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’

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 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

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

Paying attention: Toward a critique of the attention economy

This is the introduction to the special issue of Culture Machine co-edited by the authors and drawn from the 2010 conference of the same name co-convened by the Digital Cultures Research Centre for the European Science Foundaiton (see www.payingattention.org). At 10,000 words it represents a substantial rescoping of and re-engagement in critical examinations of the attention economy in the context of today's rapidly emerging realtime, ubiquitous, online digital technoculture. The introductory essay reviews the major formulations of attention and experience as economic, cultural and design themes (from Goldhaber, Beller and Franck to the more recent neo-marxist (Terranova, Marrazzi, Lazzarato) and neurologically informed approaches (Hayles, Malabou). it then lays out the ground of the special issues updating and re-focussing of this work on the current and emerging digital technocultural media sphere of smart devices, the pervasive mediation of experience, and the massive financial speculation in the attention capturing potential of social networking media. the special issue includes an interview by Kinsley with Peer2peer co-founder, Michel Bauwens, and essays by key theorists of attention Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and several papers on topics from Facebook, Free and Open Software, the ecological costs of our attentional technics, to the problematic role of digital social networking in Istanbul's recent European City project

Dis-automation: Creative making with automation and AI

This essay considers the nature and stakes of creative making with computational automation technologies. I will argue that Bernard Stiegler’s organological approach to the human as “technical life” takes care of the question of the nature of creative making, and the pharmacological critical practice that it mandates takes care of the question of the stakes. I say “takes care” to emphasise that Stiegler’s theoretical enterprise is dedicated to a “therapeutics” of contemporary technocultural transformation, because culture is best understood as a taking care of the technical pharmakon – both poison and cure – that is our irreducible technical supplementarity. After providing an assessment of Stiegler’s thinking on organology and pharmacological critique, I will discuss the work of some creative makers I have worked with or was able to interview as part of the South West Creative Technologies Network’s Automation Fellowship programme in 2019-2020. The goal is to interpret their work pharmacologically and so to elaborate and extend Stiegler’s work on contemporary technocultural becoming. Digital automation and AI are powerful drivers of the so-called Silicon Valley era of disruptive “creative destruction”. This means that the stakes of creative making and its possibilities for taking care of the future cannot be higher today

The Question of

A short, speculative account of the state of play in the formation of a discipline or field of computer games studies. The processes of academic teaching, research, and institutional positioning in regard to computer games are viewed from the perspective of wider currents and crises influencing knowledge formation today. It is argued that the different approaches to computer games cannot ignore the differences in their conceptions of the object of study in a naive pluralism. These different conceptions of games as parts of the technocultural milieu must encounter each other in the name of the struggle against the avoidance of critical thought concerning the nature and forms of technoculture that often prevails in the production of specialist “knowledge ” today