My chapter on the design of playful AI and robotics – and the relationships between the material, the technical and the imaginary – is in The Internet of Toys: practices, affordances and the political economy of children’s smart play, edited by Giovanna Mascheroni and Donell Holloway (Palgrave 2019). Titled ‘Toying with the singularity: AI, automata and […]more…
hand-held cinema
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum has uploaded my report on this archive research: Handheld cinema, or the other successful toys that move.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…
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…
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…
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…
swing test
Brandon Hill Park, one cold, wet and windy December evening…more…
dancing… and waiting…
Within the phenomenological framework, we can see how the mobile game-play in both urban and domestic places evokes particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of […]more…
Harlem Shake, gangnam & planking
Field notes, DanceTag test at St Matthias Campus, UWE Bristol 19th Nov 2013 Following a lecture I gave introducing the project to third year Media & Cultural Studies students on a module called Games, Simulation & Media, and overlapping with introduction to video micro-ethnography of gameplay. Seven students in the workshop, one of whom had […]more…
DanceTag in the wild
A moment from a playtesting / publicity event for the Dancetag project as part of the Digital Festival in Brighton. A group of women enthusiastically obliged. They played the part too – insisting they ‘dance round their handbags’. Interestingly, the app completely failed at this moment – the dancers couldn’t hear the music over traffic […]more…
hybrid ontology of mobile gaming
‘Within the phenomenological framework, we can see how the mobile game-play in both urban and domestic places evokes particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of […]more…
