PLAYFULNESS AND TRUST IN THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN ON FACEBOOK

BRINGING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT INTO PLAY

Valentina Rao @ Playful Experiences Seminar, Tampere 2-3/4 2009

The Comeback of Play in Everyday (virtual) Life

Huizinga: play as productive activity

disappeared together with the sense of the

“Holy”

Castronova: the Fun Revolution is bringing

fun back in the agenda

INSTITUTIONAL POWER WANTS TO PLAY

Political communication on Facebook:

the Obama campaign

Play is employed because “fun” is more viral, in a “top-down” strategy from the campaign; playful applications though emerge also from grassroots support - popular expression is playful!

Viral Marketing or Social Play?

Playful Elements 1/ the Application

An application is an “artifact”; its experience is limited in time and space; it can be a game, but also it can be

just “social lubricant” or “interactive silliness”

Applications as playful objects stimulate a playful mood that affects the whole experience, whose goal can be non-playful

Playful Elements 2/ the Frame

What gives the experience its semantic limits? The content? (Obama) the goal? (win the elections /

make people have fun and become motivated) the space/time frame?

psychological frame: “we need an outer frame to delimit the ground against which the figures are to be perceived” (Bateson, 1976:127)

Applications as mood signs?

Embedded Playfulness 1/ the Internet

The Internet is playful because:

• A technology that is playful is easier to use

(Littledale) • A playful web design increases involvement • Online interactions, because of their virtuality, involve

the play of (self) representation and performance (Danet)

Embedded Playfulness 2/ the Social

• Social interactions with the only goal of sociability are playful

• Facebook can be compared to “third places”, areas dedicated to socializing and conversation

• When a playful environment, such as Facebook, comes into contact with the social dynamics of citizenship, we see a new breed of (productive) play

• Social play or social ritual?

Playfulness as “persuasive” tool

Play blurs the boundaries between true and false, real and unreal:

“Instead of a betrayal of the facts, what counts in play is a betrayal of the rules”

No responsibility: the only responsibility is to participate, for “there is no game without all participants” (R. Silverstone)

Conclusions

• Learn to distinguish “viral strategies” from play as a part of social dynamics

• Separate between “user participation” and “citizen participation”

• Learn the peculiar modes of shifting “frames” in online interactions, where conversation is made more complex by the presence of the interface

Thank you for your attention!

contact information: Valentina Rao

inarao@factorygirl.it

References:Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (1938)

Castronova, Edward, Exodus to the Virtual World (2006)

Bateson, Gregory, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy", Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Noyes, Jan, Littledale, Richard, Beyond Usability, Computer playfulness, in Green, W. Jordan, P. Pleasure with Products: Beyond Usability (2002)

Silverstone, Roger, Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life (2002)