Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space to examine these uninhibited and constraining modes of play, this essay considers how smooth play works as a resistive force outside of normative configurations of play conditioned by operations of striation that work on the body. As a gaming intervention, I look at my own art installation SmoothSketch which uses a microprocessor to create a controller that functions as a “canvas” allowing players to draw freely while simultaneously controlling in-game agents. I argue for a non-representational approach to rethinking gameplay as the push and pull of various operations of play, or rather smooth forces that resist and deterritorialize beyond striated configurations of power through a continuum of affective intensities. Using SmoothSketch, I explore this through the installation’s spatial assemblage of play in which a continuum exists between the smooth space of the game and its transference of affective energies onto an analogical control peripheral whose continual generation, through the energy of drawn lines, unfolds simultaneously with the player’s actions.
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