Tag Archives: simulation

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 […]

robots for everyone

As I’m working on a cluster of ideas about robots, AI, automata and animals, here is an entry on Robot that I wrote for The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2015). The word “robot” was coined by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in 1921, in his play R.U.R. He took his inspiration for it from […]

accursed play

A new article in Games and Culture: Accursed play: the economic imaginary of early game studies. It’s part of the Ludic Economies special issue edited by myself and Alison Harvey – which should be published later this year. Here’s an extract: Play, work, and waste So videogame play in the arcades and the home in […]

the semio-economics of Hyrule

The expansive world of The Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wild features a diegetic economic system. From time to time Link meets travelling merchants or visits shops in villages and can buy or sell food, plants, weaponry, minerals and so on, resources that are distributed across the world and foraged for or won […]

After VR… introductory thoughts

part one: edit from the second edition of Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant & Kelly New Media: a critical introduction London: Routledge 2003, p.106+ 2.1 Whatever happened to Virtual Reality? In the first edition of this book, written in 2001–2002 when interest in VR was still relatively strong, we outlined its history and discussed the debate that surrounded […]

After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media

A symposium I convened under the auspices of the newly minted Transforming Creativity Research Group and AMT at Winchester School of Art. My introductory thoughts… After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media After VR After After VR Taking the recent revival in commercial, popular, and academic interest in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies and […]

prosthetic imagination

Rules themselves create fictions by the very fact of complying with their respective rules, is separated from real life where there is no activity that literally corresponds to any of these games [they] are played for real. As if is not necessary (Caillois 1962, 8). Replace cops and robbers and dolls houses with their digital descendants Grand Theft […]

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 […]