ABSTRACT
Games have recently become relevant spaces for anthropological experimentation, enabling alternative approaches to critical analysis, conceptual work, and ethical discussion. But how can games become relevant as field devices? Using games in the field entails more than doing ethnography by playful means or playing games with ones’ counterparts. Indeed, the practices of ‘game design’ and ‘game testing’ afford peculiarly recursive modes of ethnographic inquiry. On the one hand, (i) the practice of designing a game enables modes of ethnographically inventing and projecting field relationships. Rather than inscribing or prescribing intricate social dynamics, the game design process entails a form of ethnographic exploration of field sites. On the other hand, (ii) the practice of game testing, more than simply allowing to reflect critically about a given gameplay, nourishes para-ethnographic relations with the fields’ practitioners. Indeed, in testing it’s also the game’s ethnographic indexicality that is put to a test: triggering discussions or reflections and comparisons of the experiences enacted in the game with previous ones the participants might have had, enabling its recursive prototyping.
