Repairing Play

"Repairing Play tries to wrest the narrative of play away from white, European notions that rely primarily on pleasure by including different connotations of play that do not rely on the access to the conditions of leisure"--Let’s start with the problem: our definition of play is broken. We game scholars know this intimately because we have watched as the term’s emancipatory potentials were appropriated and co-opted by hatred, far-right rhetoric, and bigotry over the last decade. One need go no further than a game’s voice chat, Twitch stream, or Reddit forum to observe how neatly adolescent hate speech sits alongside gameplay. Was Gamergate the moment when play was appropriated by hate? Or was it instead the moment when a century of rot eating away at the concept finally broke through? Folks, our ship is sinking, and we’re about to be washed out to sea. Maybe we’ve been on this ship so long that we’ve forgotten what freedom is. Is play our savior or our oppressor?