another fine mess
We’ve treated ourselves to a huge box set of Laurel and Hardy DVDs. One of our favourites is Me and My Pal (1933), which is set an hour or so before Olly’s marriage into a rich family. Stan’s wedding present, a jigsaw puzzle, attracts first the attention of the taxi driver hired to take them [...] more…
future of toys bid
extracts from case for support for an AHRC Network bid: The central theme of the proposed activity is the future of toys in a digital media culture. Taking recent developments in ‘hybrid’ toy and game design and the ‘Internet of Toys’ – systems that integrate physical toys with digital game technologies and networks- the following [...] more…
Pokémon Go as distributed imagination
Here’s a draft of a short article accepted for a special section of Mobile Media & Communication on Pokémon Go: The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality (AR) to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on [...] more…
prosthetic imagination, augmented memory
What did I say at the ‘Amusing and Disturbing’ symposium on gaming and children at the Tekniska Museet in Stockholm in April? Ah, I remember now: more…
the hybrid realities of Pokémon (before Pokémon Go)
Excerpt from Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play, 79-85. Transmedia systems: Drawing Pokémon As a transmedia system, Pokémon is designed to open up numerous and varied platforms for play with its characters and world. Our house was for years a monument to its success in this regard. Bedroom walls were covered with posters detailing and categorizing [...] more…
Pokémon as new mass media
Something I started writing at the end of the last century! From Lister et al 2009, New Media: a critical introduction 2nd ed.), 292-294 CASE STUDY 4.10: Pokémon: videogames as new (mass) media To explore the issues arising from popular new media’s implication within commercial entertainment culture we will return to the multiplatform worlds [...] more…
SimKnowledge
I have a chapter in Michelle Henning’s Museum Media, one of Wiley’s new International Handbooks of Museum Studies. It’s called ‘SimKnowledge: what museums can learn from videogames’. PDF here. more…
what is the state of play? the work of the Opies in the postdigital era
full article here Re-reading Iona Opie’s The People in the Playground (1994) I was struck by the fact that the children she was watching, and wryly commenting on were in their final year of primary school at the end of the 1970s – and I am of the same generation.. My playground was a few [...] more…
prosthetic imagination
Rules themselves create fictions by the very fact of complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that literally corresponds to any of these games [they] are played for real. As if is not necessary (Caillois 1962, 8). Replace cops and robbers and dolls houses with their digital descendants Grand Theft [...] more…
Animal Crossing economics
The clock and the world’s temporality in Animal Crossing are completely integral. The clock isn’t a measure of time, but virtual time’s arrow itself, driving forward the events, economies and relationships, not just ticking along beside them. The game has some elaborate measures built into its fiction to avoid temporal paradox, manipulation, or collapse. For [...] more…
robots are go
With Silas Adekunle of Reach Robotics I have just been awarded a REACT Prototype grant to research playful robotics. More as it develops, but here’s a bit of the application: Reach Robotics has designed an entertainment robot controlled by a smart phone game, palm-sized and personalisable. The aim of the project is to develop a [...] more…
soft worlds
Extracts from a chapter from Gameworlds: virtual media & children’s everyday play: Soft Worlds more…
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