✱ Understanding (post-industrial) playful media
Grant McCracken, writing in Culturematic, offers a deceptively simple insight:
Reality TV still has producers, directors, and writers, but they matter much less. Their job is to manage the start conditions, to crack up the Culturematic...and then live with what happens.
This is a sharp way to think about where games - and more broadly, playful media - are headed in their post-industrial era. To riff on McCracken:
Playful Media still has producers, designers and technical specialists but they matter much less. Their purpose is to create the conditions, curate the trigger for experience… and then amplify what happens.
This marks a shift from authorship to orchestration. From crafting finite narratives or tightly bound systems, to scaffolding sandboxes - spaces for emergence, co-creation and collective myth-making. In these spaces, the value isn't in what is made for the player but in what is made through them: memes, modifiers, moments, movements and mementos.
Viewed through this lens, the most interesting creative acts today aren’t polished, finished products - they’re immersive invitations. Cultural triggers housed within containers designed to be picked up, probed, remixed, and memed.
The sandbox provides the scaffolding - the toys, tools, tactility, templates and techniques - but the core loop (action → interaction → reaction) is designed and directed by the player. It is enriched by how that loop feels and how it makes them feel and extended by the emergent activities, rituals, culture and meaning it catalyses.
This evolution demands a new kind of creative posture and playbook:
- less art, more craft
- less products, more probes
- less assembly lines, more jazz improv
- less cathedrals, more chaos containers
The job is not to control the outcome. The job is to create the conditions that catalyse generative chaos and cultural resonance. Meaningful, meme-able experiences.
Or as McCracken put it: to test the world, discover meaning, and unleash value.