excerpt from Gameworlds (pp.6-8) on Cohen and MacKeith’s ‘paracosms’ and imaginative play: Such worlds open up as virtual environments for play beyond the page, along with television, comic and film stories and characters, as resources for play in the playground, the park or the bedroom. They are to be lived in and played out beyond the […]more…
domestic media archaeology
Clearing out a small room in our house that has been used over the years as a baby’s bedroom, an office, a spare room and a storage space. Amongst the accumulated objects, clothes, CDs, books, videogames, pictures, etc. that was a large box stuffed with electrical leads and computer cables. Rummaging through for power leads […]more…
The mobilisation in and as play of relationships of control and passivity, of playing by the rules and resisting, distorting or simply ignoring them, of social hierarchies that might be inverted or reinforced in any particular game… a dreamlike fluidity of power relationships evident in the medieval carnival and the… something else. Not immediately recuperated […]more…
we both know your yearnings
I know who I am, but who are we? Distributed subjectivity in the postindustrial machinic phylum. The card is delivered to me from a fairground fortune-telling machine in the collection of the SeaCity Museum in Southampton. Its message is printed on thick card and has the look of handwriting. It assumes an intimacy between us, […]more…
toyworlds
Toys, materiality, and imagination (extracts from Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play, NY: Bloomsbury 2014).more…
the semio-economics of Hyrule
The expansive world of The Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wild features a diegetic economic system. From time to time Link meets travelling merchants or visits shops in villages and can buy or sell food, plants, weaponry, minerals and so on, resources that are distributed across the world and foraged for or won […]more…
talking about the playful future
A talk at the University of York’s Theatre, Film & TV Department‘s research seminar series on October 11th. Taking the Lightbug project to design interactive playground equipment as a case study, it coveredconcepts and approaches for researching the temporalities of design for postdigital play: Design is by necessity future-oriented, even the most everyday and banal new object or […]more…
After VR… introductory thoughts
part one: edit from the second edition of Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant & Kelly New Media: a critical introduction London: Routledge 2003, p.106+ 2.1 Whatever happened to Virtual Reality? In the first edition of this book, written in 2001–2002 when interest in VR was still relatively strong, we outlined its history and discussed the debate that surrounded […]more…
transforming creativity
With Dan Ashton I have recently set up the Transforming Creativity Research Group at WSA. We are waiting for the official website to be launched, but have a news and events blog up and running: https://transformingcreativity.wordpress.com/ We have already run the After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media symposium, and Dan and I […]more…
After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media
A symposium I convened under the auspices of the newly minted Transforming Creativity Research Group and AMT at Winchester School of Art. My introductory thoughts… After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media After VR After After VR Taking the recent revival in commercial, popular, and academic interest in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies and […]more…
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…
