UC Irvine

This dissertation argues that understanding play requires embodied participation rather than detached observation. To study play, one must play. Through thousands of hours of participant observation and autoethnographic engagement within karaoke venues across Orange County, California, and beyond, I examine karaoke as a play medium using play as a method of inquiry. By engaging directly, authentically with the karaoke, and within my community, I was able to pursue a search for the play itself, a phenomenological engagement with play as lived experience rather than abstract theory. As part of this inquiry, I contend that karaoke is a uniquely revealing activity for exploring the possibilities of play. Karaoke’s multilayered frames, game, show, activity, and party, operate not as ontological categories but as dynamic states of appropriated play media reframed within a single ecology of karaoke play, each organizing distinct rhetorics of procedure, performance, leisure, and affect. When any frame dominates, the karaoke experience changes dramatically. But when these frames coexist in balance, that karaoke holds the potential to be well-played, provided its participants' intentions align. By engaging play as an object and as a method, this work attempts to “liberate play from games” and push against the “progress narrative” that has long constrained its study— the notion that play must justify itself through productivity or moral worth. Karaoke’s frivolity becomes a scene of philosophical resistance, reminding us that while play can be wielded toward any number of purposes, it is nonetheless not for anything but it can be everything. Within karaoke’s liminal gatherings, participants enact a collective negotiation of vulnerability, joy, and belonging that reveals play as a mode of being rather than a category of behavior. Ultimately, playing karaoke repositions play as a lived ontology of human creativity and connection. It demonstrates that play is not simply what we do but how we become, how we encounter ourselves and one another through moments of shared, improvised creation. Karaoke matters because it doesn’t matter, and as such its play is of play’s most essential quality, toward its own ends, autotelic and quintessential, constituent of being human.