playthings

update December 2021

Academic texts have a life of their own, and this one is a good example. Before I proceed, let me go through the publication history of this text. This text started as a set of ideas that derived from my teaching, specifically from teaching a bit about sex toys in my Play Design course in 2018, and the whole playful approach of technology in my PlayLab course. I needed to have a reference that allowed me to talk about materiality, embodiment, and my problems with the “ontology” of games and toys. So I wrote Playthings, and discussed it with my colleagues in a work in progress session at the Center for Computer Games Research. My colleagues’ feedback, especially Hajo Backe’s turned it into a text I was happy with, that did the work I wanted it to do. It was looooooong and really detailed in my appropriation of Barad and cyborg theory, and I thought it ready to submit to Game Studies. So I did, and it got rejected, with one mildly negative review and a very negative one.