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 […] more…
ethology (notes for a picture essay)
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you could vibrato it
A quick cut and annotation of a microethological study of the testing of Alphasphere at the Pervasive Media Studio some years ago. I’ve put it here as reference for a workshop on haptic play at RMIT this week. I’ll explain more here later. more…
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 […] 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…
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 […] more…
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