The final colloquium of the semester will be held April 28 at 12pm in University Hall 432. Dr. Doug Stark, Assistant Professor of English, will present “Protective Play: On Farocki’s Operational Games.”
Abstract:
Traditionally, scholars have considered play a means of expanding our horizons, but as education, labor, and daily life are increasingly “gamified,” Dr. Doug Stark argues that today’s play is more about safeguarding ourselves. From crossing the road as a child to conducting a mock job interview as an adult, we routinely engage in a twofold form of protective play, whereby playing at an activity both insulates us against its usual consequences and prepares us for the risks of the real deal. This talk focuses on German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s documentaries on workplace roleplay, military training, resilience tests, and video gaming to grapple with the relationship between protective play and contemporary formations of power. While such practices certainly tend to reproduce the status quo, they equally ask us to entertain a different world: In play, we don’t just learn from “what is;” we learn from “what if.”