Postdigital Play and the Aesthetics of Recruitment

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in newly emergent material and digital configurations of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practices and spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid play relies on predefining clear and distinct entities that then enter into hybrid situations. Drawing on concepts of the ‘interface’ and ‘postdigital’, we argue the distribution of computing devices creates difficulties for such presuppositions. Instead, we propose an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is adequate to the new openness of social and technical play.