Why we're living in The Ludic Age.

BY HEATHER CHAPLIN

Eric Zimmerman was an independent gamemaker before being an independent gamemaker was cool. He‘s co-founder of New York-based Gamelab, which has been making indie games for eight years now. I‘ve known Zimmerman for ages — as do most people who keep their eyes on games — but he caught my attention all over again at a recent conference when he threw out the phrase “The Ludic Age.”

“The Ludic Age?” I thought. “What the hell is that?” Ludoloy is the study of games and play, so much I know. But “ages,” “eras,” “centuries of” — these are terms for important things like industry, technology and information. How could there possibly be an age of play? And if there were, wouldn‘t it be a terrible, wasteful, dissolute thing?

First let me step back. Zimmerman is one of the primary thinkers behind a new movement of academics, game designers and educators calling for “gaming literacy.” I know, you‘re thinking that sounds crazy, about as crazy as an age of play. Gaming literacy? What, you want people to be better Asteroids players?

The two ideas are connected, and they‘re worth understanding. Gaming literacy is actually an idea that stems from the fact that as we move further into the 21st-century, the skills people will need to be literate — i.e., able to navigate effectively through the world — are changing. Some believe the key to 21st-century literacy will be something called “systems thinking,” which is understanding how dynamic systems work, things like the eco-system and global warming — i.e. big systems made of interrelated parts that constantly change and affect one another. Like a videogame. And sure enough, games just may be the best way to teach people systems thinking. Zimmerman and his partner-in-crime, Katie Salen, got a grant last year from the MacArthur Foundation to build a game called Gamestar Mechanic, which teaches kids how to be game designers. The idea: to foster 21st-century literacy.

And so we move into the Ludic Age, where play and games take center stage.

I was so intrigued by this idea — the notion that play and games could actually be key to solving the massive problems we face in the coming century — that I‘ve been pumping Zimmerman for more insight ever since.

The first thing to remember is that play is not new. Just as film was not the birth of drama or storytelling, but rather a new medium for conveying stories, videogames are just the latest way of fostering play. Play is even older than storytelling: It‘s prehuman, being as old as animalkind, oh were that a word! All sentient beings play in one form or another. Carl Jung said play was the essential wellspring of creativity. In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga says play “is in fact freedom.” He says it‘s through play that we know we are not “merely rational beings.”

During the 20th century, it was often said that the moving image was the right medium for the age, and so it is with games and the 21st century. Why? Because information is no longer something we can put together in a linear, story-based way and hope to make sense of it. We are swimming in a vast pool of information, streaming ones and zeros all around us every second. How do we navigate that to find meaning in our lives? Zimmerman believes that the dawn of a Ludic Age will allow us to do just this, to play with information in the Jungian sense of being creative, in the Huizinga sense of being free, in the gaming sense of exploring relationships and connections.

So no, the Ludic age does not imply an era of unprecedented frivolity or even intense Asteroids playing. Rather, Zimmerman says, it would be a time of creativity, experimentation and constant reinvention. Which may be just what we need to make sense of the 21st century.