Quick Review - The Play Theory of Mass Communication by William Stephenson (1967)

I’ve been arguing for some time that we can theorize disinformation through play. To me the relationship seemed obvious, and I was surprised to find little to no work on the matter. So, when my colleague found the text, “The Play Theory of Mass Communication” by William Stephenson for their own incredible work on toxic game communities, I immediately gave this 1967 text a read. Given its limited reach within game studies and communication studies, I thought I would provide a slight overview here.

Stephenson’s text is arguing that mass communications absorbs people into subjective play. Underlying all 207 pages, he is arguing that play is how we the public engage with various communication from reading newspapers to listening to the radio. Yet to make such a claim, Stephenson offers a few frameworks and looking glasses to help. Methodologically, he relies on this idea of Q-method (a concept he seems to have come up with) and consistently uses it to try and classify his data sets. As a method, it is a key critique of the book as it unnecessarily meddles the pages with analysis that does not effectively paint some of the images he is engaged with. More powerfully, is his theoretical framework of play.

Play is not specific to games. According to the text, we can view people reading news on their morning commute as playing (145), and the entertainment that drives much of mass communication has an aura of communication-pleasure that is relatable to play. Stephenson, understandably, builds his theory of play from the work of Johan Huizinga (2014) and sits in defining it around a distinction between work and leisure. In doing so, he positions it alongside mass communication as an action that “fills” the in-between. News relies on the “fill” to keep its audiences engaged - which is exactly where entertainment or play comes in. It is driven by symbols, expectations, and pleasure, all of which is communicated.

Stepheson’s core theoretical argument can be simplified to the following:

1. Play = entertainment.

2. Play ≠ equal work.

3. Mass communications = work and entertainment.

• Therefore, play (within mass communications) is entertainment. Entertainment that Stephenson argues builds culture.

We get enthralled in the news similar to a player getting lost into the flow of the game. As Stephenson puts it,

“reading creates a certain order, as in a child’s playing, a brief grasp of the reader’s own world. It casts a light spell upon the person - not of rapture, but of deep absorption.” (150).

Our absorption into mass communications occurs because mass communication offers communication-pleasure, an interlude or break that we can watch and discuss. As Stephenson argues, Mass Communications - in its focus on fills, entertainment, and pleasures - builds culture (p. 48). Like Huizinga, Stephenson places play at the core of culture, and mass communications engage in that to further solidify perspectives of a culture.

All of this comes at a time before social media, prior to 24 hour news cycles churned out online, where radio and newspapers were the dominant information dissemination practices. Fast forward to today, and we have an information ecosystem moving at rapid fire speed, fully intertwined with our work, leisure, and everything in between. The “fill” is ever present. In 1967, Stephenson argued that the challenge of studying play then was that it is an action deeply tied to us, making it really hard to look at objectively (152). Today, play is so deeply entrenched in the information flows we willingly or unwillingly engage in, that teasing out its larger roles for interpretation and knowledge dissemination become an intense practice of pulling at the underlying threads behind the “bits'' that move across our screens, our personal communications, and our own reflections of self.

This gets interesting when we consider disinformation on social media - a platform where modern mass communication takes place. In my work on memes with Fenwick McKelvey and Saskia Kowalchuk (McKelvey et al., 2021) we found that they set the boundaries of expectations for communities. Memes reinforced the ingroups and outgroups; it established the morals of participation. Memes are part of modern mass communications, but they are also inherently playful, subversive, and entertaining. They are a perfect example of Stephenson’s point.

Meme from our data. Group added "climate change" to emphasize priorities during COVID-19

My interest in Stephenson’s work is the fact that he frames audience engagement with news as play. He focuses on the communicative, visual, and lived aspects of our engagement with information content to argue that how we share, observe, and obtain information is play. In this, it isn’t the meme that is play, but our engagement with it. In other words, memes are playful, but our sharing, laughing, liking, and looking at them is play. They fill in our daily feeds, our scrolling and engagement is the point of interest, but also the point where disinformation gets furthered. Taking this into account, the argument we can make is that disinformation is playful, and that we - the audience - and its makers are the ones playing.

It’s unfortunate that more people did not engage with Stephenson’s work at the time, as his engagement with play and communication studies offers a powerful basis to build from. Of course, his text is somewhat dated. The media ecosystem is nothing like that of 1967, and our concept of play is much more robust than what Stephenson built with at the time.

Today, we have begun to move past the work/leisure distinction as relying on it left many bodies, classes, and voices out of the fold for consideration (Duncan, 1988; Trammell, 2023). Play is not as rigidly defined as Stephenson and Huizinga might think. However, his work shines light on the role of play in information systems. It allows us to not just focus on play and games, but play and knowledge, action, or behaviour, and in doing so opens up new questions and frameworks for analysis.

For me, Stephenson’s work reaffirms the directions I have already been thinking in, and only further solidifies my arguments around the playful side of disinformation. I’ll be putting him in conversation with more recent scholarship, and in doing so, hopefully develop a more robust framework to consider disinformation as play.

References:

Duncan, M. (1988). Play Discourse and the Rhetorical Turn: A Semiological Analysis of Homo Ludens. Play & Culture, 1, 28–42.

Huizinga, J. (2014). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Lightning Source Inc.

McKelvey, F., DeJong, S., & Frenzel, J. (2021). Memes, scenes and #ELXN2019s: How partisans make memes during elections. New Media & Society, 14614448211020690. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211020690

Trammell, A. (2023). Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. The MIT Press.