ABSTRACT
This chapter considers several theoretical understandings of why people play, what play is, and what play does. It further investigates play's relationship to the infrastructure and systems of power that condition its possibility and nature. In the chapter, author defines the ambivalent sense in which people can consider fanfiction a form of play. Fanfiction is a case that can be valuably read, perhaps also experienced, as either or both. Britpicking, the practice of making a text suitably British-sounding, is a common fandom term. While Britpicking is an affectionate, self-deprecating play on nitpicking, it is immediately linguistically obvious that its inverses, American-picking, Ameri-picking, and Yank-wanking, are merely awkward, still-unsettled echoes of the real concern. As Britpicking opens up quotidian vistas of alterity, it also reveals a disturbing singularity in people impressions of each other, a singularity that collapses regional and class differences into an idealized and uniform Britain and America.
