Play & Technology

This course considers the social science of play and interactive media technology, with many examples drawn from electronic games. The course investigates play as communication, the history of mediated play, competing social scientific and philosophical theories of play, the structure of games, and the societal consequences of mediated play. Both children and adults are considered. The course is organized around competing theoretical understandings of play drawn from the primary text (e.g., play as development, fate/chance, power, identity, fantasy, self-fulfillment, nonsense), and will be illustrated with examples from current technologies of play.

The central questions addressed in this course are: (1) What is play? (2) How does technology mediate play? and (3) What are the consequences of this mediation?

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