In this book, Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play - how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, he develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail. He considers the making of meaning in play and in every aspect of human culture. He draws on findings in pragmatic epistemology, neuroscience, and semiotics to describe how meaning emerges from playful engagement. Upton argues that play can also explain particular aspects of narrative; a play-based interpretive stance, he proposes, can help us understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even of the process of critical engagement itself. -- |