In the first instance the toyetic as a concept allows scrutiny of objects and behaviours that might be considered borderline to or overlapping with toys and play, such as ritual and art objects, ornaments, sport- and game-related objects, educational artefacts, popular media and playful environments.
[This text was cut from the first draft of Toy Theory]
Like toys, objects used in rituals and religious ceremonies are non-productive in industrial or domestic terms, and like toys their salience lies in their articulation of the material and the imaginary: bridging the supernatural or divine with the material, embodied and lived, at the moment of ritual. Their material constitution and manufacture might be differentiated from profane objects (like Heidegger’s silver chalice) or it might be that an ordinary object is transformed in the seriously-playful activity of ritual itself, clay or sticks, wine or bread, transubstantiated for the momentary duration of the ritual. In some ritual cultures objects move between the sacred and playful depending on their immediate context. Ritual itself, as Huizinga asserts, has seriously playful dimensions, with game-like rules and separation from mundane everyday life of setting, duration, modes of behaviour and deportment.[i]
Decorative objects and ornaments
Toys themselves flicker between the object-in-play and the aesthetic or ornamental. Advanced LEGO models might be kept and displayed rather than broken up, the elaborate dolls of the nineteenth century were as much ornament as plaything, the industrial phenomenon of ‘collectible’ toy lines from Whimsies and POGs to Pokémon and Funko Pop! On the other hand, ostensibly functional objects can, through their symbolic and performative dimensions, move closer to the toyetic. For instance, museums are full of beautifully worked and decorated weapons and armour that clearly served a role that was as decorative and performative as it was practical.
Board games and card games fall into the category of toys in a commercial or industrial sense, in that they are often sold in toyshops or the toy aisles of supermarkets but are generally taken to come under a broader category of children’s playthings, distinct from toys themselves. In their early years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, videogames and consoles were often bracketed as toys. Games have a long historical and cultural presence, at least back to Antiquity with Roman knuckle bones and more formal play such as the Egyptian Senet and the Mesopotamian Game of Ur (each dating back to the early third century BCE) through to the Chinese Go and the much more recent Eurasian chess. The basic components of board games, a flat surface etched with a grid and sets of movable tokens, remained basically unchanged until the advent of the popular computer game in the late 1970s. Sports equipment such as balls, javelins and hoops have a similarly long history, with Greek vases depicting hoop-based games. Games designers and game scholars have addressed the distinctions between toys and games.[ii] I would note the general but not absolute principle that a toy is often understood as more open-ended in its possible animation in play than the rule-bound nature of game-based play with objects. Game play is structured and regulated by a ruleset or system of time and relationality, of value, exchange, cooperation and competition. But it is important to note that any game system is open to adaptation and subversion in play – new rules, emergent playful behaviour – and any game tokens can be picked up and played with differently, as children might animate chess pieces in a story-world of their own fabrication.
Another key category of object that has overlapped with toys through history is the educational toy. Instrumental in their pedagogical intent, they include alphabet blocks, sets of animals in books or objects, the more systematic ‘gifts’ of Froebel in the nineteenth century, through engineering and scientific toys to the contemporary panoply of developmental toys, games and software. They have been deployed to rescue literacy, numeracy, moral education and diversion from the less worthy dimensions of play. Given the instrumentality that drives the design and application of educational toys I have not addressed them in Toy Theory in detail but they are mentioned in passing where appropriate.
The long history of automata is a central concern of Toy Theory. An archaeology of the toyetic would link the robotic mechanisms of classical Antiquity, both fictional and actual, through the sophisticated and programmed automata that entranced European courts in the eighteenth century, from the fairground fortune tellers, optical and ‘pre-cinematic’ toys of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to the development of robots proper, and the emergence of software ‘bots and automata in the digital games culture of the late twentieth century. A fascination with the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the copy and the original, the material and the imaginary flows through philosophy and cultural theory from René Descartes to Donna Haraway and Jean Baudrillard, and into media and film history, notably in media archaeological approaches.
The dolls house, the Wendy house, Marie Antionette’s Hameau de la Reine, landscape gardens (for example in Ming dynasty China and early eighteenth century England), modern theme parks and the microworlds of videogames and VR share a toyetic organisation of space, a design pinned directly to the playing, viewing, perambulatory or performative body. Disney’s own term for the design of its theme parks – ‘imagineering’ – is apt: these structures and spaces are engineered, machines that fit around and scaffold the body, perception (lines of sight, scent, sound) and imagination. Videogames and online virtual worlds resonate with more recent notions of simulation, in both its philosophical and computing sense, of an artificial world toyetic in its potential for pleasurable illusion, its degrees of abstraction from and stylisation of the actual world phenomena and systems they ostensibly model, rendered interactive, and manipulable, to-hand via keyboard or controller.
Toys mediate the playing body and mind with their symbolic and material environments. Throughout Toy Theory I aim to sustain a sense of the mediatic character of toys from sticks and pebbles to virtual objects. Though critical of media studies’ tendency to read toys primarily as dematerialised media ‘texts,’ I acknowledge and work with the salient differences of toys as media in the general contemporary sense of the term as mass media or media of communication. Throughout the twentieth century toys were integral to the sign systems and emergent transmedia systems of commercialised children’s media culture, from Charlie Chaplin dolls and Laurel and Hardy masks, through Disney’s marketing innovations to the transmedia systems of Pokémon and LEGO, to the virtualisation of videogames and smart toys today.
[i] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (Boston MA: The Beacon Press 1986 [1938]).
[ii] Schut, “Virtualisation of LEGO,” Miguel Sicart, Play Matters (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2014), Will Wright, cited in Celia Pearce, “Sims, Battlebots, Cellular Automata, God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright,” Game Studies 2, no. 1 (2002).