Texts as Toys

Excerpts

Because LLMs allow those who find no joy in the ludic affordances of text to still develop radically superior instrumental relationships with text, they (and the critics watching them) make the critical error of thinking that the ludic quality can be dispensed with entirely. They use LLMs in ways that suggest an intent to reduce text to some sort of pure industrial intermediate that will eventually sink out of sight beneath more sensorial modes of information processing.

The ludic qualities of both text, and AI as a technology, are load-bearing at the human interaction level. You must play to unleash their potentialities.

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It is important to note that the ludic element plays a major role even in purely functional and instrumental reading and writing. Examples include:

• Reading or writing a brief or report to prepare for a meeting
• Studying a textbook and making notes for an exam
• Reviewing a paper to write a peer review
• Composing text strings for user interfaces

All these types of reading and writing can be highly pleasurable and relaxing if the relationship to the text is ludic on both ends (and you’re at the appropriate level of literacy in the particular subject or genre). In fact the relationship must be a ludic one to access the most powerful potentialities.