GAMES ARE ANCIENT.
Like making music, telling stories, and creating images, playing games is part of what it means to be human. Games are perhaps the first designed interactive systems our species invented.
When information is put at play, game like experiences
replace linear media. Media and culture in the Ludic
Century is increasingly systemic, modular,
customizable, and participatory. Games embody all of
these characteristics in a very direct sense.
Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure
time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be
games or experiences very much like games.
THERE IS A NEED TO BE PLAYFUL.
It is not enough to merely be a systems literate person;
to understand systems in an analytic sense. We also
must learn to be playful in them. A playful system is a
human system,a social system rife with contradictions
and with possibility.
Being playful is the engine of innovation and creativity:
as we play, we think about thinking and we learn to act
in new ways. As a cultural form, games have a
particularly direct connection with play.
Manifesto by Eric Zimmerman:
http://ericzimmerman.com/files/texts/Manifesto_for_a_Ludic_Century.pdf
Essays by Eric Zimmerman:
http://ericzimmerman.com/portfolio/essays-and-articles/
Manifesto published on Kotaku with an exploration of the manifesto:
http://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204
Responses to the manifesto:
http://kotaku.com/will-the-21st-century-be-defined-by-games-1293867009
