Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/227858
Title: Probing Interfaces: New Games, Spacewar!, and the Gamification of Complexity
Authors: Hong, Renyi 
Keywords: Social Sciences
Communication
gamification
complexity
AI ethics
New Games
Spacewar
Stewart Brand
interface
Issue Date: 1-Jan-2021
Publisher: USC ANNENBERG PRESS
Citation: Hong, Renyi (2021-01-01). Probing Interfaces: New Games, Spacewar!, and the Gamification of Complexity. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION 15 : 1836-1854. ScholarBank@NUS Repository.
Abstract: “Theory of Game Change,” written by Stewart Brand in 1976 for the New Games movement, provides one of the earliest examples of digital game logics being brought into real-world use. This article focuses on this event to reconsider gamification’s play on complexity. Applying Spacewar! to New Games, Brand sneaked in an epistemology of the computer interface, breaking real-world games down into parameters to modulate and probe complex systems. The result carried a utopian cybernetic imaginary: Changes in rules were meant to motivate spontaneous and harmonious adaptions to new situations. The black-boxing of complexity required of this process, however, carries the solutionist impulse that would later form the main critique of gamification. Yet, focusing on the critique neglects the relations that gamification has with complexity and limits the critical potential that the term presents as a demand for ethical accountability.
Source Title: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
URI: https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/227858
ISSN: 19328036
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