Simulation, history and experience in Oshii’s Avalon and military-entertainment technoculture

This essay takes Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon (2001) as a starting point for consideration of the impact of simulational interactive media on contemporary technoculture. The connections made in the film between virtual reality games and military research and development, and its quasi-simulational modelling of various historical ‘Polands’ in re-sequencing a dystopian end of history are the most valuable resources it brings to this study of how simulation’s predominant development represents a major challenge to the forms of critical cultural reflection associated with narrative-based forms of recording and interrogating experience.Analysis of the methods and rhetorics of simulation design in the military-industrial (and now military-entertainment) complex will elaborate the nature and stakes of this challenge for today’s globalising technoculture of ‘militainment’

The good hubbing guide: Building indie game maker collectives

This Guide comes from the activities of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Video Games Research Networking Scheme project, Creative Territories (2014-15). The project looked at the recent emergence of small and independent game maker collectives. The aims were to get some bearings on these as part of the growth of indie games production and to consider how to support them as valuable components in the long term sustainability of this important breeding ground of video game creativity which is also now a significant sector of the industry in its own right.Our scoping of the territory these recently emerging collectives of video game makers occupy shows that video game makers who come together in shared work arrangements live in interconnected and overlapping local, regional, national and global “places”. Our Guide is about what they do or could do to “live long and prosper” there

Essential viewing: Review of Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 3: Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être [Technics and time 3: The time of cinema and the question of ill-being]

Critical review of the third volume of Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time series with a particular focus on Stiegler's theory of cinema and of cinematic consciousness therein

The Nintendo Wii, virtualisation and gestural analogics

This paper examines the Nintendo Wii from a perspective informed by Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis of equipmental being in order to make some claims about thesignficance of the Wii’s innovative interface. The Wii enhanced the analogical, gestural component of user input in home game consoles which are (or were) based more firmly in digital, finger-based input. The Wii’s redefinition of interactive media engagement heralds a wider transition to a more embodied media technicity ofvirtual experience. I will advance some propositions about how to understand the Wii’s popularity, its place in advancing a mainstream program of the application of VR technics, and its potential to open up other programmings of ‘spatio-physicality.

Indie Dreams: Video Games, Creative Economy, and the Hyperindustrial Epoch

© The Author(s) 2018. This essay draws on research undertaken as part of a research network project exploring the growth of independent game producers in recent years and the associated changes in the technological and economic conditions of the games industry in the UK, Europe, and the North American continent. It reflects on the possibilities of and challenges to a critical and creative maturing of video games as a cultural medium, evaluating these in the context of contemporary developments in global technoculture and the digital economy. Bernard Stiegler’s critical analysis of hyperindustrial consumer culture is mobilized in evaluating the dreams for an indie future of video games as a creative force in digital cultural transformation

Real lives 2004: The devil you know

This paper discusses the educational game software, Real Lives 2004 (Educational Simulations, 2004) as a means of raising and reflecting on the relations between simulational practices and statistics. These relations animate many modes of the framing and interpretation of experience in the information age. They manifest in diverse phenomena and pose enormous questions for the analysis of contemporary technoculture. Real Lives 2004 provides a window onto key issues concerning the interplay of simulation and statistical analysis. The game presents as a “stripped back” simulational object lacking the detailed 3D interactive milieu of today’s big budget commercial games. It also promotes the educational (and implicitly, critical and ethical) potential of ludic, simulational forms. As such, the game can be read as an under-sketching of the statistical simulation of existence that looks back over the history of this key tradition of governmental and instrumental control, while proposing its continuity in the pedagogical practices of the new media age