Tag Archives: affect

not not animals

Does it make any sense to consider virtual animals as animal in any serious way? Both the naturalistically-rendered wolves of Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wild and the chatty anthropomorphised citizens of the Animal Crossing games are inorganic abstractions, assemblages of animated drawings, behavioural algorithms and audio clips. Their material substrates – digital/electronic […]

postindustrial playground

[For all the changes to children’s playground equipment from the Edwardian era to today], the proprioceptic and vertiginous pleasures of swinging and sliding persist, and children in playgrounds today are still largely climbing on, swinging through, and sliding down industrial forms and engineering. This kinaesthetic dynamic is not an eloquent or easily translatable language, but […]

AI & the achievement of animals

A stork and a wild pig in Breath of the Wild are distinct species only in a decorative sense, as mise-en-scene of the open dynamic world. As prey however they are simply the same: moving targets and soon-to-be raw meat. At first glance, a horse in Breath of the Wild is defined primarily by its vehicular potential. it is […]

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 […]

moments of voluptuous release

[In early critical texts (mid to late 1980s) on the cultural economy of computer games] Fiske & Watts and Bernstein make reference to Roland Barthes’ 1950s account of Japanese players of pachinko. For Barthes, pachinko – a mechanical arcade game, somewhere between pinball, bagatelle and the fruit machine – and its players are at once […]

gesture, technology and play

This is the website for a symposium organised by Helen W Kennedy, Patrick Crogan and myself at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol in 2010. Its ‘reading room’ has links to presentations and subsequent publications. The body has of course always been central to our playful engagements with games and games technologies. Yet, the embodied player […]

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 […]

McLuhan, media, massage

Contributed to a day of screenings and seminars recently at the Watershed celebrating Marshall McLuhan’s centenary. Here’s the blurb for the panel I was on (‘Extension’): Technology, McLuhan argued, is an extension of natural human ability – allowing us to think, feel, and act in ways that were not previously possible. This is possibly most […]