Postdigital literacies: Materiality, mobility and the aesthetics of recruitment

CHAPTER 13 Postdigital Lliteracies: Materiality, Mmobility and the Aaesthetics of Rrecruitment Thomas Apperley, Darshana Jayemanne and Bjorn Nansen Introduction This chapter analyses the role of digital play in children’s learning and literacy by considering how digital play is being reconfigured through emerging gaming situations involving increasingly novel compositions of the digital and material. This analysis extends work examining hybridity in gaming products, such as connected toys that expand digital play experiences into physical objects, by turning attention to the production of play and practices of literacy that emerge through more distributed gaming interfaces involving entanglements of diverse devices, bodies, and materials. We situate these arrangements within the concept of the ‘postdigital’, which points to the embedding and embodying of computational technologies throughout everyday life, whilste also seeking to critically interrogate experiences of disjuncture in the seamless imaginary of the digital. Through a number of examples of games that can be characterized as postdigital, we examine how diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices, and materials are recruited into the situation and experience of play. The chapter argues that new gaming literacies arise through the ‘aesthetics of recruitment.’. In particular arguing that postdigital forms of play imply modes of literacy organized less around the interface as a determined object than various practices of interfacing across undeterminate arrangements. Recruitment and literacy Scholars have long recognized the role that digital play has in learning and literacy (Apperley & Beavis, 2013; Gee, 2003; Steinkuehler, 2006),; however, the concept of digital play is undergoing considerable transformations in dialogue with wider cultural and technological change. In this chapter we address games and gaming literacies (Buckingham & Burn, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009) in relation to the concept of the postdigital (Berry & Dieter, 2015; Cramer, 2012). This term refers to the blurring of the digital and non-digital through widely distributed computational technologies and connectivity in our contemporary moment. However, the postdigital is also a critical interrogation of the disjunctures in the hegemony of the digital. In this sense, the concept highlights the complexity of the playful devices we describe, which work towards establishing a smooth segue between digital and non-digital spaces. We argue that in the contexts of gaming and its associated literacies, the postdigital situation can be conceptualized in terms of an aesthetics of recruitment. This aesthetic is characterized by devices that interweave virtual and actual elements in order to recruit new materials, bodies and experiences into emergent arrangements of play. As Burnett and Merchant point out (see Chapter 14), these new arrangements and flexible relationships disrupt common understandings. In this case we aim to make strange how teachers and teaching practitioners understand and approach postdigital playful devices in relation to the ongoing discussion of gaming literacy. Recruitment is a useful conceptual tool for considering how these devices can add to how we understand the literacy practices of students, learners and young people. It also signals how digital play may reconfigure the relationship between teacher, learner and text and recruit learning into wider (playful) contexts. The aesthetics of recruitment can be illustrated by everyday products that use nearfield communication (NFC) to facilitate data mobility between games and consoles. Currently this is often done using collectable figurines with digital storage capacities. Notable examples are the Skylanders series (Toys for Bob, 2011–-), Disney Infinity (Disney Interactive Studios, 2013–-) and the Amiibo (Nintendo, 2014–-). Postdigital forms of play can also be understood to include connected toys, augmented reality apps, computer-augmented board games and specialized input devices, which are adding new material elements and contexts to game play. These games and playful devices are part of the reconfigurations of material and digital elements in computing that are increasingly mobile, ‘pervasive’, ‘locative’, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed’ (Montola, 2011), and which are often described through the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ (vVan Kranenburg, 2008). They can be characterized as postdigital in terms of playful behaviour that is continuous with, yet also exceeds, the digital through conditions that are technical, historical, aesthetic and affective (Berry, 2014; Schinkel, 2014). Broadly, then, the postdigital ‘describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation …... a media aesthetics which opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness’ (Schinkel, 2014), in which ‘the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital becomes increasingly blurred …... [and] computation is part of the texture of life itself which can be walked around, touched, manipulated and interacted with in a number of ways and means’ (Berry, 2014). The idea that digital games are ‘messy’ (Bogost, 2009) or assemblages of digital and non-digital interaction (Taylor, 2009) indicates the potential fruitfulness of the postdigital concept in thinking about the increasingly distributed arrangements of play, gaming and literacy. Our concern in this chapter is to consider how the postdigital media environment can contribute to a wider understanding of gaming literacy. It is clear that the postdigital Comment [Q1]: AU: The reference “Nintendo, 2014” is cited in the text but is not listed in the references list. Please either delete in-text citation or provide full reference details. acknowledges the pervasive connectedness of playful technologies, as illustrated by contemporary mobile phones and tablets, which combine computing resources and connectivity with a wide array of sensors and inputs. Here we can think of technologies such as cameras, wireless networks, geo-tags and other locative services, near field communication, RFID (Radio-frequency Identification), gyroscopes and other sensors, all of which are relevant to this discussion. These technologies are ones that have been utilized by game designers to shift the interface away from the screen and recruit other technologies and objects within the field of play. These innovations may supplement play, such as the downloading of a new avatar through a QR code in Kinectimals (Apperley & Heber, 2015), to becoming the core of the game mechanics, as in Ingress, which uses data from Google Maps and players’ own phones as an integral part of the game design (Moore, 2015). Even games utilisiizing conventional PCs or game consoles are increasingly hooked into the wider networked public of social media and video sharing, which expands their possibilities for co-play and communication. From this point of view, each digital game and device is a kind of media ecology (Fuller, 2005) in its own right, and thus literacy practices developed through play require understanding and analysis of the relations between devices, software and objects in this ecology, particularly when the connection between the what and how of objects is undetermined. Research has recognized that digital games are a key site for developing literacies that pave the way for participation in the ‘new’ media environment that is increasingly dominated by interactive and user-generated media (Salen, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009). Often it is the practices of gaming communities that are used to exemplify how digital gaming and literacy are connected (see: Apperley & Walsh, 2012). Examples of literacy practices, taking place with gaming cultures include various forms of curation, creation and remix: 1. Creating, curating, sharing and commenting on photos, screen capture and live game play (Apperley, 2015a; Potter, 2012); 2. Creating, curating and commenting on various forms of creative work inspired by digital games on online forums (Schott & Burn, 2007); 3. Creating and contributing to collectively produced guides, walkthroughs and afteraction reports that might take the form of text, images, or video on online forums (Ashton & Newman, 2010; Newman, 2008); 4. Making, curating and commenting on short films called machinima that are made using game engines and other film-making software (Kringiel, 2011); 5. Redesigning, curating and commenting on digital gaming by using in-game design tools (Sotaama, 2010); 6. Designing new levels and other elements of digital games, using a software development kit (Peppler & Kafai, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009). The literacy practices deployed and developed during play are also palpable (see: Gee, 2003), and typically involve taking on an experimental mind-set that accepts risk and failure as part of the process of discovery and achievement. Zimmerman, for example, argues that the ‘ludic attitude’ used in play is a ‘paradigm of innovation’ that ‘embrace[s] transformation and change’ (Zimmerman 2009, p. 27). In terms of delineating how the notion of ‘postdigital gaming literacies’ can add to existing discussions of gaming literacy, it underscores the importance of play for engaging with novel and emergent postdigital environments. One of the first things we tend to do with a new device is ‘just have a play.’. It is through play that objects inculcate habits in human users and thereby become the ‘social’ nodes for the development of new literacies that can help in navigating the messiness of the postdigital environment (Apperley & Heber, 2015; Nansen et al., Nansen, Vetere, Robertson, Brereton, & Durick, 2013; Nansen et al., 2014). In what follows we begin by locating the concept of recruitment within game studies scholarship, before considering how it plays out in different examples of postdigital games. We then move into an analysis of postdigital literacy through concepts of interfacing that produce embodied sensations and spatialities. The aesthetic of recruitment Elsewhere (Jayemanne, Nansen, & Apperley, 2015) we have characterized the ludic devices and arrangements of the postdigital play situation in terms of an ‘aesthetics of recruitment.’. The concept of ‘recruitment’ in our formulation refers to the somewhat ambiguous nature of the interactions that we are describing. Unlike the triumphalist marketing rhetoric that surrounds many hybrid gaming products, the idea of recruitment emphasizes the contingent and asymmetrical relations of postdigital play in which multiple elements can or should be enrolled. Aesthetically, recruitment designates game designs that make an appeal to the experience of play. But this appeal may be responded to in many different ways, according to the individual’s capacity to respond. Theoretically, the concept of recruitment also helps to emphasize the unpredictability of the arrangements of bodies and spaces associated with postdigital play. Each recruitment generates a new interfacial configuration and hence, shifting possibilities or imperatives for literacies. This analysis is informed by materialist approaches within critical interface studies and serves to complicate the notion of ‘hybrid playful products’ (Tyni, Kultima, & Mäyrä, 2013). For Farman (2012) and other critics (Ash, 2015; Cramer & Fuller, 2008; Drucker, 2011; Galloway, 2012), interfaces are not stable demarcations between two symmetricallyarranged types of space –- the ‘real’ space of players’ bodies and hardware as opposed to the ‘virtual’ space simulated on the screen. Instead, interfaces arise and decompose in a more dynamic fashion as different bodies, sensations, devices and objects come into, and fall out of relations. Postdigital gaming literacies arise from this interface fluidity, and in turn consider play as critical to the experience and understanding of novel postdigital situations. The concept of recruitment in one sense reflects the appeal of play as an inherently attractive activity, particularly in terms of the varied life histories and material powers it can bring together. Innovative scholarship on branding was the first to consider digital gaming within the paradigm of recruitment. In Lash and Lury’s research on the FIFA brand, they argue that the FIFA digital games were a form of recruiting consumers to the brand (2007, pp. 54–55). Brands in the global media environment develop their ‘networks through media outreach, translation and transposition, through the recruitment of other objects’ (Lash & Lury, 2007, p. 55). Postdigital play is situated in such networks, yet makes the material processes of recruitment the subject of play, thus emphasiziising the development of skills required for discerning what and how to recruit different elements into an assemblage of play. Such skills are crucial because inherent in the notion of recruitment is the possibility of failure and botched attempts to gather bodies, devices and objects together in a given situation: the ‘recruitment drive’ only occurs when there is a deficit of membership that needs to be shored up. Recruitment can also have a coercive aspect, evoking concepts of the military draft. As game studies and human computer interaction research have shown, games and play can exercise powerful attractions, drawing people into new social experiments, spatial and temporal typologies, bodily practices and technical arrangements (Nansen, Vetere, Robertson, Brereton, & DurickNansen et al., 2013; Nansen et al., 2014). Such research has also noted that these situations are often precarious (Apperley, 2015b). Examples include situations in which people are reluctant or unwilling to play; public spaces are unsuitable for or discouraging of unusual gestures; social, safety and behavioural codes are limiting; or, technical mishaps, failures or incompatibilities occur. These expanded conceptions, materialities and instabilities of the gaming interface are more capable of accounting for the literacies of postdigital play, because they do not prejudge the types of bodies, devices, objects and spaces that will be organized around an interface but rather orient us to the processes by which such constellations are formed. This is particularly relevant to postdigital play, which is often represented as being capable of recruiting players into dynamic situations, which we explore through a number of examples below. Postdigital play practices Osmo is a crowdfunded augmented reality product. It requires an iPad, a stand, a mounted mirror for the camera to observe the gamespace, an app for download, and physical game pieces such as numbers, letters and the classic tangram puzzle. The app, advertised as ‘play beyond the screen’, extends the interface of the iPad by projecting it onto a surface, making the surface interactive through the use of visual software that recognizes objects allowing the iPad to react to activities undertaken on the physical surface. In this sense it exemplifies a postdigital playful device, which requires the recruitment of other objects to produce a fluid interface. Osmo play was observed as part of an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings. The research involved ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of young children’s media interaction. Two siblings (a girl aged three and boy aged five) were observed playing with Osmo, which was set up on the living room floor. During this play the younger child attempted to follow the spelling app’s instructions to place a letter tile on the physical play surface, but it was unable to read the letter she was placing, presumably due to poor placement within the field of the reflector’s vision. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, she leant over and tried touching the letter on the screen. The older brother, who was sitting within reach, interjected into her play by pushing a number of additional letter tiles onto the physical play surface, causing the app to flash and issue visual instructions. It was unclear whether this act was intended to assist or disrupt his sister’s play, though failing to get feedback from her engagement she stood up and walked away. The brother promptly slid across the floor into the spot she had occupied in front of the screen and cleared the letter tiles from the play surface in order to begin a fresh game. The intensive potentials for postdigital play with Osmo, and the practices assembled around it, suggest that the aesthetic of recruitment involves an enrolment of players as well as many different material and digital elements that may be distributed through the postdigital play space. Children and many varied objects come together, and –- as illustrated above sometimes fail to coordinate, in their exploration of the Osmo’s different processes of interfacial assemblage. Cameras and other types of sensors, when combined with appropriate apps, diversify the number and types of bodies that can be recruited and hybridized through an expanded range of sensations and their inscription in a given play situation. In turn, the apparent ‘contagiousness’ or fascination of playful behaviour encouraged by these devices informs the need for negotiation between the different bodies, devices and objects recruited. Play, as exploration and experimentation, becomes the mode through which the process of recruitment is both mediated and understood, thus making in a core element to the literacy of postdigital devices. In contrast to the more familiar and standardized objects of Osmo play, the hardware package, MaKey MaKey, is a tool for turning everyday objects into input devices for computers. Clips can be used to attach electric sensors to a wide variety of objects – from bananas to a stairway – in order to incorporate them as ‘videogame controllers’ for things such as Super Mario Brothers. This then enables the objects to work as keys for inputting commands into a computer, opening up the possibilities for all sorts of objects to become recruited as new interfaces within a vastly expanded repertoire of hybrid play. The grammars and literacies established by MaKey MaKey tend to be far messier than those of Osmo, reflecting the wider gamut of objects and player behaviours which it can draw into a hybrid system. The digital elements are, however, less diverse: generally, the technology has been used to control existing games such as PacMan, but the physical and tactile experience of play is considerably transformed by the introduction of highly unorthodox materials into the interface. This opens up radical new possibilities for interface processes to arise between simulated bodies on the screen and material bodies in the world. The aesthetic of recruitment expands the possibilities for new proprioceptive relations to game-space by forcing players to re-balance, re-configure and re-consider their habitual use of a versatile interface effect. Irrespective of how ‘gimmicky’, this destabilizaisation of the interface is, it remains important for scholars of literacy because it marks a de-coupling of digital literacies from a particular interface and highlights the need for a more operational understanding of literacy in the postdigital environment. This understanding must account for the dynamic integration of information from multiple devices and senses (audio, haptic, proprioceptive, visual), which can conceptualize the role of play in connecting and sorting this information. Examining postdigital literacies in terms of the aesthetics of recruitment thus involves focusing less on predetermined gaming interfaces associated with desktop computers and gaming consoles, and instead considering the processes and practices of interfacing that negotiate multiple and hybrid bodies, devices and objects. If, as Taylor (2009) argues, we can speak of the Formatted: Default Paragraph Font, English (U.S.), Highlight ‘assemblage of play’, we argue that in postdigital play (and thus also literacy) the term ‘assemblage’ should be understood as verb as well as a noun, as play and the construction of the interface itself is a process of assemblage. Osmo and MaKey MaKey represent two different styles or ‘literacies’ of hybrid recruitment. Osmo draws players inwards to a relatively bounded space to play with a set of pre-made physical objects that serve specifically designed digital games. MaKey MaKey pushes a pre-existing virtual game world outwards to hybridize with the environment and objects in new ways. Such ambitions for recruitment are taken even further in games such as Hybrid Play, which wirelessly connects mobile game to a rubber grip with inbuilt sensors, Formatted: Font: Not Italic that is are designed to be attached to numerous pieces of playground equipment in order to incorporate their movement into the screen based game. MaKey MaKey offers larger potential for asymmetrical recruitment because of the sheer amount of objects that are available for recruitment. These styles can, in turn, be contrasted with the hybridity offered by a postdigital toy like Sphero. This is a ‘connected toy’ consisting of a mechanized ball that can be rolled around by a phone app. The device can be manipulated in the hand in order to control and operate game apps designed for the iPhone. The design is thus more directed and limited in that ways it can recruit objects, unlike the open recruitment provided by the interface of MaKey MaKey. However, by offering the possibility of manipulating both physical and digital space, Sphero suggests a more reciprocal mode of digital-physical recruitment. In each of these cases, we see the assembly of asymmetric sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials. We argue that such arrangements imply a mode of literacy organized Comment [Q2]: AU: Edit OK? less around the interface as object than the various literacy practices of interfacing, which we explore in the next section by drawing on critical interface studies that conceptualize the role of interfacing in the production of bodies, objects and spaces. Interfacing bodies, objects and spaces In 1994 Weiser, one of the pioneers of ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’), wrote an influential piece called ‘The world is not a desktop.’. While Weiser overtly makes the case for ‘invisible’ interfaces and computing, what is of more interest in this context is the way he goes about doing so: that is, by expanding the set of metaphors that we use when we think of how interfaces operate. In particular, Weiser criticizes the tendency to imagine interfaces as replicating contemporary conscious forms and modalities of behaviour. Thus where the multimedia of the time sought to emulate the experience of legacy media such as TV, virtual reality sought to emulate unmediated experience, and intelligent agents sought to replicate human agents, Weiser suggests a certain, almost dialectical, relation between visible and invisible technology (and hence, interfaces between technologies and bodies): Invisible technology needs a metaphor that reminds us of the value of invisibility, but does not make it visible. I propose childhood: playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults. (Weiser, 1994). Weiser’s nomination of childhood learning as a metaphor for interfaces suggests that as well as being a key thinking of ubiquitous computing he is also a forerunner for thinking about ubiquitous digital play –- or, at least, that play and computing were profoundly connected. His description of ubiquitous computing resembles Caillois’ (2001) notion of the freeform paidea more than the rule-bound ludus; digital play expands throughout the street, the home, the park, the workplace and beyond. Importantly, Weiser’s metaphor addresses the processes of constant learning and forgetting. The potentials of diverse and pervasive playful computing shifts the critical goal from analysing this or that bounded play situation, towards tracing and navigating the emergence of what Fuller calls ‘seaminess’ (2005), the moments of intersection that take shape across asymmetrical powers of bodies, devices and objects for sensing, feeling and doing, which are hybridized in postdigital situations. The postdigital calls for a conception of play and literacy that is capable of engaging bodies and flows that we cannot necessarily predict without arbitrarily reducing either the asymmetry or the contingency of the play situation. The very mobility of many of these devices means that it is not possible to definitively pre-judge their context of use. The boundary of the play space must be left an open question. Adding to work by game studies scholars such as Mäyrä, Tyni and Montola, as well as the tradition of human– computer interaction scholars who have focused on embodiment since Winograd and Flores (1986) and Dourish (2001), here we propose to draw on Farman’s ‘mobile interface theory’ (2012). This was developed to trace the locative and pervasive effects that arise in the use of devices such as mobile phones, and highlight the question of navigation and the orientation of embodied experience. Farman combines two major streams of thought –- phenomenology and poststructuralism, with key references in Merleau-Ponty (1958) and Derrida (1998), respectively, in order to produce a theory of the ‘sensory-inscribed body.’. In this context we will place the emphasis on the phenomenological aspects of the theory. Phenomenology facilitates a focus on the integral relation between space, practice and body: ‘embodiment is always a spatial practice …... bodies always take up space and, as Lefebvre argued, are spatial in and of themselves’ (Farman 2012, p. 19). A particularly important nuance of this claim is that ‘embodiment does not always need to be located in physical space. As people connect across networks on a global level, what many are experiencing as they practice the space of the network is embodiment …... we create our bodies across digital media’ (2012, p. 22). This creation involves the adoption of determinate spatial practices in which the interface – pace Drucker (2011) and Weiser (1994) – is liable to fade in and out of visibility. During a mobile phone call: the interface of the phone typically recedes and you are moved into the space of conversation. If, however, there becomes an extended period of silence, the sense perceptions immediately pull focus from the other person to the device …... You will move the phone away from your ear to look at the screen, determining if you are still connected, if your reception is strong, or if your battery has died. (Farman, 2012, p. 28). The shift between the co-location of interlocutors to the surface of the phone screen constitutes two kinds of embodied spatiality;: two distinct ‘interface effects’ (Galloway, 2012). Farman also gives a more complicated example, which will be familiar to many scholars, of a student’s phone ringing during a lecture. The usual flow of the lecture space is disrupted by the ringing, producing the confused behaviour of the individual student, as well as the lecturer and the rest of the class, thus showing different processes of embodied spatiality, brought into focus at their moment of failure. Situations such as these indicate a need to reconsider the seemingly simple distinction between the virtual and the real. Farman (2012) suggests that as the ‘virtual’ interface and digital content do perfectly real things, the pairing ‘virtual/actual’ is more helpful. He traces the concept of the virtual back to the term ‘virtue’, as it was used until the late 1400s, in the sense of the ‘virtues’ or powers and abilities of a given thing. However, it is not always the Comment [Q3]: AU: Meaning not clear. Please check and revise. case that all the virtues of an object are actualized at once (as in the case of the mobile phone in the lecture theatre, where multiple possibilities for behaviour are urgently possible at the one embarrassing moment). Where the virtual/real opposition is a symmetrical relation in which the virtual ‘mirrors’ the real, the virtual/actual opposition is ‘asymmetrical’ both because the set of virtual possibilities tend to exceed any actual result, and because every process of actualizaisation is different. Postdigital play, involving such instances of asymmetry, suggests a demand for a sensibility of risk-taking and experimenting. In turn, postdigital literacy suggests learning unfolds through playing with the repertoire of possible configurations of bodies, devices and objects recruited to produce an interface, in relation to the actualized connection, and in relation to affective and aesthetic outcomes of those potential connections. This virtual/actual pairing informs another crucial notion that Farman derives from phenomenology: the importance of the unconscious aspects of our embodied experience. This once again speaks to the processes by which interfaces come into and recede from ‘visibility’ (although it might better be termed ‘perceptibility’ because this refers to all the senses and not just sight). While those things that we are aware of and perceive are vital to our sense of beingin-the-world, our senses also work to block out much of the sensory input that we are bombarded with. Thus, embodiment depends on the cognitive unconscious ….... Imagine that while you were having a conversation with someone, that every other conversation in the room and every sound in the room became equally important …... We function as embodied beings because we do not notice everything or sense everything. (Farman, 2012, p. 27). The senses are not simply receptive, but actively screen and sort phenomena in the process of generating our self-image as spatially- embodied beings. Phenomenology terms this process ‘proprioception’ (Shinkle, 2008). At the same time, this sense of ourselves is inscribed by ‘cultural inscriptions of masculinity or femininity, the signifiers of our cultures, or sexualities, our religions, among other aspects of our embodied identity that we read in others and encode on our bodies for others to read’ (Farman, 2012, p. 32). Thus the act of assemblage of the hybrid interface, sorting through the connections that can be made between bodies, devices and objects in postdigital play, conveys information about the identity of the body at the interface that can be ‘read’ by others. Configuring the postdigital interface thus implies a mode of literacy beyond the moment and process in which play is produced to account for the meanings it performs. For example, postdigital literacy involves a form of identity play similar to what Potter describes as ‘curation’ of the ‘project of the self’ (2012, p. 176). The configurations produced through processes of postdigital play signal a particular juncture of identity, but one which always has the potential to be other. The interface approach thus helps us to analyse the literacies of postdigital play – in each case, we can pose questions about how spatial forms (locative, pervasive, bounded) are produced in relation to what types of sensory-inscribed bodies. This allows us to place the ‘panoply of devices’ foreseen by Weiser into relation with players’ sensuous and cultural capabilities. Postdigital games (keeping in mind that videogames are, at least to a degree, natively postdigital) enjoin us to take account of how multiple embodied performances, experiences and spatialities are produced by the ensemble of devices and materials at work in a given gaming situation. In turn, postdigital literacy can be conceptualized as playfully produced through practices of experimentation with the operations and feel of recruitment involving multiple synchronizaisations and de-synchronizaisations in assemblages of play. Conclusion The postdigital connects with a range of discourses around ambient and ubiquitous computing that suggest digital information sensing, processing and networking will change rapidly in the coming years. We expect it will spread into the physical world and operate at multiple scales: from the body, to the building, to the street. Yet, the postdigital offers an alternative concept for this blurring of digital and non-digital materials, drawing on more critical humanities traditions to interrogate this historical moment and its implications. In this chapter, we have explored the entanglements of senses, materials and devices in the production of postdigital play, and analysed such reconfigurations for the play literacies of children. Just as there are increasingly urgent questions about the kinds of programming literacy required by children to practically or critically engage with the operation of computation in everyday life, the postdigital is redistributing relations of play, with implications for children’s gaming literacies. Citing some examples of postdigital games, and drawing on materialist approaches within critical interface studies, we have suggested that new gaming literacies arise through an ‘aesthetics of recruitment’. Which This indicates literacy is organized less around the interface as a determined object and more around practices of interfacing that involve increasingly undetermined and diverse sets of bodies, sensations, devices and materials. For teachers and teaching practitioners this signals a shift in focus from the certainty of typical digital gaming platforms, such as desktop computers and gaming consoles. Rather, it suggests that teaching and teaching practitioners also consider the processes and practices of establishing interfaces that negotiate multiple bodies, devices and objects. Furthermore, this emphasis on the process of configuration indicates that literacy may also be usefully Comment [Q4]: AU: Please check if the intended meaning in this part of the sentence is revealed. understood beyond the context of play, as part of an ongoing process of curatorial identity play. Acknowledgements This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735) and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP140101503). References Apperley, T. (2015a). Glitch sorting: Minecraft, curation and the post-digital. In D. Berry and M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design (pp. 232–244). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Apperley, T. (2015b). Venezuela. In M. J. P. 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