Postdigital Interfaces and the Aesthetics of Recruitment

Abstract

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in emergent digital materialities of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practicesand spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid playrelies on predefining clear and distinct digital or material 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 thinking these situations through an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is able to accommodate the intensive entanglements and inherent openness of both the social and technical in postdigital play.