (2014) Media technologies:
        Essays on communication, materiality, and society, Cambridge, MA, MIT
        Press.
Miller, D., and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach, Oxford,
        Berg.
Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, cleanliness and convenience: The social organization of
        normality, Oxford, Berg.
Sørensen, A. and Schubert, C. (2015) Roads Less Travelled. Exploring New Con-
        nections Between Media Research and STS, in “EASST Review”, 34(1).
Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: The meaning of a format, Durham, Duke University Press.
Van Vliet, B., Shove, E. and Chappells, H. (2005) Infrastructures of consumption:
        Environmental innovation in the utility industries, London, Earthscan.




                                       ***


    Miguel Sicart
Play Matters
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014, pp. 176

Giacomo Poderi University of Trento

    Play Matters belongs to the Thinking Playfully series of the MIT Press,
which is designed to provide readers with short, readable and argumenta-
tive books that combine depth with readability. The volume fits well into
this series as an agile, yet engaging and thought-provoking manuscript on
a topic, the one of play, that has never been so central in the academic
debate since the time of Huizinga's seminal work Homo Ludens (1938).
This is particularly evident in game studies and in those fields of cultural
studies or social sciences that recently started facing the need to confront
with breakthrough societal changes. On the one hand, pushed by the
game industry and by the growth of a widespread gaming/participatory
culture, video games became a dominant form of entertainment media;
on the other hand, the emergence of strong semantic entanglements and
cross-contaminations among different human domains blurred the very
meaning of play: (i) game-related elements started entering non-gaming
domains; and (ii) aspects which were typically disassociated from games,
started converging into that domain, as it is generally hinted by the emer-
gence of areas such as professional gaming, gamification, serious games or
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Book Reviews                                                             185
the overall idea behind playbour.
    In Play Matters, Sicart provides readers with “a romantic theory (or
rhetoric) of play, based on an idea of creativity and expression that has
been developed in the highly post-romantic cultural environment of the
early twenty-first century.” (p. 5). By avoiding the instrumental and func-
tionalist view on play that is often pushed by postmodern culture indus-
try, this work offers a theory of play that is based on an ecological ap-
proach in which all elements have strong network relations to each other
and are not hierarchically structured. Sicart sees play “as a portable tool
for being. [Play] is not tied to objects but brought by people to the com-
plex interrelations with and between things that form daily life.” (p. 2). In
this theory, play is a 'mode of being human' characterized and performed
as an activity which is: contextual, carnivalesque, appropriative, disrup-
tive, autotelic, creative and personal. Throughout the chapters, the author
clearly explains the implications of such an approach on the most typical
dimensions that play is associated with. For instance, toys – the materiali-
ty of play – become “affordances for appropriation” which are hinted at
playing and which become fundamental elements for understanding the
technological and physical contexts of play. Similarly, Sicart's aesthetics
of play is a nonformalist one and goes beyond the exclusive focus on form
which is portrayed by many conceptions of aesthetics of play. Indeed,
here it is a performative understanding of the beauty of play that comes to
the fore: the aesthetics of play “as the action of appropriation and expres-
sion of and within a context” (p. 63).
    The volume is structured and divided in small chapters each of which
frames one of the key elements of Sicart's theory of play. Namely: Play Is;
Playfulness; Toys; Playgrounds; Beauty; Politics; Architects; and Play in the
Era of Computing Machinery. The book starts with three independent sec-
tions that provide explanations on the design of the book within the
Thinking Playfully series, the acknowledgements, and the instructions for
reading the book. It also ends with three rich sections related to the
Notes, References and Index.
    As a critical remark for a book that has been written to be agile to
read, the Notes section deserves a few words. Sicart himself states in the
opening that the large amount of notes included in this work, it has been
purposely intended for making possible more than one kind of reading:
one which can focus on the core content of the book, stripped of in-text,
unnecessary or marginal comments and one which allows the reader to
dwell on many different details, anecdotes and explanations by relying on
the notes. Notes are placed at the end of the book, in form of endnotes
divided and numbered per each chapter. However, I have found it
somewhat unfriendly to move back and forth from the chapters to the
note section, in order to find the proper note among the various ones.
Endnotes at the end of each chapter, or even notes numbered progres-
sively for the whole book could have been a much more usable and acces-
sible way to include notes.
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Book Reviews                                                Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

    Finally, the book seems to be written with practitioners and academics
who focus on games and playful dimensions of human endeavours as the
key target audience. However, the language is very simple and the use of
jargon is basically non-existent, which makes the book accessible to any
kind of reader. I found particularly intriguing how Sicart manages to pro-
vide a theoretical account of play which is clear and effective in its struc-
ture and, at the same time, clearly detaches the activity of play either from
the concept of game and of playfulness. Conceptually, this is a sound
move that, in my opinion, makes of his work a useful lens for framing,
studying and talking about the entanglements mentioned above in the
opening of this review.




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