Toy Theory: technology and imagination in play will be out in November. No cover image yet, but here is the draft marketing blurb: A…
Tag: play
postdigital playgrounds
Text and images from my contribution to the A is for Age-Appropriate panel at CCA 2023, with Sara Grimes, Darshana Jayemanne, Bronwen Swerdfager, and…
toy animals
This article – in Cultural Politics 20(1), March 2024 – maps the child’s toy and media environment as one populated with artificial animals, from…
robot ludologists
video on its way
Unbox: Cardboard Cinema
The Beauty and the Beast board game is an ingenious engineering of cinematic, narrative and architectonic space into a slot-together cardboard allegory. A tie-in…
AI has always been a toy
We should look to the digital game for the most compelling and generative toyetic source of concepts and material developments in artificial life and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…