Power Up

The Play Research Group, UWE, Bristol
studying the technologies and cultures of games and play

the Snakes and Ladders defence (TM)

Another exhibit at 'Must-Have Toys' at Bristol City Museum. My kids had fun playing this blowup of an Edwardian (?) snakes and ladders board. I'm concerned they weren't fully interpellated by  the game's moral intentions though....

posted by: sethgiddings at 08:49 | link | comments (4) |

the Tetris Defence exploded (again)

Check this out at Grand Text Auto.

posted by: sethgiddings at 08:18 | link | comments |

lollipop of zelda

 

posted by: sethgiddings at 14:33 | link | comments (3) |

and now to Vancouver...

Lots of comment on DiGRA in the blogosphere, e.g. at Terranova, The Ludologist,  Gamasutra,  Ludonauts, Distant Sound of Trumpets, games*design*art*culture etc... thankfully not all of it is concerned with what Jesper refreshingly now calls "N versus L".

Well, I thought there was lots of interesting and promising work going on. I'll list a few of my highlights for now, then get round to posting more developed comments soon.

TL Taylor's opening keynote session on  the (self) constitution of players in MMORPGs was great of course. Laura Ermi and  Frans Mayra are doing some very useful work thinking through (and differentiating types of) 'immersion' and had a wonderfully blobby approach to diagrams. Nick Glean's paper on complexity and self-organisation in sim games was of particular interest to me and Marinka Copier's presentation on fantasy and role play across difference types of play cultures was wonderful - she's doing some essential work on play theory. Bart Simon's account of case modding was cool - his articulation of the aesthetics and materiality of this practice should be applied to game cultures more generally. I haven't seen Jim Gee speak before - he is very good value. I have to admit I haven't read his book either, but I will now. His model of the relationship between player and avatar as one of distributed skillsets and affordances is rich. Patrick Crogan's presentation was another highlight, and his paper is on the top of my 'to read' pile.

posted by: sethgiddings at 12:16 | link | comments |

soft cyborgs

Playful Subjects seemed to fall into two main themes - some very useful work was done on players and subjectivity on the one hand, with attention to technology and agency on the other.

So (taking a deep breath)….   The presentation by Helen and myself kicked off a discussion that never quite got addressed fully, so I'd like to raise it here. It revolved around our use of the term 'cyborg' to account for the relationship between videogame player, game and hardware. Geoff and Dave in particular were concerned that we seemed to be positing some science-fictional 'fusion' between human and machine - this was not our intention (well, not quite). Here's the backstory: we have both been thinking through the nature of the videogame play event, its elements and particular pleasures / experiences. Drawing on Helen's pioneering work on technicity and her interest in Donna Haraway's work, my appropriation of ideas from science and technology studies (STS) and Latour, and our recent conversations with our colleague Iain Grant (in particular the work he has done on videogame play as a 'passional circuit' - see Lister et al 2003, section 5) we have been thinking through the specifically and literally cybernetic nature of gameplay.

Iain uses William Gibson’s famous anecdote about watching kids in an arcade to question the notion of interactivity (I’ll comment further on this in another post) and to argue that this is an example of ‘cybernetic bodies’ – not physically augmented cyborgs (like Robocop or someone with a heart pacemaker), but rather a rigging together of parts of bodies (both human and nonhuman) in an intense, but temporary, configuration. Here is a rather hacked together extract:

“we did not see here two complete and sealed-off entities: the player on the one hand and the game on the other. Rather, there is an interchange of information and energy, forming a new circuit”.

“In a cybernetic circuit, there is no point of origin for any action that circuit performs. In other words, it would make little sense to talk of one component of a circuit initiating that circuit. By definition, a circuit consists in a constancy of action and reaction. In gaming, for example, not only is there the photon-neurone-electron circuit Gibson evokes, there are also macroscopically physical components of that circuit, such as the motions of finger, mouse or stick. Motions of a finger, prompted as much by changes in the display as by any 'free will' on the part of the player, also provokes series' of neuroelectrical pulses resulting in hand-arm-shoulder-neck movement, even in whole-body motion, for which the individual whose body it is, is far from responsible. Through the tactile and visual interface with the machine, the entire body is determined to move by being part of the circuit of the game, being, as it were in the loop”.

"The most important aspect of this account of gaming is that it shifts attention from the interactions between two discreet entities towards the cybernetic processes that, as it were, edit parts from each to create an indissociable circuit of informational-energetic exchange”.

This raises two initial issues – one conceptual: how to articulate this biomechanical model with the various (techno) cultural circuits also in play (of this – more anon); the second is an issue of terminology. Is ‘cyborg’ the best term? Helen likes it, not least because it keeps Haraway’s essential work (and its socialist-feminist politics) centrally positioned. I’m not quite so keen because it conjures up images of singular organic-machinic body, rather than the contingent, temporary and (arguably) more radical, nature of technocultural relationships in everyday life and gameplay.

We’ve tried some other terms… jerry-rigged cyborg; plugin cyborg (referencing both software and Archigram); various versions of assemblage (ref. both computer language and Haraway’s monsters); drawing on terminology from cybernetics and AI: first order process cybernetics, multiply integrated circuits; perverse engineering; informationally encapsulated, domain specific compilation. These hardly trip off the tongue though! I thought perhaps ‘soft cyborg’ might do some work – as it refers to both the integral position of software in the circuit and echoes other distinctions such as that between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ technological determinism.

Any thoughts on either terms or the underlying concept?

posted by: sethgiddings at 11:44 | link | comments (9) |

playful subjects report

Where to start? Well, I should start somewhere - it's now been a while since the event! Here goes then, an edited version of a report for a faculty research bulletin. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to reply or post what you felt were the most interesting pointers for further discussion and research....

The Play Research Group in the School of Cultural Studies hosted the Playful Subjects symposium on the 14^th and 15^th of May at Spike Island . Delegates and artists from across the UK and from Denmark, Canada, the Irish Republic, Finland, the US and from disciplines as diverse as sociology, marketing, fine art, media education, computer game production studies and film studies gathered to discuss technology and agency, players and subjectivity in computer games.

 

Playful Subjects built on the School’s pioneering research and events in the field of game studies, from Game Cultures, the first UK national conference on computer games in 2001 as well as its well-established role in new media research.

 

Asked ‘how can we theorise the intimate relationships between the human, the textual, the ludic, and the technological in the act of gameplay?’, delegates presented research on wide-ranging topics, including: gender and technicity; childhood and gameplay; haptics and synaesthesia; virtual consumption;  videogames as game texts and technologies; and the struggles between ‘legitimate’ and ‘transgressive’ play in massively multiplayer online games. Other presentations included an interactive virtual world, a near future fiction of videogame production and race, and a message from robot games scholars in the future.

 

Please see the symposium website: http://www.playfulsubjects.org for details of speakers and abstracts.

 

posted by: sethgiddings at 10:50 | link | comments |

Template by motime.com  |