Real Player Manifesto

Abstract

The Ludic Society manifesto briefly introduces several ideas around the named international association of game researchers and practitioners. The Neo-?pataphysical conceptions allows new formats for the investigation of digital games as cultural phenomenon and artistic practice. The ludic field covers topics of Real Play and uselessness in techno Toy objects. In the nascent discipline Ludics an investigator of games applies poetic practices of games and play as method of research. The research field of Ludics introduces the notion of “Real Players”, who are gaming inside the best game engine we know, the “Reality Engine”. The ludic researcher emerges as penseuse maudite, as wicked severe thinker, a bon mot which Deleuze originally had attributed to Nietzsche (1965). This discourse-theoretical framing drives towards Nietzsche's vibrant dictum of a ”gay science,” in playful formats as aphorisms and poetry (transferred out of the sphere of computer games into real life), in setups which I call Real Playing, which is distinct from Real Gaming, which normally addresses the phenomenon of incorporating computer games in real life. The Real Play highlights a certain social life and, as a mediated art, employs a game with a Real Gamer constraint, a bondage as its own rules of play. The willing acceptance of this constraint is not a limitation, but an intentionally chosen poetic rule of play in Ludics or in German´Ludistik´ (Jahrmann, 2005).