Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life comes out tomorrow, June 20th. Hurray! Even more exciting, the State of Play VI Conference in New York is very graciously throwing a book launch party for me there. The party is open to conference attendees, and runs from 5:15 to 8:00pm. Copies of the book will be there for sale, and I’ll be signing for anyone who asks. Many, many thanks from me to Dan Hunter and the State of Play folks for making this happen, and to Cornell University Press for supporting the effort from the start. Also, and not coincidentally, the book is now “In Stock” at Amazon. /cheer

[Cross-posted to Terra Nova.]

In a recent post I raised the idea that, like religious experience for William James, play may best be thought of as a mode of experience. Less foregrounded in that discussion was a further lesson from James: that we should expect to find this disposition in as many varieties as there are times and places for human life, rather than in some universal form. I’ve recently posted a paper to ssrn that aims to get us thinking about how play may be distinctively configured in different times and places, specifically in Europe directly after WWII and in the United States through the present day. In it I consider “New Babylon,” the fascinating project of Unitary Urbanism by Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka Constant), who through it sought to make a city for Homo ludens. I set Constant’s vision against Linden Lab’s Second Life, a world also deeply informed by ideas about games and play. In both, though in quite different ways, architecting for play held the promise of post-bureaucratic sovereignty.

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