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…
towards the phenomenology of Angry Birds
draft: The phenomenology of Angry Birds, or, how to live in virtual gravity [PDF download here] Abstract Taking the popular mobile game Angry Birds (Rovio 2009) and its simulation of gravity as a starting point, this essay explores the nature of sensation, perception and proprioception in contemporary digital and mobile culture, as exemplified in digital […] more…
Gameworlds in sight…
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Orangujam
An enchanting talk by Hanna Wirman at the Bristol Games Hub yesterday. Every time I hear Hanna speak of her research designing games for captive orang-utans it opens up new realms of thought and ideas. The talk was pitched at the game designers at the Hub, Hanna inviting them to think of their imagined end-users […] more…
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