In this seminar Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley will explore the philosophy of games and the potential of play to disrupt players’ common-sense perspective of the world. Various “turns” in modern philosophy, including materialist and speculative philosophies, suggest that humans need to think beyond an anthropocentric perspective. Instead of seeing matter and nature as passive resources for human conception, we need to recognise nonhuman vitality and agency.

Various analogue forms of gaming, especially live-action roleplaying games, produce experiences for players that accord with this ethical task. LARP might be a form of training, one which requires a willingness to “play the fool”, that chastens the destructive human will to mastery. In this seminar, Dr Germaine Buckley will challenge accounts of play that characterise it as a humanist mode, that place human agency front and centre: humans construct and deconstruct the world through play. In contrast, this seminar will suggest that LARP asks its players to account for the unhuman nature of reality, to consider that fact that it is the world that makes us.