The Playful Citizen (Games and Play)

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.

René Glas, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Recent publications: Glas, R., “Playing with the gamebook: The Final Hours interactive storybook series as playful paratexts”. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (forthcoming); Glas, R. et al. “Literacy at play: An analysis of media literacy games used to foster media literacy competencies.” Frontiers – Special Issue (in press); Glas, R., “Making Mario: Shaping franchise history through paratextual play”. In: Beil, B. et al. (eds.). Paratextualizing Games: Investigations on the Paraphernalia and Peripheries of Play. Bielefield: Bielefield University Press, 2021. pp. 131-161.
Sybille Lammes is Full Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at The Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) at Leiden University. She has been a visiting Senior Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, and has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, as well as the media studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. Her background is in media studies and play studies, which she has always approached from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical geography. She is co-editor of Playful identities: The ludification of digital media cultures (Amsterdam University Press 2015), Mapping time (Manchester University Press 2018; forthcoming) and The Routledge handbook of interdisciplinary research methods (Routledge 2018; forthcoming). She is an ERC laureate and has been the PI of numerous research projects.
Michiel de Lange is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. He is co-founder of The Mobile City, a platform for the study of new media and urbanism, and works as a researcher in the field of (mobile) media, urban culture, identity and play. He is a researcher in the NWO Creative Industries funded project The Hackable City, about the ways digital media shape the future of city making.|Joost Raessens is Full Professor and Chair of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Imar de Vries is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. His work primarily focuses on studying innovation discourses of wireless technologies, social media, and augmented reality. De Vries is a member of the board of Media Lab IMPAKT and affiliated with Media Lab SETUP.