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