Speculation & Play
Meditative questioning and critique are complimented by craft’s encouragement of play, speculation, and imagination. Working with detritus only, without instruction, allows space for non-gamified ludic play. Ludic play involves imposing imagined, speculative worlds onto material. Most games revolve around epistemic play, which involves problem solving, gaining understanding of how a system works, often leading to an end point or reward. As our mixed reality involves more and more digital, gamified, reward based, epistemic play, space for ludic play, imaginative speculation, and creative projection are lacking for both children and adults.
Though gamification is often seen as beneficial for attracting and maintaining the interest of participants, it supports cultures of task-orientation and mechanised time. Naturalisation of a global mechanised time through hourly clocks shifted our perception from unique felt time to organised task-time. In the former, a task might conduct the length of time spent on it, however in the latter, time dictates the task. The issue with mechanised time is that dividing it into sections has no end, there will always be smaller and smaller divisions in which to fill more tasks (Han, 2010)(Posthumanism and Technology, 2021). Days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. Han believes this is an underlying factor to the sense of widespread burnout. That the more embedded mechanised time is with our body, and way of life, the worse this burnout becomes. Gamification provides reward for this task orientation. Though, this gratification is disingenuous, reliant on a sense of superiority in a constructed hierarchy between those who can and cannot complete the task.
Ludic play cannot be gamified in reward-oriented sense because there is no clear or consistent goal. This also means there is no hierarchy of success nor genuine grounds for comparison between one person’s play and another’s. In crafting, this free form play is as vital an entry point as the maintenance of traditional artisanship, and analysis/deconstruction in how things are made. Learning technique and free creativity are also not mutually exclusive forms of crafting but can intertwine to explore unique techniques of constructing and deconstructing.
Encouraging speculation or imagining is a vital skill in growing from ‘Anthropos’ ideology. We must learn to think outside of Western human ethos of categorisation, segregation, organisation, and control, as supported and maintained by Capitalism. We must imagine ourselves as other critters, imagine how we can aid their experience of a non-human world that is so often manipulated, poisoned, beaten, and demolished by industry.