Charles J Pratt

For example, let’s say a wand has the power of exploding when it hits a wall, if there aren’t any enemies nearby to get damaged then this power will not be revealed. If you get lucky and manage to take out all the enemies with a few wands left make sure to maximize the information you learn about them – shoot down to see if they have a heal, or right to see if they have a charge attack (makes your next basic attack deadly) or if you’re feeling greedy shoot into a pillar (one free-standing wall) or a closet (3-sided nook) to see if you can make treasure. I think all game design is like this, but Michael’s work embraces and elevates this process with sublime clarity. There’s a lot more to this game – artifacts, secret rooms, streaks, monster powerups – but I’m going to leave you to discover these things on your own.

This award is very appropriately named, because Bernie has definitely dedicated his lifetime to playing games, making games, thinking about them, writing and teaching about them, changing them, intervening in the world to make it a better, more playful, more joyful place. Now, based on the New Games movement and its roots in 60’s counterculture, you might think that Bernie’s philosophy of games was some kind anything goes, hippy, let-it-all-hang-out approach, but he’s much too sneaky for that, much trickier. And the way he resolves this tension is by reminding us that we play games for a purpose – for a particular kind of pleasure, beauty, and meaning – and looking at this purpose helps us understand what’s going on in a game, in this dance between games and players, rules and play. In particular we were examining the pervasive anxiety about the way the modern, industrial world has transformed human life – the way our traditional structures of meaning have been upended and dismantled and replaced by systems of logic and science and technology which have this immense instrumental power but which also enmesh us in vast systemic structures that seem cold, indifferent or even hostile to the human values that matter most to us as individuals.

If you can trick yourself into looking at things as if, as if they were someone’s work, as if they had been arranged with a purpose, you may find yourself overwhelmed with the world’s haunting beauty – the subtle echoes of shape and pattern, the way the light hits the bricks at just the right angle, the suspenseful mystery of an errant shadow, the perfect punchline of an upended cup. One of the early voices and key figures in the history of game studies, Bogost’s entire career has involved trying to figure out the tricky relationship between games and the world, starting with the primary question – what would it mean to take games seriously? In Play Anything games are treated less as things that work on or through or about or against the world and more as aspects of the world itself, invitations to experience the world as it is, not as we imagine, not for our sake, not in our interest, but on its own terms – blunt, indifferent, but also endlessly fascinating and sublime. The way that games draw us in to trace the convoluted surfaces of objects and rules and materials and code and the brute facts of their behaviors and interactions provides a model for a way of looking at the world beyond the demands of our egos and the distortions of our desires.