Ludo Ergo Sum: Play, existentialism and the ludification of culture

Abstract

This chapter aims to initiate a dialogue between semiotics of culture and existential semiotics about how to understand and conceptualise the changing role of games and play in contemporary society. Games have become the largest cultural industry in the World and their prestige is now exceeding their traditional borders and contaminates the languages of marketing, politics, art and many others. It is urgent, therefore, to acknowledge this change and to try to analyse it with the tools of semiotics. Cultural semiotics, hence, will allow us to conceptualise play as a modelling system and therefore to reconstruct its trajectory in the semiosphere. Existential semiotics, on the other hand, will help us outline the connection between the cultural evolution of games and the current global semiocrises and then to trace their effects on the individual level. In this chapter, then, we will first focus on the inner workings of play as a modelling system, then on its position in the semiosphere (in particular in relation to the concepts of gamification and ludification) and on the relationship between the ludification of culture and the global semiocrises brought by globalization. Finally, we will outline how, in this context, play and games have the semiotic potential to become tools of resistance and of individual expression.