A reminder: next Play Group session is Wed 31st March, in room 14 at 1.30. Please send me suggestions for the agenda.

Has anyone had a look at the website  - http://www.joystickjunkies.com I thought Raiford might be particularly interested - it is a curious but interesting combination of games, fashion, music and other bits of pop culture with some very nice artwork and a 'female friendly' authorship and membership.  There are details here of an album inspired by video games and a night of all japanese music as well as the opportunity to buy 'space invader' clothing.  Worth a glance... at least. 

On the subject of useful quotations it would be interesting to gather from all corners the ways in which the concepts of play and performance are increasingly central to media studies and pop cult studs discussion of text/reader relations.  A lot of it emerges from studies of fandom - eg Matt Hills draws from  (and resists) some of Silverstone's ideas around this but ends his tome on fandom with a study of a particular group which depends upon the use of Winnicott.  So now Winnicott's notion of a third space crops up to solve the problem of text/reader models - didnt our John Hodgson propose something similar?  Another example is the work of PhD student Jeannette Monaco who uses Schechner's tropes of performance alongside Turner's concept of the liminoid in an analysis of the fan discourse in Sopranoland (particularly focussed on a flamewar that lasted almost 6 months).  Interesting.  [What is also interesting is the questions Monaco goes on to pose around the ways in which the technologies deployed in the construction of the more recent website have a performative effect on the fan discourse itself.  But this is more focussed on the idea of technology than play.]

 posted by Helen

Is there a philosopher in the house ? Gadamer ? I found his use of play in Truth and Method really interesting but couldn't quite get a grip on his context. Might this be a useful discussion session - is there a new date ? Since we're collecting killer quotes, ‘If we examine how the word play is used … we find talk of the play of light, the play of waves, the play of a component in a bearing-case, the inter-play of limbs, the play of forces, the play of gnats, even a play on words. ….The movement which is play has no goal which brings it to an end; rather it renews itself in constant repetition. The movement back and forwards is obviously so central for the definition of a game that it is not important who or what performs this movement. ‘ (Gadamer 1981 : 93 Truth and Method Sheed and Ward London UK)

From 'TV: re-situating the popular in the people' by John Fiske, in Continuum

"Ang and Hobson both use the notion of play to account for the way that their subjects watch Dallas and Crossroads respectively. In particular, their women viewers played with the boundary between reality and representation. [...] [They] found evidence of fans' belief in the 'reality' of the represented characters, but also found that the women knew what they were doing when they made this confusion. It was a playful, controlled self-delusion that increased their pleasure, and put them in a position of greater power within the process of representation. It also enhanced TV's intersection with their oral culture.

Play of this sort is a form of empowerment because it devolves the final stage of the process of representation to the subordinate. This power may not in itself be oppositional or radical, but it is, at the very least, the power to be different. It is perhaps too much to expect popular art which, in its commodity form, is produced and distributed by capitalist institutions to be directly radical or subversive. But its indirect subversiveness may be greater than most theorists have given it credit for. The dominant value system works towards homogenisation, and homogenisation is a powerful reactionary force, for the value system that it tries to universalise is always that of the socially powerful. The power to be different, then, is a crucial, if not the crucial, stance of resistance".