Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (Book Review)
Edmond Y. Chang, Contributing Editor
“Our definition of play is broken,” argues Aaron Trammell in his introduction to Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. This newest addition to The MIT Press’s Playful Thinking series offers a concise response to normative definitions of play, which privilege Western, White, ostensibly universal and politically-free perspectives and philosophies on fun, games, leisure, and pleasure. Trammell takes on the “master texts” of play studies—Johan Huzinga, Jean Piaget, and Roger Caillois—and shows how these canonical definitions perpetuate heteronormativity, patriarchy, and white supremacists logics. Trammell articulates that play is not always useful, edifying, or simply phenomenological, somehow magically marked off from and immune to ideology. Trammell responds with a call to reimagine, reconfigure, and repair play through engaging Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) histories, scholarship, and pedagogies; through feeling and understanding that play is embodied practice, affective experiences; and “through the lens of Black radical tradition,” what he calls “a form of intellectual reparations.”
Repairing Play is organized into five chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion that challenge the privileged, romanticized, and “vanilla” understandings of play that ignore, erase, or misrepresent reparative play—play that is “as painful as it is pleasurable, as individual as it is universal, and as mandatory as it is voluntary.” Rather than preserving and conserving play as always innocent, often pastoral (or white suburban), necessarily developmental, and free- and accessible- and consensual-to-all, Trammell highlights that play is often traumatic, colonizing, hurtful, asymmetrical, unreciprocated, even torture, particularly for marginalized identities and embodiments.
The “Introduction” outlines the terms, keywords, and grinding edges and stakes of repairing “play,” offering a redefinition that disrupts, even disintegrates the “magic circle,” the notion that games are just for fun, a separate sphere from the “real world.” However, all games have consequences, particularly for those bodies and identities already at the margins. Trammell explores the good, bad, and ugly of games and insists that “a radical new practice of play” must take into account the ways that play is also about risk, capture, pain, and power. Chapter One “Decolonizing Play” opens with Billy Holiday’s 1939 rendition of “Strange Fruit,” a soundtrack for a frank discussion of lynching, colonization, slavery, and the brutal hunting of, violence against, and literal and ideological playing with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized bodies. This chapter confronts the imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist legacies of definitions and deployments of play as “civilizing,” as evidence of who gets to be “human,” as justifications of racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and phobic play disguised as “free” and “fair” and “level.” In other words, play becomes another way to sort people into good and bad, proper and improper players, even good and bad citizens. Trammell argues that play must be decolonized; it must resist and rewrite these norms and tropes of play. Decolonizing play requires reinserting bodies of color and non-normative perspectives and practices back into play in part through foregrounding writers, designers, and communities of color.
Chapter Two “Play as Affect” considers the ways that feeling, emotion, and “stimulus and response” of games are not the same for players of color. Building on the first chapter’s challenging of play as freedom and mobility, Trammell cites the experience of Pokemon Go! player Omark Akil’s experience as a Black man walking and wandering streets, parks, and other White spaces. The chapter explores games as designed experiences but also felt, embodied, and sometimes endured experiences, as well as their “felt consequences.” In other words, play is as much about joy, frivolity, raised endorphins, and fun with friends as it is about scraped knees, sadness, anger, and fear. Chapter Three “Play as Capture” and Chapter Four “Torture and the Black Experience” offer up the most visceral and compelling exhumations of the asymmetry between White play and Black play as allegorized by the childhood game of tag. Trammell argues, “There are different rules for different people here. In America’s playground, Black folks are always ‘it’” (56). These chapters explore the ways that engaging in play, being hailed by play is often assumed to be consensual, voluntary, and reciprocal when in fact it is more often about capture, arrest, capitulation, and the power to police certain bodies and identities. Chapters Three and Four extend W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness”—the experience of Black Americans who are part of yet never fully belong in the nation. Play for Black players is also a kind of “double consciousness” recognizing that the ludic power of being “not it” or “it,” of subject versus object, of winner over loser often replays and rehearses the embedded logics and persistent narratives of conquest, slavery, imperialism, incarceration, nationalism, and state-sponsored violence. For Trammell, play is always a negotiation and often an ambivalent one that requires vigilance and intervention, especially when the scales are tipped, decks are stacked, and rules are (often invisibly changed) due to race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and other identities and embodiments. The unmarked White normativity of play requires and is co-constituted by those that are always-already “it,” unassimilable by, unintelligible to, and forever locked out of “home,” “safe,” and the “magic circle.”
The book concludes looking for alternative lines of inquiry, trajectories of escape, and strategies for survival, collaboration, and coalition. Chapter Five “Recentering Blackness in Games and Play” recognizes that “Black art isn’t always legible to White folks.” Trammell tries to imagine and implement potential solutions and survival strategies that foreground Black feminism, Black radical aesthetics, BIPOC game studies, and BIPOC game designers. Highlighting Black creators such as Mike Pondsmith (Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2077) and A.M. Darke (‘Ye or Nay?), Trammell demonstrates how these designers appropriate, subvert, and repurpose the stories and fantasies of White play to articulate radical game spaces, game feelings, and expressions of play that centers Black bodies, identities, and experiences. The Conclusion “Repairing Play” offers a few final notes to remember that reparative play remembers the pains of the past, speaks truth to power in the present, and imagines different futures. Trammell recognizes that repairing play is a process, a collaborative endeavor, and a utopic horizon of possibility (or possibilities) that is messy, imperfect, and critical. Repairing play must come to terms with the lived reality and experiences of marginalized players and strive for a speculative future—one that confronts and witnesses the oppressive legacies of play but also urges players and creators and critics to develop coalitions of mutual aid, healing, comfort, and joy.
Repairing Play’s overall evocation sees the need for play studies and game studies to address more than representation, form, genre, mechanics, and narrative, but to recognize that play in and of itself is often broken, violent, and complicit with dominant norms and institutions. For play to become more inclusive, diverse, and just, it must make time, space, pay, resources, and collaborations for Black scholars, creators, and gamers to talk about and play around in their own voices and bodies, especially “where [they] don’t have to code switch” or play nice. The text is accessible, musical, pop cultural, strident, yet playfully theories the theory and theorizes the vernacular. Repairing Play’s apt but brief survey of provocations further opens the field for alternative vantages and interventions, particularly by Indigenous, queer of color, and newer thinkers and contributors, to expand the conversation, to add to the mixtape, to join the fray.
Part of the Games of Color Column: The column aims to foreground, highlight, and engage with BIPOC games, gamers, scholars, designers, and artists. Given that games code and encode, render and represent social, cultural, political, even pedagogical norms, we hope to address the problems and possibilities of this medium we enjoy. Once or twice a month, we will think, talk, and play through the ways that games and gaming communities must reckon with race, difference, diversity, and equity. For more information or to contribute, contact Contributing Editor Edmond Chang.
