Mr Happy
This video essay ‘Monsters, mini-games and Mr Happy’ was originally published in Audiovisual thinking: a journal of academic video, no.2, September 2011. The journal seems to be defunct now, so I’m posting it here. There is a written account in my Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play (Bloomsbury 2014): 22-26. Link to Open Access book. The […] more…
small thoughts on AI & smart design
A 5 minute panel presentation for the WSA Smart Design for the Future conference, 20/4/22, organised by Dr Yuanyuan Yin. Full details on the conference more…
transmedia toyetics
An MA Global Media Management workshop with Maggie Li and Megen de Bruin-Molé: incorporating toy mechanics and media into transmedia storyworlds. Here are monsters from Chinese mythology, an escape room, Spongebob in the Qin Dynasty, and a dangerous roller coaster. more…
touch toyetics
A toy stops being a toy when it is no longer touched the relationship between the hand and the toy [is] an example of technogenesis, or coevolution of humans and technics. Wanda Strauven 2021 Touch Archaeology. Lüneburg: meson press, 189, 205. more…
videophilia
This is a really old post from a defunct blog, but one that I keep referring students to when we discuss ethnographic methods, so it’s useful to keep in play. It’s a response to an informal presentation by Nick Taylor (then a PhD candidate at York University, Toronto, now at North Carolina State University) at […] more…
redefining the toyetic
Critical attention to toys demonstrates that the instrumental nature of machines and systems is less stable than generally assumed. And it shifts ontological questions from the essences of particular types of object to the ways in which objects are used; that is, rather than categorising toys as distinct from other classes of artefact and technology, […] more…
analogue ai animal activity
Animal AI and A-Life ideas by level 1 Games Design & Art students: non-digital modelling of social behaviour, ecosystems and resources, sensing, movement and conflict. In response to this talk, and this brief: With materials to hand, model an AI animal mechanic in a board game or card game. Don’t design the whole game, just […] more…
industrial creativity
Lovely responses from year 2 BA Graphic Arts students to my talks on the ideologies and practicalities of industrial creativity and play. I love the toy designs in particular. View this post on Instagram A post shared by BA Graphic Arts WSA (@ba_ga_wsa) more…
artificial animals games intelligence
A lecture for year 1 BA Games Design & Art, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton more…
Surviving the Singularity
Please go here: http://www.microethology.net/robot-zoo/ more…
Toy Theory
My book, Toy Theory, will be published by MIT Press in 2023. Here’s a section of the proposal: Headline Rethinking culture, media, technology and the human through play with objects and materials. Placing toys at the centre of the postdigital era through a philosophy and genealogy of play with objects, of toying and being toyed with. […] more…
toy cinema
Video of a short lecture on precinematic and postcinematic toys for Estrella Sendra’s SOAS module ‘Introduction to Film Language, History and Theory’ October 2020 more…
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