Borrowed from: Salen & Zimmerman, Rules of Play (2004) — via Lüneburg 2018.
Applied to: Phosphor.
The concept
Play becomes meaningful when the relationship between a player’s action and the system’s response is discernible (you can perceive that something happened) and integrated (it matters for what happens later). Lüneburg adds the distinction between local agency — this action, this response — and global agency, the sense that your choices shape the whole.
Running it over one pass through Phosphor
You walk forward. You enter a concrete cavity, and the reverb opens out. You look up at the hanging vegetation, and the harmony shifts underneath you.
- Discernible: architecture → reverb, yes. Almost immediately.
- Discernible: gaze → harmony, no. The delay and the softness of the transition hide the causal link.
- Integrated: partly. Movement accumulates into the piece’s shape, but no single action is recoverable later.
- Local agency: present in the reverb, absent in the harmony.
- Global agency: genuinely unclear.
Where the theory breaks — and this is the useful part
Meaningful play assumes that the one who acts and the one who understands the causal chain are the same person. In a live performance they are not. Agency belongs to the performer holding the controller; meaning has to arrive for an audience that is not holding anything.
Salen & Zimmerman have no account of this split. Neither does Lüneburg, whose participants are performers.
Fused Spectatorship (CHI PLAY ‘23) attacks the assumption from the other side: eleven of twelve participants could not tell whether they were watching or playing, and the authors conclude that bodily engagement matters more than control. But their spectator’s own hand is being moved. Mine watches someone else’s hands move.
Two different kinds of bodily involvement, and I do not yet know whether they are the same thing. That gap is where my research question is coming from.