Professor Dr. Rolf Nohr: Play-like Action: Towards an Integrative Approach to Play Research

The question of the concept of action is relevant both to media studies (‘How to Do Things with Words?’ – John Austin) and to game studies (‘If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect it to tell a story’ – Markku Eskelinen). How does the symbolic acquire a dimension of action? Should the computer game be understood primarily as a narrative phenomenon, or rather as something structured by action?

Media studies is shaped by the ongoing debate around the concept of performance, by the figure of praxeology – controversially discussed in the context of discourse-philosophical considerations and the practice turn – and by discussions of agency and the ‘irreducibly cooperative character of meaningful social actions’ (CRC ‘Media of Cooperation’). At the same time, hardly any conference or text in game studies can avoid invoking, with a certain folkloric regularity, the somewhat absurd science war between ludologists and narratologists once again (QED).

The lecture takes this dual perspective as its point of departure and offers specific preliminary reflections towards a theory of the action of playing within the field of the symbolic. Rather than placing general questions concerning a praxeology of the symbolic for media studies at the centre, it chooses the computer game – in the sense of a case study – as a specific, exemplary and, in certain respects, limited object of inquiry. Precisely because of its particular configuration, the computer game appears well suited to developing reflections on praxeology that, in future steps, may prove transferable to other fields of inquiry, processes and sign operations.

For nothing justifies qualifying the computer game as any kind of ‘other reality’ or ‘magic circle’ (Huizinga). On the contrary, the central thesis of my current reflections is that play merely renders visible what is present everywhere: a discursively configured form of practice which, in different ways, operates, directs, processes and constitutes ways of engaging with the world.

In order to reflect on play as a structure-forming, processual and emergent dynamic, the lecture argues that a praxeological concept of play must be established – one that, on the one hand, rejects the ‘object concept’ of the game and, on the other, decisively negates the alterity of playing. Playing should instead be understood, among other things, as a governmental practice that responds to contingency.

The lecture will outline how a ‘systematics’ of play-like action in late-modern media constellations might be developed.