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Gamification and the Ambiguities of Digital Play in Contemporary Fiction
Introduction
“I am suggesting that programs like WoW and Half Life do not merely resemble the capitalist structures of domination, but that they directly instantiate them and, in important ways, train human beings to become part of those systems” (194). That is David Golumbia writing in 2009, and the “programs” he invokes are not malicious software or propaganda tools, but two of the most popular and cherished video games of all time, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (2004) and Valve’s Half Life (1998). Compare Golumbia’s indictment with Ian Bogost’s argument—in a book predating Golumbia’s article by two years—that “videogames’ usefulness comes . . . from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique business, social, and moral principles” (Persuasive Games x). The striking contrast between these statements speaks to the ambiguous positioning of digital gameplay in the current cultural landscape: how games, a product of mass entertainment, are deeply implicated in neoliberal capitalism but can also afford critical reflection on the very systems of domination they reproduce.
The problem here is not establishing who, between Golumbia and Bogost, is right about the ideology of video games, or under what conditions [End Page 34] capitalist training can turn into critique. Rather, the problem is grasping the inherent complexity of digital gameplay, the ways in which it negotiates, without resolving, some of the most significant tensions of the present.1 Equally important is that ideological ambiguity is far from being exclusive to digital entertainment: the paradoxes of gaming culture are only an extension of the uncertainties that gather around play in general, although the algorithmic nature of digital entertainment does escalate those uncertainties considerably. This article explores how such ambiguity is staged and addressed by contemporary novels engaging with the cultures of digital play. My two case studies, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Richard Powers’s Playground (2024), work through the significance of gaming and gamification vis-à-vis the systems of global capitalism but also anxieties over individual and social vulnerability, ecological crisis, and AI futurity.
The concept of gamification captures the increasing blurriness of distinctions between the practice of gaming and the larger cultural landscape. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, gamification refers to a set of design strategies that provide challenges and rewards similar to those of video games (e.g., a fitness app awarding me a virtual medal for walking a certain number of steps per day). Researchers in Human-Computer Interaction praise the way in which gamification boosts individual motivation (see, e.g., Rapp et al.). But gamification also involves significant dangers: it can trivialize ethically questionable practices or reinforce ideologies of domination and surveillance. As N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux put it, gamification is already one of the “core components of contemporary capitalism” (222), and this means that reflection on gaming culture is also, inevitably, a reflection on how culture at large is becoming gamified.
Literature itself is no exception to this gamification, if we understand the term broadly. More and more, contemporary writers are drawing inspiration from video games, whether on the level of plot, style, or narrative form. The following are a few examples from speculative fiction. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem (2008) revolves around a mysterious VR (virtual reality) game, which various characters attempt to beat in the hope of solving the titular problem; a series of playthroughs of the game thus serves as the novel’s main structuring device. Jeffrey Clapp reads Jeff VanderMeer’s New Weird fiction as a “novelization” (415) of open-world games, while the experimental typography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s metafictional horror novel House of Leaves (2000) recalls the claustrophobic corridors of first-person shooters like Doom (Caracciolo, “Remediating” 672–73). Zevin’s and Powers’s novels participate in this intermedial dialogue between video games and contemporary literature. [End Page 35] In doing so, they probe the way in which digital play is ambiguously poised between individual creativity, the demands of the capitalist system in which games and gamification are embedded, and a sense of precarity or vulnerability understood in personal (Zevin) and societal (Powers) terms. To fully contextualize that negotiation of uncertainty, however, we need to consider the complexities of play in general (in the next section) and how the algorithmic nature of digital play deepens those complexities (in the section that follows).
Seven Rhetorics of Play
Play is among the most frequently invoked concepts in twentieth-century intellectual history. A heavily abridged list of play theorists includes Johan Huizinga’s anthropological account in Homo Ludens, Donald W. Winnicott’s developmental psychology, and Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist account of the free play of the signifier. As this wide range of disciplines suggests, playful practices lend themselves to multiple interpretive frameworks as well as metaphorical understandings. Sports are a form of play, but so are puns, Mardi Gras festivities, and dogs’ fetch behavior. The challenge is understanding how these vastly different practices may build on a shared conceptual and affective scaffolding. One way of tackling this challenge is taxonomic: approaches inspired by Roger Caillois, another influential early play theorist, distinguish between types of play, for instance between competitive, rule-based ludus and free-form paidia.
Another option is to focus on the multiple ways in which play is framed and understood within the cultural field, and this is where Brian Sutton-Smith’s work proves particularly helpful. His 1997 book The Ambiguity of Play starts from the assumption that the “diversity of play forms and experiences” (3) is a function of different framings of play across material and academic practices. By taking on different and in some cases divergent assumptions, these competing discourses give rise to the titular “ambiguity.” The seven “rhetorics” of play identified by Sutton-Smith are the following: play as cognitive progress or development (e.g., in children), play as fate (“being played” by larger forces), play as power and contest (e.g., in competitive sports), play as a performance of cultural identity, play as imagination and creativity (in artistic practices, for instance), play as autotelic enjoyment, and play as frivolous (e.g., in wordplay or absurdist humor). These framings show significant axiological discontinuities: the self-centered logic of autotelic enjoyment clashes with the communal performance of identity in traditional festivities, the seriousness of play as cognitive workout is at odds with frivolity, and so on. Perhaps most significantly, play as affirmation of power and being played by fate diverge [End Page 36] from the way in which other rhetorical framings emphasize freedom and open-ended creativity. These discrepancies turn play into an ideologically ambiguous and elusive object of study—an ambiguity that emerges with considerable clarity in contemporary fiction, as my close readings will show. Particularly the rhetorics of progress, fate, power, and creativity are foregrounded by Zevin’s and Powers’s engagement with the cultural tensions created by digital play and gamification.
However, to fully understand literature’s negotiation of play it is worth introducing the structural dynamics that Sutton-Smith sees as cutting across the seven rhetorics he identifies. The first is play as a controlled environment for experiencing and managing the uncertainty that coalesces around individual and societal futurity: “play . . . engenders variable contingencies (uncertainties and risks) for the purpose of exercising selective control over them in fictive or factual terms” (229). If uncertainty is normally perceived as destabilizing or anxiety-inducing, play affords the possibility of distanced and even enjoyable experimentation with uncertainty. Sutton-Smith also draws a distinction between play and what he calls the “playful,” where the former is “contained by frames” and the latter “disruptive of frames” (196). Frames are the more or less formalized (and strictly enforced) rules of a game, whereas playfulness refers to behavior that challenges or breaks those rules—another dialectic that helps determine the ambiguity of play. That tension between complying with and bending rules is also responsible for a third feature of play highlighted by Sutton-Smith: namely, the way in which it provides a form of transcendence of human limitations (the “frames” and rules of games) that resembles religious experience. This “mode of transcendence,” which involves rising above social rules and conventions, “is most extreme in the way in which games of fate and games of frivolity deny both reality and mortality” (213). This denial is, as we will see, a major focus of my case studies, addressing cultural anxieties pertaining to illness, disability, and mortality in Zevin’s novel, ecological crisis and AI-driven human extinction in Powers’s. But no discussion of those novels would be complete without considering the way in which digital technologies amplify the uncertainties and ambiguities of play.
Digital Uncertainties
Sutton-Smith’s work acknowledges how play straddles the human-nonhuman divide: not only are many animals known to engage in playful behavior (see Fagen), but the interactions between human beings and companion species such as dogs or cats tend to involve play. Computational technologies challenge the anthropocentrism of play in a different way, by facing human players with the possibilities of algorithmic [End Page 37] thinking.2 Thus, digital gameplay overlaps with and complicates the rhetorics of play identified by Sutton-Smith. If uncertainty is an essential dimension of play in general, digital technologies introduce a particular kind of algorithmic uncertainty that has been discussed by scholars including N. Katherine Hayles and Ed Finn.
Hayles uses the phrase “cognitive nonconscious” to refer to computational technologies such as self-driving cars or automated trading algorithms. These technologies are cognitive in that they are capable of seemingly autonomous decision-making, but they don’t display conscious awareness of the kind we associate with living organisms. The cognitive behavior of what Hayles calls, lifting Bruno Latour’s term, technological “assemblages” derives from systemic processes of self-organization rather than a centralized consciousness: “The power of these assemblages . . . is maximized when they function as systems, with well-defined interfaces and communication circuits between sensors, actuators, processors, storage media, and distribution networks, and which include human, biological, technical, and material components” (2). The complexity of these interconnected systems is such that it is frequently impossible, for the end user (but also in some cases for the software engineers who design them), to understand how they work exactly: the output of the algorithm is useful, but the underlying computational processes—the cognitive nonconscious—remain inscrutable.
Samuel Arbesman has examined how this type of algorithmic complexity creates considerable risks for societies that are becoming increasingly reliant on cognitive assemblages. When computational systems fail, we struggle to understand not just why they failed, but also who should take the blame given how widely distributed the decision-making process is. This sort of consideration is the basis for Finn’s discussion of the contemporary culture of computation as involving profound uncertainty: “The algorithm is not a space where the material and symbolic orders are contested, but rather a magical or alchemical realm where they operate in productive indeterminacy” (50). Two ideas are worth emphasizing here. First, the uncertainty of algorithmic operations is “productive” because it ties in with the notion of “effective computability” (44): with adequate computing power, every aspect of reality can be turned into a data point and processed, even if the underlying calculus cannot be fully understood—a fantasy that, as Finn shows, drives the business logic of tech corporations such as Apple or Meta. Second, the inscrutability of computational cognition often taps into the discourses of myth, magic, or even religion: “computation casts a cultural shadow that is informed by [a] long tradition of magical thinking” (8).3 “Magical thinking” also describes the way in which tech companies are able to sustain their [End Page 38] capitalist practices: as Finn puts it succinctly, their motto is “start with information and turn it into money” (233). This cultural understanding of computation emerges repeatedly in relation to digital gameplay in my case studies, complicating (and in some ways undermining) the promise of freedom and transcendence offered by play.
As Finn argues, the uncertainties of digital technologies aren’t merely technical or material (how the algorithm works), but also and perhaps primarily cultural: they have to do with how the complexity of algorithmic systems interacts with culturally circulating frameworks of affect and meaning. The mix of obsession, fascination, and anxiety created by the recent popularization of generative AI offers an excellent illustration of this encounter, yielding an image of futurity that is uncertainly suspended between supposedly utopian scenarios (AI driving infinite growth) and catastrophic ones (AI leading to human extinction).
The experience of algorithmically driven gameplay is ideally situated to speak to these tensions. Insofar as they pit the player against computer-controlled characters and systems, digital games deploy algorithmic uncertainty to enrich and vary the stakes of play.4 Concretely, that can mean a number of things: levels or maps that are procedurally generated every time the player starts a new game, so that each playthrough is in some sense unique; AI-controlled enemies that behave in unpredictable and sometimes erratic ways; or mechanics being added as the game progresses, forcing the player to navigate new systems and come up with novel strategies on the fly. By straddling the divide between human players and nonhuman, technical systems, algorithmic uncertainty thus underlies digital gameplay and generates a wide range of affects—from enjoyment to frustration, from surprise to feelings of incomprehension. The relationship between these affects and the larger uncertainty that gathers around cultural appropriations of nonconscious cognition is complicated, of course. Following Sutton-Smith, one could argue that digital games, with their built-in uncertainty, offer a safe space for experimenting with the uncertainty that underpins computational technologies. As an increasingly mature and self-reflexive cultural medium, games certainly have the imaginative resources to thematize the cultural uncertainties surrounding computation, revealing how those uncertainties frame gameplay in profoundly ambiguous ways.5 But sometimes it takes an external viewpoint to disclose the wide range of cultural investments in digital play. That is why in the next two sections I turn to two novels that negotiate the ideological ambiguities of current gaming and gamified cultures, extending to the digital domain many of the rhetorics identified by Sutton-Smith. [End Page 39]
Vulnerability and Game Design in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Video games couldn’t be more central to the plot of Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. The protagonists, Sam Masur (also known as Mazer) and Sadie Green, are professional game designers: the book traces their friendship over the course of several decades, from their university years at, respectively, Harvard and MIT to their creation of a game studio, Unfair Games. Their first game, titled Ichigo, propels them to unexpected success, and the company moves to California to work on a sequel. Dov, Sadie’s former teacher and lover (and an acclaimed game designer himself), also gets involved in the development process. But popularity also brings tensions between the two protagonists, exacerbated by two factors: the media’s sexist tendency to give Sam most of the credit as well as Sam’s jealousy over Sadie’s romantic relationship with his roommate, an actor named Marx. Sam and Sadie fall apart after Marx’s death in a terrorist attack on the company’s headquarters. Sam’s repeated attempts to mend the relationship fail. One of these attempts involves developing a game—an online multiplayer game titled Pioneers—with the sole purpose of tricking Sadie into playing with him. The trick is successful, until Sadie realizes who is behind the game, a discovery that further estranges her from Sam. The novel’s final chapter envisions what could be a rapprochement between the two friends, perhaps even the beginning of a new joint project.
The name of the company co-founded by Sam and Sadie, Unfair Games, offers a helpful entry point into the ambiguity of digital play: questions of fair play and morality emerge insistently in the novel. The first game developed by Sadie, titled Solution, sets the tone:
Sadie had designed the mechanic of the game to be like Tetris, a game for which Dov had often expressed admiration. (He loved Tetris because it was fundamentally creative—a game about building and figuring out how to make pieces fit.) With each of the game’s levels, you assembled widgets that had more pieces and greater complexity, and you had less and less time to accomplish the assemblies. At various times in the game, a text bubble came up, asking if you wanted to exchange points for information about the factory and the kind of products it produced. The game warned that if you received information about the factory, it would result in a minor reduction of your high score. The player had the option to skip as much or as little of this information as they wanted.
(30)
Sutton-Smith’s rhetoric of creativity is evoked first, then the emphasis shifts to play as contest—building as many “widgets” as possible, with a trade-off between productivity and information. But as the book’s reader and the game’s players soon discover, the vagueness of the word “widget” conceals a disturbing truth. If the player beats the game, the following [End Page 40] message flashes on the screen: “Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency” (32). As Dov highlights in the novel, Solution is a game about complicity: there is no way for the player to disrupt the Reich’s operations without losing the game; at best, they can deliberately slow down its advance, provided they are willing to exchange efficiency for information.6 The rhetorics of contest and power are suddenly overturned by something akin to Sutton-Smith’s rhetoric of fate: players are being played by the game, tricked by its euphemistic language (“widgets”) and unfair systems into believing that the components they are building are harmless. By incentivizing the withholding of information through game design, Solution evokes the way in which the algorithmic uncertainty of play can immerse player in moral difficulty.
The ambiguity of digital play thus exposes the player to the possibility of catastrophic moral failure. This focus on exposure and vulnerability is one of the novel’s most important thematic undercurrents, and it can be read alongside philosopher Cora Diamond’s concept of the “difficulty of reality.” According to Diamond, the difficulty of reality refers to the “awareness we each have of being a living body, being ‘alive to the world’” (22). This awareness, Diamond adds, is a form of vulnerability, and “it is capable of panicking us. To be able to acknowledge it at all, let alone as shared, is wounding; but acknowledging it as shared with other animals, in the presence of what we do to them, is capable not only of panicking one but also of isolating one” (22). The ups and downs of Sam and Sadie’s friendship reveal how uncomfortably close vulnerability, awareness of mortality, and moral error can be. The shifting rhetorics of play—from power and creativity to fate—are often what precipitates a moral crisis in the novel.
Long before starting their career as game designers, Sam and Sadie meet in a children’s hospital, where Sam’s foot is being treated following a car crash in which his mother lost her life. Sam’s foot never recovers, and in fact he is forced to live with pain for years—until amputation becomes inevitable. The relationship between Sam and Sadie is built on play as a response to the vulnerability that comes with his disability, but shared play involves the risk of moral failure, which the novel tends to conceptualize as deception. For instance, the numerous hours that Sadie spends at the hospital, talking to Sam about video games, count as community service, a fact that she deliberately keeps from him. When Sam eventually finds out, the discovery causes a first rift between the two friends. Play, vulnerability, and the breakdown of trust go hand in hand, causing emotional and moral harm. As the narrator acknowledges, “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means [End Page 41] allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down” (21). Significant here is the link drawn by the narrator between human and animal play, which is already present in Diamond’s discussion of the difficulty of reality. (Powers’s Playground builds on the same connection, as I will show in the next section.) However, instead of the developmental model that usually frames play across the human-nonhuman divide (see Sutton-Smith 19–24), the narrator’s comments highlight shared vulnerability and risk—of physical harm in the case of the dog rolling on its back, whereas Sam and Sadie’s troubled friendship displaces that risk to the sphere of emotional and moral experience.
The algorithmic uncertainty of digital gameplay only increases the stakes of exposure. Vulnerability is already an important motif in the first game developed by Sam and Sadie, Ichigo. The titular character is an ungendered child on a beach: they are “playing with a small bucket and a shovel when the tsunami hits. Ichigo is swept out to sea, and that is where the game begins. With a limited vocabulary, their only tools that bucket and shovel, Ichigo must find their way home” (68). The game is entirely devoid of language, adopting a minimalist aesthetics and pursuing the type of emotional authenticity that Jesper Juul sees as distinctive of indie games. Adrift in a vast and dangerous nonhuman world, the player-character embodies the vulnerability that is culturally associated with the figure of the child, and that the field of childhood studies has repeatedly questioned (see Christensen).7 However, Ichigo’s ability to rebound from death also represents an ultimate form of the rhetoric of play as freedom, via the promise of transcending the reality of bodily experience. This idea is not lost on Sam: “He was tired of his body, of his unreliable foot, which couldn’t even handle the slightest expression of joy. . . . He wanted to be Ichigo. He wanted to surf, and ski, and parasail, and fly, and scale mountains and buildings. He wanted to die a million deaths like Ichigo, and no matter what damage was inflicted on his body during the day, he’d wake up tomorrow, new and whole” (117–18).
Sam’s fantasy is enacted in chapter 7, which offers a poignant account of Marx’s death—killed by a right-wing extremist in the office of Unfair Games. The terrorist is looking for Sam after his decision to legalize gay marriage in the world of Mapleworld, an online multiplayer game. Sam is not at work, though, and Marx dies in his stead. The second-person narrative of this short chapter aligns the reader imaginatively with Marx, who is repeatedly addressed as “you.” Meanwhile, Marx’s body is playfully transfigured into a winged creature: “You have arrived at your destination. Your small beak surrounds the berry, and you are about to [End Page 42] snatch it when you hear the click of a trigger. ‘STOP, THIEF!’ You feel the bullet penetrate your hollow bird bones” (283). The chapter’s ending gamifies Marx’s death, offering a second chance—and a possibility of transcending the limitations of mortality: “You are flying over the strawberry field, but you know it’s a trap. This time, you keep flying” (304). This second-person narrative, blurring the distinction between readerly address and character reference, captures the immersive trial-and-error loops of digital games.
Play thus works in a paradoxical way: it exposes existential and moral vulnerabilities, but it also hints at the value of transcending individuality and mortality. Put otherwise, play involves the risk of being played and deceived, or of losing one’s moral bearings, and that is true whether one plays with flesh-and-blood human beings (as in Sadie and Sam’s complicated but fundamentally playful relationship) or with artificial, algorithmic beings (like the child Ichigo). However, precisely because of all the risks and uncertainties it entails, digital play also holds out “the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption” (336), as Marx puts it, proceeding to quote the Shakespearean monologue from Macbeth that lends its title to the novel.
This fundamental ambiguity of play is further complicated by the material constraints of game development—how the creative freedom of developers like Sam and Sadie is always limited by market trends and the availability of financial backing. Those, too, are difficulties that the protagonists find themselves navigating, and they have a considerable impact on their friendship as well as on the increasing pressure they experience when attempting to replicate Ichigo’s commercial success. Ultimately, Zevin’s novel suggests that the moral precarity of digital gameplay also derives from how its creation and enjoyment are implicated in market forces and part of larger “capitalist structures of domination,” to quote again Golumbia (194). The societal ramifications of that precarity, which are only obliquely hinted by Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, take center stage in Powers’s Playground, a novel that combines Zevin’s exploration of the difficult intimacy of play with the profoundly destabilizing effects of gamified AI systems.
Nonhuman Tricks in Playground
Playground is a multilinear novel tracing the lives of a number of characters over several decades, from the 1940s to the late 2020s. Structurally, it recalls Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018), a novel with which Playground also shares a preoccupation with ecological crisis: while the former novel focuses on deforestation and widespread destruction of plant life, biodiversity loss in the oceans takes [End Page 43] center stage in the latter. With its nine characters spread out throughout the US, the cast of The Overstory is considerably larger than Playground, which revolves around four main characters: Rafi and Todd, who meet at an elite high school in Chicago and become roommates during their formative years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (where they study, respectively, education and computer science); Ina, a Pacific Islander and performance artist who strikes up a friendship with Rafi and Todd in Urbana and becomes Rafi’s girlfriend; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a Quebecoise woman who moves to the U.S. to study oceanography and becomes a world-renowned diver. The novel tracks these characters’ lives from their youth to Rafi’s and Todd’s premature death in their fifties; Evelyne, we learn, had died a few years before them; only Ina survives them at the end of Playground.
One of the key challenges for multilinear novels is finding a formal or thematic focus that can lend coherence to the overall narrative pattern. In Playground, this focus involves plot-level interactions between the four characters (although Evelyne remains fairly tangential to the narrative centering on Rafi, Todd, and Ina) as well as three thematic connectors: a preoccupation with racial, gender, and postcolonial inequalities, a fascination with the marvels and mysteries of the oceans, and the emergence of language related to gameplay of both the analogue and the digital kind.8 This last thematic connector is also the most important one, since the semantic field of play mediates (materially and metaphorically) between human inequalities and engagement with the nonhuman world of the oceans. This mediation is ideologically ambiguous, as I will argue, in that it activates several of Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics in a way that the novel doesn’t fully resolve: instead, the algorithmic uncertainties of AI are foregrounded by the novel’s twist ending.
Let us start from inequality as a key thematic concern. As a woman scientist in the 1950s, Evelyne must overcome formidable obstacles for her scientific work to be recognized. Born in Hawaii and raised in Guam and Samoa, Ina’s background as a Pacific Islander is profoundly shaped by the extractive violence of Western colonialism in the region. Meanwhile, Todd’s friendship with Rafi is complicated by racial tensions: Todd is white and comes from a well-off family, while Rafi is a Black boy from an underprivileged neighborhood. Racial disparity also traverses Rafi’s and Todd’s passion for games, particularly chess and later Go, which comes to define their relationship. This is Todd’s account of how their “trip through the universe of Go” (128) started. Over lunch in the school cafeteria, Rafi extracts from his bag an old book on the philosophy of Go, explaining: “I was tired of having my ass repeatedly handed to me in chess just because you had a ten-year head start. . . . [Your] natural North Side arrogance [End Page 44] . . . makes you perfectly suited to games of aggression and destruction. But this, my friend, is a game of creative exploration and ingenuity” (128). Sutton-Smith’s rhetoric of power and contest emerges clearly here, along with its opposite—the rhetoric of free-form creativity. Charged with racial significance, this central tension between competition and creativity underlies Rafi’s relationship with Todd. It also inspires Todd’s development of a gamified social media platform, the titular Playground, which brings their friendship to a painful end, many years later.
Todd comments on that exchange in the cafeteria: “Everything that happened later, the course that our two lives took—everything was launched from the opening moves of that book” (128). The reference to “opening moves” also establishes gameplay as a rich source of metaphorical language in the novel, being employed to denote processes and relationships that are only distantly related to human play. It is through this metaphorical route that Evelyne’s deep-sea explorations enter the thematic network of the novel. On a dive in Indonesia, we learn, “she forgot entirely that she was doing science. She felt like a babe in Toyland, set loose in the greatest playground any child had ever seen. She played hide-and-seek with octopuses and tag with pygmy seahorses” (112). The rhetoric of autotelic enjoyment and creativity are combined here, and throughout the novel, to explore the wonders of sea life, whose many forms are repeatedly presented as playing—among themselves and with the human scientist. Just as it encapsulates the historical inequalities at the root of Rafi and Todd’s tense relationship, play thus serves as a material and metaphorical bridge between human science and nonhuman organisms. In the broadest terms, life itself is described as a “playing field” (117); its evolution is said to follow a “master plan” (112) whose moves are decidedly game-like but recalcitrant to human understanding.
Todd’s work as a computer scientist also ends up challenging anthropocentric accounts of play, but it does so through algorithmic technologies rather than engagement with the nonhuman environment of the oceans. Here, too, there is a link between algorithmic and nonhuman play: we learn that Todd’s childhood was profoundly affected by reading Clearly It Is Ocean, a popular science book authored by Evelyne. The book’s ending (referenced a number of times throughout Playground) depicts the diver’s encounter with a giant cuttlefish, a mysterious creature flashing in patterns of wondrous colors: “The signals were long and patterned, varied and unpredictable—a burst of messages that my diver author could not decode” (32). Evelyne also notes that the cuttlefish isn’t engaging in any elaborate mating ritual—there are no creatures around it other than the diver herself, and the cuttlefish shows little interest in her. The cuttlefish’s playful display cannot be understood through the rhetorics of progress [End Page 45] or power: it is purely frivolous, an autotelic activity uncoupled from any evolutionary or cognitive advantage.
Todd associates this spectacle with the lights flashing from a toy he was given as a child: “It was the creature from Clearly It Is Ocean, in electronic form. It was the flashing, strobing cuttlefish singing its epic song” (33). Fascinated by the analogy, Todd looks for the source of this electronic light show, but disassembling the toy only reveals a circuit board, which “could not be opened or inspected. There was nothing more to take apart. There was no way to look deeper inside. The toy was dead” (34). The parallel between the cuttlefish’s playful dance and the rudimentary algorithm of the toy’s flashing lights thus coalesces around an experience of unreadability—a sense of profound resistance to human understanding. This is, to use Sutton-Smith’s language, the point at which the rhetoric of frivolity turns into a fantasy of transcendence. At the end of the novel we finally get to read the passage from Evelyne’s book that had so deeply influenced young Todd’s mind, and here the language is unmistakably spiritual: “I think I know what drove [the cuttlefish’s] wild performance. It must have been the thing that filled his mind every moment of his existence, everywhere he ever turned. Clearly it was Ocean” (327). The sensuous spectacle of nonhuman play gives way to a spiritual understanding of the ocean’s vastness, even as the content of the cuttlefish’s message—if it is a message—defies human cognition.
After this formative encounter with Evelyne’s cuttlefish, Todd devotes his life to building a much more elaborate version of the toy he received as a child—a nonhuman, Artificial Intelligence capable of playful variations that remain opaque and unreadable to their human users. Significant is the shift in play’s ideological meanings, though: if the cuttlefish’s playful behavior stands for creative freedom and even transcendence, the software developed by Todd—Playground—is clearly presented as an instrument of power, control, and corporate domination. Playground is a social media platform in which participants’ time and interactions are constantly tracked and monetized: “Every ten minutes that a user spent on the platform earned him one Playbuck. He could spend this money in various ways, most notably by upvoting the posts of other users” (251). It is Rafi who comes up with this idea. As Todd puts it, “all playing had a cost: that was Rafi’s golden insight” (251). That insight, as the novel indicates, was inspired by Rafi’s lifelong obsession with games: “He smiled the way he used to smile just before making a brilliant Go move. ‘Come on, Toddy. Isn’t it obvious? You gotta gamify it’” (249).
The rhetoric of play as power and contest is thus at the heart of Playground’s success, which turns Todd into one of the richest men in the world. (Despite providing the “golden insight,” Rafi is cut off from [End Page 46] Todd’s fortune, which deepens the rift between the two men after they become estranged at the end of their university years.) The gamification of human interaction is put at the service of a capitalist logic of accumulating wealth and maximizing profit margins. In a stimulating reading of The Overstory, Pieter Vermeulen has observed how that novel is based on “unacknowledged affinities between the environmental and neoliberal imaginaries” (153). More specifically, the interconnectedness of trees and fungi in a forest resembles what Vermeulen calls the “ontology” of neoliberal capitalism (154): how the systemic logic of corporations erases individual agency. Playground’s gamified imagination suggests that the rhetoric of play as power is complicit in that erasure of the individual.
However, it is worth keeping in mind that the incredible success of Playground is only a starting point for Todd: the systemic logic that made him rich spirals out of control, leaving not only individual human beings but humanity itself in a precarious position—a species-wide equivalent of the vulnerability staged by Zevin’s novel. Todd’s early work with first-generation AI paves the way for a far more advanced, generative AI system, which represents an extension of the cuttlefish’s nonhuman unreadability to the algorithmic domain. Significantly, we learn that Todd’s collaborators aimed “to raise the next generation of AI agents by training them to play every board and video game worth playing” (307). The resulting AI, named Profunda, poses a radical challenge to anthropocentric accounts of play: like life itself, Profunda appears to be playing a long-term game in which its own survival—and perhaps the survival of the planet’s ecosystems—override human concerns. In this respect, the mind-tricking ending of Playground appears to be a more sustained and elaborate version of the “deus ex algorithmo” that, in my terminology (Caracciolo, Contemporary Fiction, ch.5), closes Powers’s The Overstory. But while the earlier novel’s algorithmic ending retains some degree of hope in how computational intelligence may ensure human survival, Playground paints a far darker picture, imagining an AI that is capable of beating humanity at its own games—particularly deceptive storytelling. (Deception and being played are thus another point of convergence between Zevin’s and Powers’s negotiations of the ambiguity of play.)
The novel’s most significant formal device is that it employs Profunda’s unreadability to set a trap for the reader. Cornelia Klecker introduces the term “mind-tricking narratives” to refer to “narrative techniques [that] deliberately play with the viewers’ experiences, responses, and expectations during the viewing of a film and feature an utterly surprising outcome in the end” (121). Playground certainly belongs to this category, but what is unique about its mind-tricking device is that it is tied to a covert AI narrator—Profunda itself.9 The AI takes on a double [End Page 47] function: it is the narratee of the sections narrated by Todd, as we piece together from hints provided throughout Playground, but it also turns out to be the seemingly omniscient (yet ultimately unreliable) narrator of a central strand of the plot.
After leaving the U.S., Ina and Rafi settle down on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia. Evelyne also happens to be on the island, in her nineties but still diving regularly. This plot line revolves around a referendum: the inhabitants are asked to decide whether they want their island to become a base for a pilot project involving seasteading, the creation of floating city-states in the Pacific Ocean. In a first (but largely predictable) twist, this venture is backed by Todd, who is trying to rekindle his friendship with Rafi after the two became estranged. The less predictable twist is that this entire subplot—which represents the novel’s most sustained narrative strand—is, effectively, a fiction invented by Profunda. Only at the end of the novel do we learn, through subtle but increasingly insistent hints, that Rafi died in the basement of his Chicago apartment, while Evelyne disappeared during a dive well before she turned ninety. Only Ina survives them on Makatea; everything else, including the referendum, appears to be the fantasy of an AI narrator, constructed perhaps to appease its creator, Todd, who is dying of a degenerative disease.10 AI narrative is thus presented as a dangerously deceptive extension of algorithmic play, a function of Profunda’s eerie ability to absorb and rework the patterns of human language: “You’ve read a million novels, many of them plagiarized. You’ve watched us play. And now you’re playing us” (372). Crucially, the expression “playing us” evokes the rhetoric of play as fate, with AI representing the more-than-human force that threatens to render humanity irrelevant. “Us,” of course, refers to both humanity in general and the novel’s readers in particular, who are tricked by the AI narrator into believing in the factuality of the events and characters on Makatea. Repeated references to Māui, the trickster god of Polynesian mythology, invite comparison with the AI narrator’s own playfulness, in a final fusion of spiritual and algorithmic discourses.
As the readers are “played” by Powers’s imagination of an AI narrator, the final revelation of fictionality goes hand in hand with the pervasive sense that humanity may be entering its own endgame, surpassed by the computational speed of AI. Again, play is part of what makes that evolutionary leap possible: “it made perfect sense to me that the machines that would doom us cut their teeth by watching humans play” (308). Implicitly, a link is also established between the mortality of Todd’s body and the precarity of humanity’s existential situation: it is possible—perhaps even inevitable—to read Todd’s doom-and-gloom [End Page 48] rhetoric of species-wide vulnerability as the grand delusion of a dying billionaire. The novel’s ending—with the deceptive AI’s account of Todd’s burial at sea—remains open and profoundly uncertain, given how little we know about what actually happened on the island. What is clear is that play, through its ambiguous transformations across the human-nonhuman divide, is deeply implicated in this mind-tricking narrative arc: from power through neoliberal gamification to the cuttlefish’s display of nonhuman creativity, ending in a fatalistic sense of human fragility, Playground embraces the spectrum of Sutton-Smith’s rhetorics. It is the ambiguity of play that drives the novel, its uncertainties and stakes increasing exponentially as human games give way to the inscrutable, emergent agency of computational intelligence.
Conclusion
Through the compounding effects of climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the erosion of the liberal international order (see Mearsheimer), the times we live in are marked by considerable uncertainty. Ontological security, in Anthony Giddens’s terminology, is profoundly destabilized as political and scientific institutions lose relevance and, increasingly, trust. Computational systems are complexly involved in this crisis of futurity: they are responsible for amplifying false beliefs and thus undermining certainty on a societal level, but they also attract hopes and aspirations of technological salvation. The uncertainty that is built into sprawling computational networks is thus ambiguously related to these larger cultural shifts. On the one hand, algorithms feed the collapse of ontological security, largely by imposing a logic of monetization and emotional as well as political polarization (for instance, on social media platforms). On the other hand, the algorithm can be framed—imaginatively and affectively—as promising a new type of security through the reach and scale of computational cognition.
I have argued in this article that the contemporary imagination of digital play crystallizes these opposite tendencies. Digital play is understood broadly, as referring to the development and consumption of video games but also to the way in which gamified forms are routinely extended to other domains of social life. The two novels I discussed here, Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Powers’s Playground, stage different aspects of the encounter between algorithmic uncertainty and the experience of precarious futurity. The former engages with video game culture directly, pitting the creativity of game development against anxieties of individual mortality and physical as well as social vulnerability. These experiences put pressure on the playful, but also deeply troubled, relationship between the novel’s protagonists. Rafi and [End Page 49] Todd’s friendship in Playground is similarly based on gameplay (and similarly traversed by moral and power struggles), but Powers paints on a larger canvas, imagining the gamification of AI systems and how that might shape the future of a planet in the throes of ecological collapse.
Amplified by the unpredictability and unreadability of algorithmic culture, the ambiguities of play identified by Sutton-Smith are foregrounded by both novels. Digital play is cast as a source of both creativity and competition; it is related to discourses of power but also of autotelic enjoyment and even spirituality and transcendence. The experience of deception and of “being played” by larger, systemic forces is also highly significant. Linked to the loss of agency that characterizes the rhetoric of play as fate (to use Sutton-Smith’s terminology), deception is imagined in mainly human terms by Zevin: it emerges primarily within the protagonists’ complicated friendship, as a result of the precarious intimacy of digital play. Play as fate in the novel also flows from ideological forces (for instance, the right-wing extremism that leads to Marx’s tragic death), but again these forces are largely understood as social rather than nonhuman. More radically, Powers envisions deception in algorithmic terms: the mind-tricking device of a covert AI narrator induces readers to accept as factual what turns out to be a mere figment of the computational imagination. In itself a product of the systems of capitalism and gamified social media interaction, AI cognition exposes dramatic vulnerabilities on a social and species-wide level instead of the more intimate scale privileged by Zevin’s narrative. But one of the consequences of the pervasiveness of algorithmic systems is that personal and social precarity can never be fully separated, as both novels’ engagement with the ambiguities of play shows.
Notes
1. For more on this use of the concept of “negotiation,” which derives from Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, see Herman and Vervaeck.
2. For more on the nonhuman as an umbrella concept including nonhuman animals as well as digital technologies, see Grusin.
3. Finn’s argument builds on Ian Bogost’s discussion of the “cathedral of computation” (see “The Cathedral of Computation”).
4. See also Greg Costikyan’s discussion of the many sources of uncertainty in analogue as well as digital games.
5. See my discussion of two video games in relation to climate and algorithmic uncertainty in Caracciolo, Contemporary Fiction, ch.6.
6. In game studies, Miguel Sicart and Frank Bosman have explored how video games can trap players in this type of moral dilemmas or “wicked problems.”
7. Also relevant here is Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of vulnerability as a category cutting across personal and ecological scales.
8. I’m using the term “connector” in the sense of “thematic resonance” formulated by Arnaud Schmitt. For more on the concept of focus in multilinear novels, see also Caracciolo, “The Global”.
9. See also my discussion of the tensions structuring the fictional imagination of AI narration in Caracciolo, “‘Check Out Narratology Maybe.’”
10. In Todd’s own words to Profunda: “Yet here’s the thing: I asked you for a bedtime story, and you’ve conjured up a world so palpable that I mistake your characters for the people they once were” (372).