Monday 9 September 2024,  3.00-5.00pm BST

This is an online event. Please register for the Zoom here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oF6SJ0AsSweAqXQqReVXQw

Legitimacy through Contingency –
Or, How to Do Things with Games

Prof Thomas Malaby (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Among the many topics about which anthropology has made significant contributions, its handling of the cultural forms of bureaucracy and ritual stand out as particularly successful. The focus on the use of them in specific events, and especially in the service of modern institutions, has been bolstered by sustaining an awareness of them as gambits, as propositions which can succeed or fail. Institutions have also long attempted to use games (though with less consistent results), yet the anthropological treatment of that cultural form has been spotty. Steadily over the 20^th century, and accelerating rapidly now, bureaucratic institutions have greatly improved their ability to deploy games and game elements in their projects of control. Code has been revolutionary for this effort because it enables the production of broadly distributed, implicit, and contingent architectures which invite users’ performative engagement (for example, entering prompts in dialog with ChatGPT). After considering Austin’s claim that meaning resides in use, along with lessons for the study of games from Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, and others, I look back at the bureaucratic use of games, tracing links to Western projects of colonialism and capitalism. I then consider the current landscape of games’ institutional use and how such gambits for legitimacy are taking new forms through their intimate and naturalized indeterminacy.

Bio

Thomas Malaby is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interest is in the ever-changing relationships among institutions, unpredictability, and technology, especially as they are realized through games and game-like processes. He has published numerous and widely-cited works on the status of games in human experience. Dr. Malaby’s work suggests that the increasing use of digital games by institutions marks a fundamental transition in modern governance. His book, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (2009, Cornell University Press), is an ethnographic examination of a San Francisco high tech firm.