Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation - or - How to make friends by trying to kick them!

In this dissertation I explore what it might mean to design games
that aim to nurture a spirit of togetherness. My central claim is
that games which are intentionally designed to be confrontational,
broken, or otherwise "incomplete" can help inspire a decidedly festive,
codependent, and performative type of play. Appropriating
the political theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that her
concepts of "action" and "plurality" provide useful definitions of
performance and togetherness as they relate to gameplay. Drawing
on theories of embodied interaction, precedents from the contemporary
art world, and various folk game movements, I grapple with
the messy relationship between designed systems and sociocultural
context. I describe how confronting this relationship head on opens
up fruitful design opportunities. Taking seriously Dave Hickey’s
concept of "the pleasures of disputation," I explore how we players
and designers might transmute the acrimony of conflict into something
joyful.