01 Biotopy essay — Wendi Yan

Speculating An Affective Gaze in Scientific Practice

Essay, chapter in Interplay
2024.11

Interplay examines five unique experiments in the field of game design –Schema, Vivarium, Biotopy, Interplay and Nephila. In the course of the book, each is explored as a vehicle to apprehend the unconventional configurations of intelligences that are today emerging from innovations occurring within the field of game design.

To ongoing debates about emerging technologies, namely artificial intelligence and biotechnology, this book contributes the novel hypothesis that interaction sites between human and non-human intelligences, be they human, collective, biotic, synthetic or environmental, are already proliferating according to developments in game design. In short, new genera and species of interactions and of intelligences are already present in playful experiments.

This book tracks the evolution of five such intelligence experiments, not unlike a set of petridishes with variant initial conditions. In doing so, what the book offers is not a unified theory of ‘play in the age of AI’, but rather a multifaceted account of how intelligences form and emerge through and across playful interaction surfaces, spaces and dynamics.

Featuring Games and Essays from:
Will Freudenheim
William Morgan
Wendi Yan
Sylvan Rackham
Doug Stark
Flora Weil
Christina Lu
Dalena Tran

“Is it possible to invent ways of making knowledge without shying away from the self? The interactive gameplay and the fictional scaffolding of Biotopy are intended to assist with the knowledge-making process. Affectively seeing an epistemic object, we believe, does not have to compromise the rigor of the knowledge production. We developed Biotopy to better intuit microorganisms' liveliness and their involvement in planetary processes. It is a new perceptual instrument which assists us with feeling our inherent entanglement with scale-agnostic evolutions. Through the process of raising a bio-digital planetary pet, Biotopy takes the player on an imaginative journey based on both biological and digital renderings. It helps the player zoom out, and see the tiny vial of microbial samples as capable of terraforming a planet.”

“What comes out of playing Biotopy, hopefully, is a somewhat shifted self, looser in its boundary from the biotope that enabled the player’s existence. One learns to see the microbial world and the planetary world differently. As a result, the scientific self meets the gaze of the epistemic object.”