{"id":2258,"date":"2013-05-09T09:51:39","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T09:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2013\/05\/09\/recess-11-restate-my-assumptions\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T10:49:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T08:49:14","slug":"recess-11-restate-my-assumptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2013\/05\/09\/recess-11-restate-my-assumptions\/","title":{"rendered":"Recess! 11 \u2013 Restate My Assumptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Alper and Niels,<\/p>\n

My apologies, I fell off the Recess! horse there for a minute. But I\u2019m back in the saddle. Let\u2019s see, what were we talking about again?<\/p>\n

Alper obsessively played Ultratron<\/a> for a while, got bored, stopped and felt guilty for spending 11 hours on it.<\/p>\n

Niels helped make Toki Tori 2<\/a>, got all conflicted about his feelings for the game and went on about how elegantly its world conveys his story.<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/em> I hope you\u2019ll both excuse me while I don my schoolmaster\u2019s cap and proceed to school you.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling Alper feels Moves<\/a> offers more meaningful play than Ultratron<\/a>. He\u2019s stuck in what Sutton-Smith<\/a> calls \u2018the rhetorics of animal progress\u2019. The idea that play is only meaningful when it contributes to \u2018individual development and group culture\u2019. Alper, you should lighten up and maybe submit to the rhetoric of frivolity. Put simply, you should allow yourself to play the fool. Because \u201cunlike the rest of us, who are all losers in most of the conventional senses, and most surely in the mortal sense, the fool transcends triviality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Niels, on the other hand, should do himself a favor and read Remediation<\/a> because he seems to think \u2018immediacy\u2019 is the holy grail of media. The medium should disappear, it should not get in the way of the audience\u2019s experience of the message. Well Niels, I have news for you: immediacy is only one possible media mode and its drawbacks are considerable. Most importantly, it precludes critical engagement of an audience with a medium\u2019s message. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, foregrounds the workings of media. It foregoes \u2018immersion\u2019 and \u2018seamlesness\u2019 in favor of bricolage<\/a> and seamfulness<\/a> (PDF). In doing so, it allows for active audience engagement. Don\u2019t you wish that for your stories?<\/p>\n

In short, let\u2019s restate our assumptions<\/a>. I\u2019ll go first:<\/p>\n

  1. Play can be meaningful and useless at the same time. <\/li>\n
  2. Games can tell stories without being immersive. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Kars<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games. Dear Alper and Niels, My apologies, I fell off the Recess! horse there for a minute. But I\u2019m back in the saddle. Let\u2019s see, what were we talking about again? Alper obsessively played Ultratron for a while, got bored, stopped and felt guilty for spending … Continue reading Recess! 11 \u2013 Restate My Assumptions<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[983],"tags":[874,408,959,637,259,956,955,957,650,118,950,175,960,953,954,952,436,958,457,951,949],"class_list":["post-2258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tumblr","tag-assumptions","tag-brian-sutton-smith","tag-bricolage","tag-frivolity","tag-games","tag-hypermediacy","tag-immediacy","tag-immersion","tag-meaning","tag-media","tag-moves","tag-narrative","tag-pi","tag-progress","tag-remediation","tag-rhetoric","tag-seamfulness","tag-seamlesness","tag-stories","tag-toki-tori-2","tag-ultratron"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4665,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions\/4665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}