| Sumario: | Uncertainty and ambiguity are central dimensions of play. In video-game design and experience, they are dramatically amplified by the material uncertainties built into digital technologies. This article explores the ways in which contemporary fiction imagines and negotiates the ambiguity of digital play. Building on Brian Sutton-Smith's play theory, I examine how the literary imagination invokes, combines, and opposes many of the discourses that coalesce around play in contemporary culture. Discussing fiction's engagement with both video-game design and larger gamifying trends, I show that play serves as a complex signifier of creative freedom, spiritual aspirations, but also moral crisis and loss of agency. My two examples—Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Richard Powers's Playground (2024)—frame the ambiguity of digital play in relation to different forms of vulnerability: personal anxieties relating to illness and disability in the former novel, fears of ecological crisis and AI-driven societal collapse in the latter. The epistemological and affective challenges of play are thus primarily understood in interpersonal terms in Zevin's narrative, whereas Powers links them to the novel's formal "trick" of a covert AI narrator.
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