Courtesy of Ben Zucker ’15:
“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
In life, we make the distinction between work and play as a means of structuring our everyday activity, but what exactly does it mean to play? How does play relate to games? Typically, the idea of game has been expressed in virtual spaces of rules which help to shape our conception of society’s structure through experience and experimentation. But we do not only play within the confines of games, nor do we consider all games playful. Pyxis, Wesleyan’s journal for the humanities, is interested in seeing how different disciplines and approaches in the humanities have explored and critiqued the notion, interpretations, and intersections of games and play.
Topics include, but are not limited to: • What creates the boundaries between work and play? How are they or how might they be transgressed?
• In what ways do games and play distort, reflect, or even create the world we live in? What control or agency do we have in a game situation? Who makes the rules?
• Does play necessarily connote enjoyment?
• What happens to ethics or dynamics of power in play?
• How has our conception of games and play changed since our childhood? How have the connotations of these words developed as we have matured?
We encourage submissions from all disciplines in the humanities. Please submit your work to hello[at]pyxisjournal[dot]com. Your file should be named as “paper title_course number.” If you have an accompanying paper prompt, please feel free to include it. We accept papers of all lengths. The submission deadline is Friday, October 25th.
We are also looking for artwork (visual art, photography, sound, and/or video) related to the theme. We accept multiple submissions. If your submission is selected, we will request a high resolution/quality file of your work.
If you have any questions, visit us here or send us an email at hello[at]pyxisjournal[dot]com. If you’d like to pick up last year’s issues of Pyxis to gain a greater understanding of the kind of content we publish, please visit the Center for the Humanities at 95 Pearl Street (at the intersection of Pearl and Washington Street).