In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.

This article looks at how games and play contribute to the big data-driven production of knowledge in High-Energy Physics, with a particular focus on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where the author has been conducting anthropological fieldwork since 2014. The ludic (playful) aspect of knowledge production is analyzed here in three different dimensions: the Symbolic, the Ontological, and the Epistemic. The first one points towards CERN as place where a cosmological game of probability is played with the help of Monte-Carlo simulations. The second one can be seen in the agonistic infrastructures of competing experimental collaborations. The third dimension unfolds in ludic platforms, such as online Challenges and citizen science games, which contribute to the development of machine learning algorithms, whose function is necessary in order to process the huge amount of data gathered from experimental events. Following Clifford Geertz, CERN itself is characterized as a site of deep play, a concept that contributes to understanding wider social and cultural orders through the analysis of ludic collective phenomena. The article also engages with Peter Galison's idea of the trading zone, proposing to comprehend it in the age of big data as a Playground. Thus the author hopes to contribute to a wider discussion in the historiographical and social study of science and technology, as well as in cultural anthropology, by recognizing the ludic in science as a central element of understanding collaborative knowledge production.

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The computer screen gradually fills up with ever more complex geometrical patterns. Thousands of players go online to combine and rearrange colorful building blocks. With every level, the shapes become more refined, the patters harder to build, and the achievements more difficult to obtain. The leaderboards with the highest scores are published online and available to the entire playing community. Also the in-game mission outcomes are shared via social media platforms. The game outlined above would not differ substantially from other abstract online digital puzzles, such as Bejeweled (2001) or Candy Crush (2012), if it were not for one crucial detailits collaborative drive for an external goal. EteRNA (2010) constitutes a big data-driven digital laboratory (Virtual Lab. Play a Game. Change the World.), where more than 38.000 citizen player-scientists assemble shapes representing ribonucleic acids (RNAs), tiny molecules that are the basis of every living cell. The best virtual RNA designs are selected and synthesized in the biochemistry laboratory at Stanford. Like numerous other citizen science games (also known as serious games, human-based computation games, or games with a purpose, GWAP), EteRNA is an example of a much broader playful/laborious phenomenon, which has been emerging in recent years. The term itself is opening up three significant fields for the understanding of citizen science games as playful collaborations for a common goal lying outside of the game itself.