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Short abstract:

Exploring embodied modes of play at video game events, this research investigates the interplay between formal game orders and open-ended ludic practices that celebrate serendipity and indeterminacy.

Long abstract:

Thousands of gamers gather regularly at video game events to celebrate spectacles of technoscience intertwined with embodied enactments of play. Based on a multi-modal ethnography of 17 gaming festivals across Europe, this contribution explores different strategies of ludic practices, illustrating how game, play, and playfulness are embodied in ambiguous forms that navigate between orders and indeterminacies.

The events dedicated to digital games incorporate orders of play, including preformed procedures, repetitions, and rule-sets. But beyond formal game frames, participants engage in more open-ended modes of play and embrace a playful attitude that transcends established boundaries of games, generating paradoxical states of reality solely for the sake of play itself.

Metacommunicative frames of play, such as declaring tasks as quests, emerge as complementary strategies to commercialized gamification processes prevalent in contemporary gaming culture. Furthermore, playfulness permeates interactions, serving as both a consequence of and a requirement for engaging in play. Such open-ended dispositions of play continuously draw on indeterminacy to create lucky chances, celebrating modes of serendipity in which players find what they were not looking for.

As game studies tend to focus on conventional notions of game and gameplay, embodied dimensions of playing and open-ended dispositions of play receive little attention. The ludic practices at events illustrate the transformative potential of embodied enactments of play and highlight challenges in replicating indeterminacy in digital systems. Examining serendipitous play as embodied practice, this research exemplifies the inherent constraints of digital games and highlights the profound implications for sociotechnical systems of play.