About

Hello!

Hi there! I’m Steve Wilcox—professor, game designer, and researcher. Hello, Worlds is a personal and professional project of mine where I explore the relationship between life, meaning, and play. In particular, I research how people make sense of the world, how sensemaking provides us with a feeling towards the world and what it means—what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls our ‘feel for the game’—and how we can use play to exchange ways of making sense so that we might perceive, think about, and interact with the world as others do.

Hello, World(s)

The notion that the world—in all its meaning and significance—is already out there, just waiting our perception of it is fairly common. In fact, you could say it’s part of our folk psychology, i.e. our naïve, commonsense understanding of the world and how it works. And yet, from philosophy to cognitive science to animal studies we know that a common, shared world is itself a fallacy, an illusion psychologists call naïve realism. In actuality, each of us enacts and inhabits our own world, what biologist Jakob von Uexküll calls an Umwelt or ‘world-environment.’ As our bodies, senses, and lived experiences vary, so too the world(-environment) around us. And so, while we may naively think that we exist in one and the same world, there are in fact a plurality of worlds or Umwelten around us at all times.

If we inhabit our own worlds, you might be wondering, why do we (naively) feel as though we exist in a common, shared world? This is where our commonalities and differences come into play. When people have something in common—such as their gender, race, or class—they tend to encounter the same structures and constraints on their agency, shaping how they can interact with and make practical sense of the world. This practical sense provides us with a ‘feel for the game’ of life. As a result, people who have never interacted with one another can nevertheless possess a common or shared feeling towards the world and what it means, just as gamers who have never met come to perceive, think about, and interact with the playspace of the same game in the same or similar ways. At the same time, differences between us and how we can practically interact with the world can lead to distinct, even contradictory ways of making sense, resulting in both subtle and dramatic differences in our world-environments or worlds. Among other things, this means that the further you are from the cultural norm the more breakdowns in sensemaking you’ll encounter and the less understood your ‘worldview’ will be. In short, there are social, political, and ethical implications at play in the world and how we understand it.

Mission

Hello, Worlds is meant to capture the plurality of worlds around us, to challenge our naïve understanding of what the world means and to whom, and to recognize the deep connection between sensemaking and play. As a research project, it treats variations in bodies and identities not as mere differences in knowledge about the world (epistemology) or how it appears to us (phenomenology) but as a plurality of ways in which we can and do exist in and inhabit the world (ontology). As the Marxist Antonio Gramsci once noted, the notion that there is just one world and one way of making sense of it is itself a powerful fallacy, one that maintains an unequal ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière) in society that simultaneously impedes our ability to make sense of the world from the margins while compelling us to adopt the logic of those at the centre. Play has the potential to disrupt the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by opening us up to novel ways of making sense of and being in the world.

Further Reading

• In Hello, Worlds: A Ludic Theory of Cognition (Games and Culture, 2024, open access) I lay the groundwork for thinking of body, mind, and world as enacted through play.
• My book—Designing A Feel for the Game—is rooted in this enactive understanding of play, applied to the creation of meaningful, memorable games.
• I was invited by the fine folks at the Embodied Design Research Lab at UC Berkeley to talk about embodiment, play, and world. You can watch that presentation/conversation below.