Playing Toward a Feminist Theory of Games

Spoken Words on a Digital Fridge: Playing Toward a Feminist Theory of Game

Megan Mize, Danielle Roach, Daniel Cox

During 2016 CCCC , our team facilitated a playful activity during the Feminist Action Hour. As part of our participation, we then had the opportunity to publish our work in Peitho. We described our project thusly:

Play theorist Roger Caillois proposes that play exists along a continuum from structured play (ludus) to free play (paidia). With our Speak and Hear with Us app, we look to move the conversation about games in academia toward the paidiac end of that spectrum while also subverting what a game can be. As you engage with our application, we encourage you to consider how play—specifically play with recorded and remixed media—functions as a feminist strategy for embodied praxis. We also invite you to compare your experience with Speak and Hear with Us to ours building and testing this tool, both before and during the 2016 CCCC meeting. In all, it is our hope that our workshop will yield ongoing insight into the rhetorical capacity of collective play as a means of feminist action.

The full write-up is available at this link with the playful activity or select the image below to go directly to the activity.