1. The playful citizen: An introduction

With the emergence of digital and mobile technologies, our conceptions and hopes of what citizen participation entails have changed profoundly. It seems as though interactive, networked, and cheap technologies have greatly democratized how literacies, knowledge, and power structures are generated and perceived in everyday life and that they have increased—and have further potential to increase—the degree of civic engagement. From playing, modifying, and designing games and interactive documentaries, and using playful tools and games for the production of alternative knowledges, to becoming protest-cartographers or pollution measurers, citizens appear to engage with, alter, and probe media technologies to a far greater extent than ever before. At the same time, we should be critical of what exactly these apparently enabling technologies do, and question what the drawbacks and the possibilities of digital media are for civic engagement. In this edited volume, we provide an overview of the potentials and limitations of citizen engagement in the digital age through a selection of contributions from various academic f ields. These contributions discuss the many digital media technologies and developments that grew to prominence in the second decade of this century. From the Occupy Wall Street movement to the development of citizen science games, from new forms of participatory documentary f ilm-making to the rise and exploits of Reddit users, unifying all these topics is a sustained focus on what we consider to be ludic, or playful, engagement. It is through this view, we argue, that forms of partaking such as DIY, journalism, research, activism, art, or politics are to be understood. We would like to share a particularly striking example here, found in the 2010 exhibition Space Invaders, organized by the National Gallery of Australia. Referring to the eponymous 1978 arcade video game, this playful exhibition celebrated the energy of graff iti culture and its street-based creativity (Babington 2010). Street artist MEEK’s contribution Begging For Change shows a homeless man holding a sign that reads “Keep your coins, I want