Tag Archives: gesture

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

at play in the flocking routine 2

From a draft version of a chapter for Michelle Henning’s forthcoming collection on Museum Media. Accompanying video is here. Occupying the final room of the centre, visitors entered the installation after walking through a range of natural history and ecological displays, from living animals in vitrines to interactive screens and videos. Visitors enter a […]

at play in the flocking routine

A few lo-res seconds of an interactive video installation at the Wildwalk science centre in Bristol (closed in 2007). The fish move and respond to players using ALife flocking routines (they are, in this sense, boids). It may not be clear from the video, but the digital water also responds to players,… From the draft […]