Against Game Studies

The article explores the limitations of the current scholarly game studies (GS) field. Its central presuppositions are (1) that there are certain attributes broadly understood as “GS” by those writing in or adjacent to the field; (2) that those attributes are historically rooted in an attempt to disassociate videogames from other types of electronic (and later—digital) media; and that (3) the preconditions that have led to this split are currently moot. In the first section of this article, I elaborate on these presuppositions through reading GS as a historically rooted field, centred around the videogame artefact. Following, by examining the notion of being ‘against’ something in academic work, I move to my central claim for the article: that maintaining this conception of GS is counterproductive to the state of contemporary videogames scholarship and that adopting a post-dualistic and post-humanities stance will greatly contribute to the broadening of the field. I break down this claim into three separate threads. Ontologically, I show that videogames are much closer to non-videogames than they used to be. Methodologically, I point out how re-integrating methodologies from outside the field is crucial to address the complex phenomena evolved in and around gaming. Politically, I highlight the importance of games in contemporary digital culture and show how boundary-work and gatekeeping might harm the attempt to make game scholarship engage with larger political issues. The article concludes with suggestions for a more inclusive and intermingled vision for the field, focusing on the notion of play rather than games

Playful mapping in the digital age:The Playful Mapping Collective

From Mah-Jong, to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. This monograph shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age, when the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing and a rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation, to pervasive and desktop-based games evidences this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. The chapters in this book explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality. They show how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and performative

CLOUD CULTURE: FLUID MEMORIES ON PLATFORM ENCLOSURES

This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perhaps experience by) users; (2) the erosion of digital ownership, emblematic of similar trends in companies limiting one’s ability to modify – or even repair – their owned hardware and software; and (3) the data-driven race for content optimisation, where platform owners use consumer surveillance to deliver their products for maximum engagement (Helles and Flyverbom 2019). These three components of the term are further explored in relation to the ontological and epistemological repercussions of a continually updating cultural commodities, across four key domains. First, cloud culture highlights $2 . Second, it emphasises the$2 , and the shift of platform power toward large-scale cultural revisions. Third, it alerts over the seeming $2 of replaced and rewritten digital objects. Fourth and ultimately, this might have severe repercussions on$2 both for media researchers and – more importantly – the public at larg

THE DATA CENTER CANNOT HOLD: DATA COLONIALISM AND THE “NIMBUS PROJECT”

Following the infrastructural turn in media studies with its focus on the material and social practices, this paper offers to reexamine contemporary data colonialism by empirically exploring some of its most crucial infrastructural artifacts – data centers. Particularly, this paper explores six data centers currently built in Israel as part of "Project Nimbus" – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move its computational infrastructure "to the cloud". The tender was won by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, and has drawn considerable attention, both due to its high-cost and technical complexity; and due to attempts by these companies' workers to curtail the tech giants' involvement in Israel/Palestine on moral grounds. Power differentials are also present within the Israeli society, as intimate governmental data will be processed and stored by foreign US companies. Based on thematic analysis of local journalistic sources, public officials’ documents, local planning authorities and the tender winners themselves, we delineate the concrete materialization of this cloud infrastructure. We show that the notion of data colonialism is complicated within project Nimbus, when lines blur in terms of whose data is colonized by whom, whose lands are used (and colonized) by these centers, and whose resources (predominantly electricity and water) will be used for their functioning. Thus, this paper offers a more granular understanding of data colonialism, and of the different actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and sustainment of this emerging global regime

'Outsmarting Traffic, Together': Driving as Social Navigation

The automotive world is evolving. Ten years ago Nigel Thrift (2004: 41) made the claim that the experience of driving was slipping into our 'technological unconscious'. Only recently the New York Times suggested that with the rise of automated driving, standalone navigation tools as we know them would cease to exist, instead being 'fully absorbed into the machine' (Fisher, 2013). But in order to bridge the gap between past and future driving worlds, another technological evolution is emerging. This short, critical piece charts the rise of what has been called 'social navigation' in the industry; the development of digital mapping platforms designed to foster automotive sociality. It makes two provisional points. Firstly, that 'ludic' conceptualisations can shed light on the ongoing reconfiguration of drivers, vehicles, roads and technological aids such as touch-screen satellite navigation platforms. And secondly, that as a result of this, there is a coming-into-being of a new kind of driving politics; a 'casual politicking' centred on an engagement with digital interfaces. We explicate both by turning our attention towards Waze; a social navigation application that encourages users to interact with various driving dynamics

'Outsmarting Traffic, Together': Driving as Social Navigation

<p>The automotive world is evolving. Ten years ago Nigel Thrift (2004: 41) made the claim that the experience of driving was slipping into our 'technological unconscious'. Only recently the New York Times suggested that with the rise of automated driving, standalone navigation tools as we know them would cease to exist, instead being 'fully absorbed into the machine' (Fisher, 2013). But in order to bridge the gap between past and future driving worlds, another technological evolution is emerging. This short, critical piece charts the rise of what has been called 'social navigation' in the industry; the development of digital mapping platforms designed to foster automotive sociality. It makes two provisional points. Firstly, that 'ludic' conceptualisations can shed light on the ongoing reconfiguration of drivers, vehicles, roads and technological aids such as touch-screen satellite navigation platforms. And secondly, that as a result of this, there is a coming-into-being of a new kind of driving politics; a 'casual politicking' centred on an engagement with digital interfaces. We explicate both by turning our attention towards Waze; a social navigation application that encourages users to interact with various driving dynamics. </p><p> </p><p> </p

TEMPORAL FRAMES FOR PLATFORM PUBLICS: THE PLATFORMIZATION OF BREADTUBE

In this paper we suggest the notion of platform publics to account for the intermingling of socio-technical processes that make online platforms (in this case: YouTube) resistant to stable definitions. It has been over a decade of YouTube studies and yet, a consensus on what precisely YouTube is seems unlikely. Arguably, Burgess and Green began this ontological quest with the first edition of YouTube (2008) in which they set out ‘to work through some of the often-competing ideas about just what YouTube is.” (iv) Snickars and Vondereau (2009) considered the “ontological ambivalence” (2009, p. 28) of YouTube to be an asset since the platform’s success was rooted in its flexibility as a stage for content. Following work attempted to understand YT as a ‘new screen ecology’ (Cunningham 2016); through its platform logics of monetization and viewership (Postigo 2015, Van Es 2020); as a contested space between creators, content and audience (Berryman and Kavka 2018, Bishop 2018; 2019); and as a database, often implementing scraping and other computational techniques to account for its nature as vast graph network of content (Airoldi et al. 2016) with internal algorithmic dynamic - for instance the preference of “YT-native” content over mainstream actors within its search and recommendations (Rieder et al. 2018). We abandon the ontological stability of YT as singular and instead present it from a post-representational (Thrift 2008) and temporally-orientated (Adam 2008) perspective. Using BreadTube as a case study, we refrain from asking what YT is, but rather where and when YT happens