The phrase "artifact plays" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts related to gaming, art, or cultural studies where the term "artifact" refers to an object of historical or cultural significance and "plays" indicates its role or function.
Example: "In the museum exhibit, the artifact plays a crucial role in understanding the ancient civilization's daily life."
Alternatives: "artifact functions" or "artifact serves".
Fig. 7 In the exploratory stage users were able to select an artifact, play with it and download relevant material from the internet so as to understand how that fits to the real world.
First, the Glossers' Johnstown ― now an unremarkable Rust Belt artifact — played a central, if unheralded, role in shaping modern immigration policy.
The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems.
However, there are strong indications that tree-construction artifacts play a considerable role in the shaping of the 16S rRNA tree.
As design for sustainability extends beyond its origins in engineering, and therefore production, increasing attention has been put on the roles technologies and designed artifacts play in mitigating or exacerbating consumption-related impacts.
First, curricular artifacts play a considerable role in dictating how faculty approach course planning (Hora and Ferrare [2013]).
Tilley C (2000) surveys a wide variety of cases in which anthropologists have argued that metaphorical relationships involving natural objects and artifacts play an important role in culture in particular societies.
The most important fact is that motion compensation improves in most cases the AUCs, suggesting that motion artifacts play an important role in correct diagnosis of non-mass-enhancing lesions.
We conjecture that in the other subjects, artifacts either obstructed the relevant neural activity (cases where a slight improvement by artifact removal was obtained) or artifacts played some role in the control of the BCI system (cases where artifact removal slightly reduced the performance).
We argue that the older children were slower to solve the problem when the typical function was primed because (i) their artifact concept plays a role in problem solving, and (ii) intended purpose is central to their concept of artifact function, but not to that of the younger children.
