Author: Eugenia Bell

Play Digest: Play to Learn

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

PlayTime opens in one month and we couldn’t be more excited. For this week’s link pack, we’re thinking about play as an important means of learning and developing—not just for children but all of us.

While PlayTime can’t help but be based on the tenets of having some fun, we also recognize that the very nature of play possesses the potential to teach, transform, and thrill (tell us your thoughts on our play manifesto!). Play comes naturally. Learning through play is an especially rich vein and not one we should abandon in adulthood.

Peter Gray of Boston College has seen a decline in children’s and teen’s mental health that he attributes to a decline in play and adult (over) supervision of play time. But he and other psychologists think that moving away from a culture that values play and becoming one that views “play as a luxury”—for children and adults—is ignoring an important part of being human.

Playworks founder Jill Vialet is just one of the growing community of people who believe that a better play experience at school leads to better learners. (And by the way, Global School Play Day is February 7.)

Museums are paying attention to play and visitors’ needs, too (and not just PEM).

And it’s not only kids who are playing to learn . . . .

Stay tuned, too, for more on our upcoming PEM Partnership. We’re putting play into action with Horizons for Homeless Children and commissioned artist Marisa Morán Jahn.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Courtesy aAlok Khemka via Flickr.)

Artificial Identities: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Writer and critic Katherine Cross examines the fundamental truths—and benefits—of identity in role-playing games and how they provide the chance to reveal players’ true natures.

Look at the back of the box for any video game and you’ll find a bullet-pointed list of features. “Pulse pounding dungeons,” “hyper realistic graphics,” “exciting multiplayer.” The real joy of gaming, however, comes from what’s silently lurking between those points. They don’t tell you about breaking up loveless marriages, changing your gender, finding the love of your life, or coming out as queer.

Video games are a mirror in which we may see an unfamiliar reflection. They entice players with the promise of an ideal self—the heroic warrior, space marine, or Chosen One who can save the world with countless magic powers that Ordinary You can only dream of. But every person’s “digital ideal” scatter-plots around the mean as a proliferation of perfected, experimental selves who will invariably stray from the intentions of game developers. I’ll never forget how World of Warcraft sparked an affair between two women I gamed with, one in Australia, the other in Hawaii. I never knew what became of them, but the game became intrusively and inescapably real for them both.

The real adventure is what transpires beyond the promises on the back of the box.

That’s always been the trick, you see. Video games, especially those that take place online and throw us all together in some virtual arena, aren’t just games. The game, the ludic matter of scoring points and showing mastery of your skills, becomes a mere excuse for everything not covered by an ESRB rating. The real adventure, often as not, is what transpires beyond the promises on the back of the box. In my time as an online gamer I’ve taken on the role of therapist, talking people I’ve never met down from the ledge of suicide. Imagine my character running through a forest, gathering herbs for her Alchemy skill, and in every spare moment I’m typing out messages to a friend, letting her vent and cry, while sending her missives that I hope will make her hate herself less.

When you play a game like this, the gulf between who you are and who you want to be becomes painfully evident—and yet it’s the pocket of netherspace you dwell in. It’s a mixture of inadequacy, thwarted ambition, and innervating eros that seizes every ounce of your attention. That mixture is alcoholic in its vintage; if booze is liquid courage, the frisson of gaming is a kind of digital courage. What people do with that courage, as is so often the case with its liquid variety, varies widely. Sometimes the inadequacy wracks you and becomes the only thing you know; this becomes an impetus to abuse, to use the illusion of power granted by the game to become a raging wanker whose license is the very concept of play. “It’s just a game, don’t be offended,” or “It’s just words on a screen,” they might say. Such people, almost invariably, try to bring cruel bigoted abuse and sexual harassment under the umbrella of gaming culture. Someone says you can’t shoot straight because you’re a girl? That’s just “trash talk,” the currency of competitive gaming’s realm.

The gap between who you are and who you want to be causes a monstrous mutation; you take it out on anyone in reach, battering them in the hope of feeling strong and powerful because you need one more hit of that elixir, one more shot to the arm in order to feel like a Big Man (and it is so often men who fall prey to this). This is the world in which GamerGate—a harassment campaign spawned by reactionary, self-identified “gamers” against women and queer people in the gaming industry, to purge us and our “corruption”—seemed to prefigure the resurgence of the wider “alt-right”; where the Ubermenschen lifestyle promised by gaming’s consumer-king culture has inadvertently become a fertile recruiting ground for actual neo-Nazis.

It’s hard not to feel despair at this. But there’s more to this world than its darkness, even if that’s all we can see now. There is, and always has been, another reality in the virtual. It’s the reality of the young transgender woman who finds her voice as a woman thanks to videogaming, or the reality of the game developer who speaks in a register only a game can fully express; the queer indie developer whose use of new game development tools allows her to tell a story that would never make it past the gatekeepers of traditional publishing. For all their artifice, these interactive realms have a way of drawing the truth from us, dissolving closet doors and puritanical inhibitions in ways that are redolent of underground scenes. But the pulse of the club or burr of the speakeasy are replaced instead with visions of the fantastical, which for all their blatant falsehood make it strangely impossible to lie to yourself. What you play, especially when you’re given a wide choice, says a lot about your innermost yearnings.

You know that insufferable question everyone gets asked at job interviews? “If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” Supposedly, the answer reveals a lot about you. Super strength indicates, perhaps, an aggressive personality; invisibility may suggest a subtler, shyer one. But with the act of roleplaying in a video game you’re surrounded by people you don’t really have to impress with your answer. It instead takes flight amid a carnival of other answers, loudly competing for space in the digital crowd. As a consequence, it says a good deal more about some aspect of you.

I had discovered what it was that I was really getting out of all my playing: a chance to be my truest self.

Some games play this to the hilt. Kitfox Games’ Moon Hunters—an enchanting prehistorical fantasy where you discover what happened to a missing moon goddess—marketed itself as a “co-op personality test RPG,” where your character’s choices added up to some truth about the player, writ large in an in-game constellation. Most games don’t embrace this so openly, however, leaving it to you to discover on your own just what it is that compels you to role-play a certain kind of character.

But the next time you get really into a game, especially one that allows you a wide degree of latitude in customizing the character you play, it’s worth asking yourself what you’re really playing with here. For my part, my World of Warcraft days drew to a close not long after I came out. I went from twelve-hour days in the game to barely being able to log in. I had discovered what it was that I was really getting out of all my grinding, raiding, and farming: a chance to be my truest self. As soon as I found a way to do it in the physical world I had less need of a digital facsimile. I owe gaming that much—and I owe it to the medium to remember the best of its potential, even in these dark days. ♦

(Image credit: Still from World of Warcraft courtesy Martin Chung via Flickr.)

Play Digest: Back to the Future

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

As we come up with new games and ever more new ways to play and express our playful selves, some game and toy makers are looking backward to recapture both the charm and simplicity of play. With this week’s link pack, we check out the trends in play things.

The folks at Tech Will Save Us want to get kids into electronics before they’re ready for Snap Circuits by introducing a Play-Doh–like product that conducts electricity and  can safely teach kids about circuit building in an extremely tactile way.

Octogenarian toy company Fisher Price is considering the year 2025 by imagining what today’s millennials will look like as parents and how their children will play—and what with. The slightly more youthful Mattel is also looking forward by joining with Silicon Valley game makers and tech giants to revive old toys for new generations.

Speaking of Mattel, their new Shero line of Barbie dolls, which includes the likenesses of Ava Duvernay and Misty Copeland, added Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad to its roster in November—the company’s first hijab-wearing doll.

Here is a fantastic and moving recent episode of This American Life about The Dukes of Hazzard, a Hot Wheels car, and confronting the Confederacy as a child.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Courtesy of Candylab Toys.)

Fake Fur: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Curator and writer Sarah Archer looks at the history, fads, and fetishization of stuffed toys and at where contemporary art has embraced them.

Stuffed animals beckon to us constantly: from retail kiosks, amusement park prize shelves, and toy stores, eventually finding their “forever homes” in countless childhood bedrooms around the world. They elicit deep sentimental attachment, and even love. Unlike pets, there is theoretically no limit to their lifespans. With us from the first moments of our lives through the scrapes and dramas of youth, they are witness to every secret embarrassment, comfort us through every lonely worry. One of the most famous narratives involving a stuffed toy, the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, is so poignant that it can move adults to tears. Cloaked in fake fur, stuffed animals carry real emotional heft, and occupy a singular place in the history of play. But we don’t usually live with them forever. Because stuffed toys are associated primarily with childhood, their presence in other walks of life—like contemporary art—jolts us with conflicting impressions of something very innocent paired with something much more grown-up. This may be because, like fairy tales, stuffed animals’ own history is surprisingly dark.

Unlike pets, there is theoretically no limit to the lifespans of stuffed animals.

Stuffed animals as we know them today emerged during the industrial revolution at a moment when our relationship with animals was shifting from one of rural necessity to urban and suburban pastime. Their lineage—particularly that of the Teddy Bear, named for President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, who hated his nickname—is rooted in the rugged cultural pastimes of the nineteenth century. The popularization of hunting, taxidermy, and the “fancies” (or hobby breeding and showing of cats, dogs, birds, and other animals), all came into prominence during this time period.

Hunting, particularly of big game, has long been a noble pursuit—perhaps as old as civilization itself. A Neo-Hittite basalt orthostat relief dating from the ninth century BC depicts a royal lion hunt, in which a ruler rides a horse-drawn chariot and subdues a lion while a bird of prey flies overhead. In the Islamic world, from Iran to India and throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even as subsistence hunting remained an important source of food for ordinary people, the hunt was also a social sport for gentlemen and royalty. Hunters were furnished with fine specialized equipment, and hunting itself was understood as a way for gentlemen to keep their wits sharp during peacetime in preparation for war. Upper class landowners had exclusive rights to hunt on their estates. The term “fair game” referred to animals in territories that were free to hunt by those of lower station. The word “game” itself, which initially referred to cards and board games in English, began to connote hunters’ prey in the early middle ages when the sport’s status as an elite pastime was solidified. This development was also the origin of dog breeding. Purebred hounds whose abilities in different kinds of hunts were valued, bred, prized, and painted both on their own and in family portraits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Anthony van Dyck’s 1637 portrait The Five Eldest Children of Charles I, the future King Charles II gently pets an enormous, docile mastiff, while an eager spaniel gazes up at the siblings.

The word “game” itself, which initially referred to cards and board games, began to connote hunters’ prey when the sport’s status as an elite pastime was solidified.

Hunting was eventually democratized by colonialism. By the nineteenth century, European hunters of any class background could stalk game in overseas territories from Africa to Australia and South Asia, and bring back trophy animal heads or whole specimens to impress their peers back home. Theodore Roosevelt was an avid naturalist and conservationist whose passion for preserving the country’s wilderness was inspired in large part by his love of the hunt. Like a latter-day Mesopotamian ruler, Roosevelt reveled in the spectacle of the hunt, which was, as ever, strongly associated with the drama and pageantry of war. A sickly child who hailed from the highest social stratum in America, Roosevelt made hunting a metaphor for his bold political persona.

As recreational hunting became popular among an array of social classes in the nineteenth century, so too did the breeding and keeping of pets. And in a somewhat macabre sense, a third hobby dovetailed perfectly with the other two: taxidermy. By the seventeenth century in Britain, the keeping of non-working animals was a status symbol, like the gentleman’s hunt, and indeed the association between dogs and hunting gave purebred canines an extra layer of prestige at pets, regardless of their owner’s hunting habits. The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the attendant fascination with categorization and taxonomy found its recreational match in the animal “fancies” that swept Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. New wealth from industry and the colonies was upending the norms of Britain’s hereditary aristocracy, and an obsession with breeding, both scientifically and socially, was one result of the tumultuous change. Purebred pets had long lineages, proof of ancestry, were well-groomed and well-formed, and they fared well in competition.

In death as much as in life, rare animals were objects of fascination and admiration. London taxidermist Edwin Ward created the famed “Lion and Tiger Struggle” display, which—though it depicted a scene from the imagination, and not nature—enthralled visitors who saw it in Paris and at London’s Crystal Palace. Taxidermy’s “golden age” in Europe was the last quarter of the nineteenth century, accompanied by the vogue for indoor curiosities such as aquariums and terrariums. The beautifully preserved head of an exotic animal or rare stuffed bird was a sign of refinement, and like the worldly contents of a wunderkammer, displayed evidence of global travel, or at least access to rare goods.

Domestic animals have been moving steadily from the fringes of the wilderness closer into our living rooms.

Since pets conquered Europe and America, according to David Grimm, the author of Citizen Canine, domestic animals have been moving steadily from the fringes of the wilderness closer into our living rooms, and at last, into our beds. Where it was once common for dogs and cats to be kept outside, at least part of the time, today, pet owners (or “parents”) welcome pets into every corner of their homes, and provide them with specialty bedding along with toys and treats. Grimm attributes this shift in part to the movement away from widespread farming, which has enabled us to think of animals as a new kind of family member rather than a working creature. The rise of smaller families means that many adults have opted not to have children, and thus have plenty of resources, time, and affection to devote to pets.

Stuffed animals have a much different sort of cultural and emotional footprint today as compared with the moment of their origin. Though the earliest patented stuffed animal was based on the Beatrix Potter character Peter Rabbit, the stuffed animal who began the craze in earnest was the eponymous Teddy Bear. Stuffed toy bears were developed separately at the same moment by the American toymaker Morris Michtom and by the Steiff company in Germany in the early twentieth century. The American version was inspired by hunting anecdote about Theodore Roosevelt that was immortalized in a political cartoon. Faced with a bear that had been wounded by someone else in his hunting party, Roosevelt felt it was unsportsmanlike for him to shoot the animal himself, but asked that the bear be put out of its misery in any case. This gruesome encounter, of which political satirists made hay, yielded the first generation of Teddy bears. The Steiff model was introduced in 1903 at the Leipzig Toy Fair, and introduced to the American market by a buyer for George Borgfeldt & Co. in New York.

Stuffed animals are cozy sculptures or 3D cartoon characters invested with deep meaning that ordinary people can own.

Since their premiere, Teddy bears have given rise to generations of stuffed toys in all shapes and sizes, some robotic, like Petster and Zhu-Zhu Pets; some highly collectible, like Beanie Babies; some exotic and mythic, like unicorns. While hunting and taxidermy have grown less popular, pet ownership has boomed, and the retail landscape for pet accessories and costumes almost seems like an extension of the stuffed animal universe. Browsing toy store aisles populated by wide-eyed seals and plush bears, the gruesome tale of Roosevelt’s wish for another hunter to put a wounded bear out of its misery seems the furthest thing imaginable. Stuffed animals, unlike their taxidermied cousins, bear no real relationship to the biological world. They are, essentially, cozy sculptures or 3D cartoon characters invested with deep meaning that ordinary people can own and even obsessively collect. Yet the implied narratives of their long history—those of the sometimes-brutal control of nature, and the violence of hunting, paired with the obsessive care and grooming of animal fancies—can never be entirely ignored.

This may be why contemporary artists have begun to mine the rich, colorful landscape of stuffed animals for their aesthetic and narrative value. The late artist Mike Kelley made posthumous headlines when the Museum of Modern Art purchased his Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, a sculptural installation work comprised of hundreds of stuffed animals that have been formed into rainbow-colored, cloud-like shapes, suspended from the ceiling by wire. Throughout his career, Kelley mined the detritus of contemporary and recent Americana, and the profusion of stuffed animals—like cosmetics, electronics, clothes, and other inexpensive consumer goods—populated his artistic landscape. The performance artist and designer Nick Cave has created a series of wearable works called Soundsuits, made from dyed hair, sisal, feathers, sequins, and other materials that sparkle, sway, and make noise with the movement of the wearer. Inspired in part by Dogon costumes, carnivals, and by the masked balls of Renaissance and early modern Europe, the Soundsuits sometimes directly reference stuffed animals. Cave’s “Bunny Boy,” which graced the cover of ArtNews’ June 2012 issue, resembles a glamourous and possibly sinister version of the Easter Bunny, or a present-day iteration of “Harvey.”

Stuffed animals come from a bloodless world, where all the beguiling qualities of companion animals can be enjoyed without paying the price of life and death.

And the artist Agustina Woodgate has been creating rugs from the “skins” of second-hand toys, using them as though they were animal hides to create majestic carpets and wall hangings. Woodgate avoids using new toys, and chooses to work only with stuffed animals who had “lived.” This deliberate choice highlights what might be the most compelling aspects of a stuffed animal’s existence. The practice of hunting real animals, and of having pets, is punctuated with the moments of their lives and deaths. Stuffed animals, by contrast, outlive us. In industrialized nations, we are sheltered from the viscera of farm life (and death), much as we are from the realities of the births, illnesses and deaths of fellow humans, which more often occur in hospital settings rather than at home. The sight and smell of blood, even on an episode of a food and travel program on Netflix, is enough to spark horror and outcry. Stuffed animals come from a bloodless world, where all the beguiling qualities of companion animals—beauty, softness, cuteness, companionship—can be enjoyed without paying the price of confrontation with the real stuff of life and death. We do our best in the modern world to live this way, too: clean, free of germs, with minimal pain, and a studied indifference to the gruesome reality of being mortal. In Woodgate’s work, the technicolor stuffed animal “hides” are a stark reminder of the fact that we are more animal than they are. If the distilled, tender cuteness of contemporary stuffed animals is a metaphor for our desire to avoid pain and suffering in the physical world, the blend of humor and horror we experience at seeing their skins sewn together is telling: the control of nature does not make us immortal, and we are all fair game. ♦

(Image credits: Doll Wall via Flickr. A 1902 political cartoon in The Washington Post spawned the teddy bear name via Wikicommons. Orthostat relief, about 9th century BC, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anthomy van Dyck, Five Eldest Children of Charles I, via Wikicommons. The halls of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace via Mashable. 1902 replica of an original Steiff teddy bear via the saleroom. Mike Kelley, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999, via Flickr. Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2010, via the New York Public Library. Agustina Woodgate, Royal, 2010, courtesy of Spinello Projects, Miami.)

Play Digest: The Game of Life

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Life is complex. Family, friendship, health, work, inequality, the state of the world all contribute to our understanding of and approach to our daily lives. This week’s Play Digest links up with games based on lived experiences.

It goes without saying that sometimes games can help escape these realms, even navigate them, or aid in solving real world issues. It’s worth noting that the board game we now know as Life was released in 1860 under the name The Checkered Game of Life, which, in fact, referred to its checkerboard-like playing surface, but which also might be the best unintended euphemism ever in board games.

When the popular Uncharted video game series was “recast” earlier this year with two women taking over the lead, the progression of gameplay wasn’t altered much. Over the course of the game, however, the relationship that develops between Chloe and Nadine has made some women reflect on not only of how sometimes complicated, competitive female friendships are portrayed on the game screen, but how it mirrors real life.

Women, and perhaps women of color especially, are subject to near-constant micro-aggressions aimed at their appearance. Wieden + Kennedy art director  Momo Pixel created Hair Nah as a response to one such insult in particular. As a comment on those who cannot resist the lure of difference, Hair Nah has the player trying to get her avatar to the airport and onto a flight with as few “hair reaches” as possible. It is a great example of enlightenment through light humor. 

DreamDaddy is a queer dating app sim in which you don’t just date a gay dad, you are the gay dad. The characters are given deep back stories, problem children, job woes, and identity crises. Gamewright Leighton Gray says it was important to her as a gay woman to develop an honest and humanistic approach for the LGBTQ gaming community. She added, “There’s so little queer content now that’s just light-hearted and fun and silly and showcases a really honest relationship. I think part of the goal for this was for it to be for everyone.”

More often than not life isn’t so interesting, as manifested in Desert Bus, once called the worst video game ever made. In it you drive from Tucson to Las Vegas and immerse yourself in all the monochromatic boredom of a roadtrip. But there was art in its mundanity and it has its fans (and raised a good deal of money for charity). Now there is a sequel, with a big “improvement”: if you win, you now get to drive the bus back to Tucson.

The life stage that vexes many of us the most perhaps (at least in the west) is death. Death isn’t addressed in the old Hasbro Game of Life (in which you’re more likely to cash in your 401k than meet the Angel Gabriel), but video games are full of it: graphic, grizzly, hyper-realistic, but usually atypical for the average player. Mortician’s Tale is different. Imagine, for a moment, that you run a funeral home. Mortician’s Tale is an outgrowth of the death positive movement, and aims to demystify the death and grieving process by putting the player in the mortician’s robe. It’s a game that would make Jessica Mitford proud.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: The Game of Life via Flickr.)

My Life Up Until November, 2007: An Infographic

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

The subjects of artist and funnyman Andrew Kuo’s colorful infographics are personal memories, moments from the near past, and thoughts about the future. His take on this work: “Putting ideas on a scale challenges the authority of a thought.”

Look for the next infographic in coming weeks.

 

Play Digest: Playtime Turns Fifty

Posted on by Eugenia Bell
Trevor Smith, PlayTime curator, shares this week’s Play Digest on the film inspiration behind the exhibition title—and this site by extension. Looking for a good watch? We recommend Playtime on its anniversary.

Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime, released in 1967—and turning fifty this week—was a failure at the box office on release and almost bankrupted him. Yet today the film is rightly hailed as a cinematic masterpiece. In contrast to the cynicism and hard-bitten critique of the French new wave, Tati’s faith in extraordinary images, his roots in physical comedy, and the “classic French ability to spot the ridiculous in the everyday” appeared mordantly nostalgic. Today, his playful yet sharp-eyed vision seems ever more profound.

Shot entirely on huge stage sets, Playtime imagined a Paris whose life was organized by modern rhythms of work and leisure. The movie unfolds in three acts. The first is set in the non-spaces of airports, open cubicle offices, and trade fairs. The second act takes place in an apartment whose floor to ceiling windows at street level turns the family into inadvertent performers. The final major arc of the movie takes place on the opening night of a restaurant/nightclub whose slick modernity renders the chaos behind the scenes all but invisible.

Tati’s reaction to these patently modernist scenarios is not to offer a disenchanted critique but to begin to play and test its limits. Often his comedy began in an act of misunderstanding or misuse of an object, which is one of the key threads in our exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum.

While the strict separation of work and leisure in these scenarios is very much of Tati’s time, his understanding of the importance of play to human imagination and empowerment in uncertain times remains revolutionary.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.)

Sweat: An Image Gallery

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Photographer B.A. Van Sise brings us the before and after of sport in his series Sweat. With these double portraits, he offers a close look at the drive of players from the Knicks to the Gotham Girls Roller Derby League.

 

Well, for starters, I don’t like sports.

I played baseball as a kid, if one can call what I did “playing.” Mostly, I stood out in the outfield and held my glove in the air and prayed to the love that moves the sun and all the other stars that nobody would ever hit the ball in my direction, which invariably everybody did. If such a thing is possible, I’m pretty sure I would have had a negative batting average and my teammates—a group of post-pubescent murderers who all hated my tiny, non-hitting, non-catching, non-running body—would clearly have preferred to use me as a backstop.

I’d return home from my games, open the hamper, toss in my uniform covered in tears and goose shit, and listen to Edith Piaf music.

It’s a shock I never made the majors.

Years later, while working my first big newspaper job at Newsday, the sports editor would be forced—when the rest of the staff was sick, vacationing or dead—to send me to photograph sporting events. I have a deep-seated admiration for sports shooters; I know a lot of them, and am constantly dazzled by their work. Sports work is the hardest kind there is for a photographer, and not the kind for me. I’d spend a couple bored hours taking pictures of where the ball or puck was or wasn’t, hand in the work with my fingers crossed, and go home, open the hamper, throw in a button-down shirt covered in tears and goose shit, and listen to John Coltrane.

Last year, a buddy of mine convinced me to go see a New York Cosmos soccer game with him. He was a leader for the group of Cosmos hooligan fans who attend every game, and he told me that I should come down, if only to yell at strangers for ninety minutes. As a good and loyal New Yorker, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to fight with strangers for hours, so off I went—and I was marveled.

The players on the field never stopped moving. They ran and slid and fought and looked like men who’ve been through a war. When they lost, I imagined their homes, their hampers, their jerseys, and their bachata music.

So that’s how it began. Since then, I’ve been visiting with athletes of every stripe to try—situation and weather allowing—to photograph them identically: first, arriving to an event, and later walking off the field just seconds after they win, lose, or quit for the day. The personalities, I’ve noticed, vary in culture from one sport to next, but one thing pervades the lot of them: a desire to prove themselves. To go faster. To work harder. To do more. At a certain level, every sport seems to turn into a game of inches, and all of those who most impressed, it seems, were still thinking about much greater distances.

I called it Sweat, because I was pretty sure the Peabody Essex Museum wouldn’t let me name it, well, Goose Shit.

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Danny Szetela // New York Cosmos

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Adam Moffat // New York Cosmos

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Ruben Bover // New York Cosmos

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
“Kate Sera Sera” // Gotham Girls Roller Derby League

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
“Northern Fights” // Gotham Girls Roller Derby League

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
“Lumiknoxity” // Gotham Girls Roller Derby League

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
“Kid Vicious” // Gotham Girls Roller Derby League

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
BackAlley Dred // Gotham Girls Roller Derby League

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Buay Tuach // Knicks

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Hanner Mosquera-Perea // Knicks

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Luke Kornet // Knicks

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Xavier Rathan-Mayes // Knicks

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Leon Gray // New York City Marathon

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Matt Schaar // New York City Marathon

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Sami Yewman // New York City Marathon

 

B.A. Van Sise, Sweat
Jennifer Piazza // New York City Marathon

Check out more from B.A. Van Sise’s Sweat series.

Playground of My Mind: A Memoir

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

In our final installment from Julia Jacquette’s visual memoir, she shows us the unexpected importance of play spaces—their geometry, their geography, and the minds behind them—and how they shape us into adulthood. Need to catch up? You can read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

 

The Paradoxical Usefulness of Nonutilitarian Motion, A.K.A. “Play”: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Fiction writer Karen Russell’s visit to an aquarium unexpectedly reveals parallels between dolphins at play and the freedom of writing.

One uniquely perverse kind of movement is “play.” What could be a more audacious use of our time? Playgrounds are some of our most demented constructions, if you think about it—even more surreal, in their way, than cemeteries! Go to a playground, and what do you find? A do-nothing machine. A go-nowhere machine. The swing set, the see-saw. Human-powered pendulums that would appall Henry Ford. Here’s equipment that wheels in circles, going nowhere fast. Scaffolding to support kinetic dreaming. Stasis-in-motion. We set aside these nature preserves for the imagination; we stent a space for fantasy. Then we encourage kids to use a bunch of hot aluminum as the looms and struts for their waking hallucinations. No kid sees that rusty-ass equipment as we do: a bunch of lawsuits waiting to happen. They see: Spaceship. Gryphon’s nest. They see through, they see beyond. They do story-embroidery. Kids can see the symmetries, the underlying forms—and they play with them. A kid I am acquainted with saw the propeller on the back of a barge, and believed the boat was powered by a gigantic hair curler. Another saw a nun on television, and said with quiet conviction, “mermaid.”

Play may be how we consummate our humanness, but it’s certainly not unique to us.

Who knows what is actually happening to kids on a playground? Their real muscles contract; meantime, their names and their identities dissolve, reconstituting inside of some strange game. Play erupts on the threshold of the cognitive and the physical, the actual and the unreal. According to Friedrich Schiller, play cures our species’ “fragmentation of being” by reconciling the drive for form and the drive for sense, our longing to annul time and our desire for new horizons of truth and meaning. Why would anybody assume that this kind of movement is something gratuitous, or something to outgrow?

Play may be how we consummate our humanness, but it’s certainly not unique to us. Gregory Bateson has written about play in the animal kingdom. According to Bateson, play is the seedbed of language, all metacommunication. Take two wolves roughhousing. A certain kind of bite denotes “game on.” It moves them into a separate zone, marked off from ordinary time: a pageant of battle. This simulation constitutes a metacommunication between the wolves, says Bateson, because the play bite denotes a real one.

The value of play can’t be reduced to its effects.

“Now we are going to do a special theater of killing one another,” snarl the wolves. “This will be fun.” Their mock-battle makes possible a genuine encounter with ferocity, in the “safe,” cordoned-off arena of fiction.

Others will disagree with me, but I do not think the function of play is to build up muscle tissue or to discharge aggression. These things can and do happen, of course. But the value of play—like that cousin species of dreaming, reading—can’t be reduced to its effects.

Play ceases to be play the second you hitch it to some utilitarian purpose. This is the paradox that challenges the game designers. It’s also the paradox that greets us writers at our desks, where it can feel truly insane to let yourself move through the dark, trying things out. It takes courage to move down the page without a definite goal, to discover through this searching process what remains to be said. It takes faith to make a not-for-profit movement, and it takes ingenuity and rigor to design the right structures to make play possible.

At the National Aquarium in Baltimore, I watched intelligent mammals playing, using their energy not for consumption or defense, but for creation. It looks like a game: they are making bubble rings. At Sea World, a dolphin figured out how to shape the bubbles, and now they teach each other how to do this; perhaps this is the dolphin’s bubble workshop. Evidently they take great pleasure in creating these elastic autobiographies. Artists of the moment, they watch the products of their bodies rise. Dolphins, I imagine, must also deal with survival questions, very important questions—the horizontal, linear ones, like, “Is there a shark behind that rock?” But they also design these bubble rings, each addressed by a unique sentience to the ocean’s surface. Up they rise, in shimmering flumes, for no reason, or for reasons that are as yet opaque to humans.

From where I was standing it looked like the animals were enjoying a radical freedom.

Viewed from a survivalist’s standpoint, the dolphin’s playful undulance seemed like a pretty dubious use of calories. In Schiller’s terms, they are “burning up their surplus.” Goofing around, where they could be mating or hunting or conserving strength. If they were our cousins, we might tell these dolphins to get a haircut and get a real job.

From another angle, however—from where I was standing, outside the tank—it looked like the animals were enjoying a radical freedom. They were reveling; they were revealing something hidden inside themselves, to themselves, in the form of these bubble chains. In a state of play with no clear goals, they were turning themselves inside out, discovering what a breath could become. And I have to confess, I was so moved by this. It was hard not to read into their fluid ricochet, something analogous to the free play of thought.

Jokes and dreams and games may be the only places—and I mean to evoke a physical place, a site—where a certain kind of truth telling is possible. Some of the best lines in our literature occur as parentheticals, asides. Shakespeare’s fools and ghosts murmur truths that would be otherwise inadmissible in any king’s court. This playfulness must pose a double threat to authorities; the second they take such writing seriously, they risk looking ridiculous themselves.

It’s simplistic to reduce a writer’s playfulness to a tactic, a device.

Critiques of human monstrosity get encoded in fables about pigs and overcoats and Yiddish demons. But these writers also joke for joking’s sake. It’s too simplistic, I think, to reduce their playfulness to a tactic, a device. The human exuberance and irrepressible strangeness of their books is an implicit critique of global monoculture and local tyranny; these authors resist the homogenizing, dehumanizing forces on their own terms. Such writing waves a freak flag, signals a freewheeling intelligence. It says: we are free to move down the page, regardless of our physical circumstances. You can shut down the roads, control the news, imprison our bodies, deluge us continuously with reasons for paralyzing fear, and still we can move invisibly in that other territory. In these writers’ hands, play becomes a celebration or everybody’s upward mobility, where the imagination is concerned.

It can be a revolutionary act, to take the scenic route.

I love being reminded that no matter what we are writing, we are playing with sound, patterning music for another’s mind. And that once you find the rhythm of a piece, that music can tug you irresistibly toward sense. I wanted to write about this topic in no small part because play hasn’t felt safe to me for a while, and that scares me. You have to fight to preserve a space to wander, where movement is its own reward. I don’t mean to sound naive here—groping in the dark can also feel totally miserable. Our fun is not everybody’s fun. Play is a risky use of resources, it is a waste of time, if you demand that it deliver a payoff.

“Dolphins play to test the contingencies of their world,” I was told. And so do we. ♦

(This piece is a condensed and edited version of the 2015 AWP Conference & Bookfair keynote address by Karen Russell. Used with permission from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Image credit: Photo by Mathias Appel from Flickr.)

Play Digest: Costume Drama

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

From writing to acting to game playing, the desire to inhabit a character other than our own is a deeply human desire: to play, to escape, to possess traits we weren’t born with. While the practice of cosplay—dressing up as a favorite character from a movie, video game, or anime—is now widespread, it is still viewed by some as an act of transgression. With this week’s Play Digest, we take a closer look.

Just dressing for the everyday is itself a effort to project a persona, and garments can often “act as totems and taboos,” says costume curator Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. In a way cosplay is transgressive, but it needn’t hold the negative connotation that word might suggest.

Hard research supports the notion that cosplay is not only a healthy expression of fandom, but also a practice that can benefit people who suffer from  conditions as varied as social anxiety disorder and stuttering. For those not familiar with this kind of play (or those who have always hated Halloween), why people cosplay may remain a mystery, but its advantages to those who participate are legion, even beyond the simple, joyful fun of it. But, in some cases, even the protective bubble of cosplaying can’t always protect the player from the ailments of society.

Somewhere between fandom, cosplay, and costuming sits the phenomenon of the mascot. Fans feel strongly about them. The Ballard Institute at the University of Connecticut recognizes their importance and asks why we care so much about them. A good, brief history of the mascot was the subject of an episode of the 99% Invisible podcast.  (And if they’re not your thing, blame this guy.)

But many mascots—fuzzy and cheerful or those of the more menacing variety—all boosters of sports consumerism and tribalism—come with loaded histories. The last few years especially have been witness to full-throated attacks on teams—at all divisions and levels of play—who cling to names, identities, and mascots that perpetuate stereotypes and demean personhood. From the Warriors to the Indians to the Zulu Cannibal Giants (yes, really): here’s a timeline.

But back to cosplay: despite some popular opinions that revolve largely around the perceived geekery of the endeavor, what gets expressed over and over is what a positive social outlet and avenue of self expression it is. Unlike a competitive sport, cosplay doesn’t have winners and losers, is a creative outlet to the highest degree, and, ultimately, is an exceedingly accepting community that reaches far beyond the art of dressing up.

Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.

(Image credit: Yukicon cosplayer from Flickr.)

On the Perception of Failure: An Essay

Posted on by Eugenia Bell

Writer—and long-suffering Toronto Blue Jays fan—Stacey May Fowles looks at how success at the highest levels of baseball can still look like failure.

On November 1, 2017, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series.

Though of course true, to say that “the Dodgers lost the World Series” feels like a strange, glass half empty way to characterize what happened in this year’s baseball postseason. It was, as it always is with baseball, so much more complicated and beautiful than that.

If you were watching what transpired throughout the month of October, you got the sense that all was just and right in the dramatic land of this game—the already anointed “best team in baseball” (the aforementioned Dodgers) faced the compelling underdog (the Houston Astros) in a seven game filmic thriller. Anyone without initial allegiances found it hard to find firm loyalties: both teams definitely felt deserving.

It was the kind of disappointment only possible when a team comes very close, but not close enough.

A more uplifting take on the 113th edition of the World Series would be that the once-excruciatingly terrible Houston Astros won their first championship in franchise history. There was something poetic about them bringing the Commissioner’s Trophy home to Houston, a city ravaged by Hurricane Harvey only a few months earlier. The magic continued when star shortstop Carlos Correa proposed to his girlfriend before he even left the field, and when pitcher Justin Verlander, traded to the Astros minutes before the deadline only a few months before, spent the following weekend in Italy marrying supermodel Kate Upton. When the champagne was drained and the red dust settled, some players went to Disney World, and others went on Saturday Night Live. It was, by all assessments, a fairytale ending.

But after that electrifying seven game series, and a season so often defined by the LA Dodgers’ great expectations, there was a certain degree of notable let down. It was the kind of disappointment only possible when a team is very good, and comes very close, but not close enough.

Nowhere was that feeling more heartbreaking and more acute than in the postgame words of Dodgers’ ace starting pitcher, Clayton Kershaw. “Maybe one of these days I won’t fail, we won’t fail, and we’ll win one of these things,” he told reporters. “There’s only one team that can succeed. There’s only one team that wins the last game, so that’s tough.”

Who among us, in the face of loss, has not felt like the relentless failure regardless of any evidence that disputes it?

The very idea that Kershaw, an elite athlete and arguably one of the best pitchers of his generation, could not only feel like a failure, but basically always feel like a failure is what made that sound bite particularly crushing. It also made his sentiment so human, and so easily identifiable—who among us, in the face of loss, has not felt like the relentless failure, regardless of any evidence behind us that disputes it?

Pitchers are particularly vulnerable to this brand of punishment and self-flagellation, perhaps more than other players on the field. Just ask Kershaw’s fellow Dodger Yu Darvish, who surrendered four runs in both game three and game seven of the World Series, came close to postgame tears, and logged on to Twitter to announce that “the World Series resulted in a disappointment due to my lack of performance.”

If a pivotal game implodes quickly, or even glides gently into the loss column via a single errant walk, wild pitch, or hit, the blame often feels like it lands squarely on the shoulders of whatever man is on the mound. He’s stuck in the spot-lit center of the game, trying not to wear his frustration, until his manager offers him an exit he may or may not want. It’s really no surprise these athletes are prone to various anxiety ailments, crises of confidence, and in some cases—like that of St. Louis Cardinal Rick Ankiel, who famously lost pitching control in the 2000 National League Championship Series and eventually chose the outfield instead—a need to walk away from the game completely.

If Kershaw felt like he has failed, what hope was there for the rest of us?

In Kershaw’s case, the overwhelming evidence of a lack of failure is pretty clear; there were an incredible 104 Dodger wins during the 2017 season, and a Sports Illustrated cover that all-caps asked, “Best. Team. Ever?” Kershaw himself has got three Cy Young Awards, seven All Star distinctions, a Gold Glove, a Triple Crown, and countless other accolades and achievements frankly too time-consuming and tedious to list. So when his sound bite became a headline that circulated among the sports-fan masses, the fundamental question was this; if Kershaw felt like he has failed, what hope was there for the rest of us?

Though many have an understandably escapist attitude towards watching sports, I would argue that what baseball, and sports in general, teaches us about the more difficult aspects of life—loss, disappointment, and yes, failure—is what makes fandom so valuable. Sports forces us to face these difficult realities head on, in an overlarge, stripped down, almost caricature-esque way. It’s always clear who the winners and losers are, the parameters of play becoming a place to safely submerge ourselves in both extreme emotional experiences.

As fans, we voluntarily subject ourselves to the very real risk of not coming out on top, of crying into our ballpark beers, because we understand that the emotional journey is well worth the potential for a less than stellar outcome. Not only do we do this voluntarily, we pay for it—with our time, and our dollars, and our feelings. (During the postseason, I’ve further paid for it with a lack of sleep, poor eating habits, and neglected household chores.) It’s almost as if we understand that it is good for our souls to suffer the losses of strangers, to invest ourselves in something so objectively frivolous, and take it more seriously than we ever dreamed possible.

If you zoom out from the intense, dramatic minutiae of the baseball season’s most important game, Kershaw’s assertion that he is a failure, that he has not succeeded beyond most of our wildest dreams, is completely ridiculous. In fact, the pitcher was up for his forth Cy Young award this postseason, where winning more than three puts you in a coveted circle of historical magnitude. From whatever perspective you choose to come at this by, even that of a dismayed Dodger fan, it’s hard to see him, or the Dodgers, as having “failed.”

Sports fans are doing the work of empathy.

The fact is, if we only ever showed up on game day to win, if that was our only valid measurement of triumph, the enjoyment of play would be a pretty pointless pursuit—especially when, in the MLB for example, you have a one in thirty shot at glory during a pretty good year. And maybe when we as fans acknowledge the sadness and absurdity of a player’s personal disappointment, understand that there is more to a season than that final game, we are actually offering ourselves the same kindness.

The act of loving sports trains us to not only care about the joy of perfect strangers, but also to want to alleviate their pain. In the stands we are developing a kindness and understanding that trophies, parades, and ultimate victories are not the true measure of worth. We are doing the work of empathy, learning to forgive the “failures” of both ourselves and others, learning to become more human—all of which are valuable lessons indeed. ♦

(Photo credit: Image courtesy of Malingering via Flickr.)

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