Pokémon Go as distributed imagination

The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality (AR) to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on the immediate environment. The significance of this novel device (within popular children’s culture at least) is open to question however. The workings of imagination in children’s lives have always populated mundane experience with non-actual actions and characters – from elaborate fantasy worlds spun off in talk and gesture from play with dolls, building blocks or tree stumps and manhole covers (Factor 2004), the fleeting moments of jokes, songs and daydreams (Opie 1993), to intimate relationships with a precious toy or imaginary friend (Winnicott 1974). Over recent decades these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s toy and media culture, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and post-digital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon Go today

SimAcademy

The academic study of computer and video games is a rapidly growing field. This article surveys its global - and local - development, and some of the conceptual issues it raises

Gameworlds

Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world

Events and collusions: A glossary for the microethnography of video game play

This essay draws on a number of recent research projects that record and analyze video game play. The "microethnographic" approach that they develop suggests methodological strategies, both for analyzing gameplay and for identifying and conceptualizing relationships between technology, agency, and aesthetics in everyday technoculture across and between the virtual and the actual. It suggests a new model of technoculture in everyday life, shifting analytical and critical attention away from established research objects and notions (the "impact" of technologies, consumption, identities and subjectivity, interactivity) and toward the "event" of gameplay as one with nonhuman as well as human participants, and brought into being by relationships, and translations, of human and nonhuman agency. © 2009 SAGE Publications

Exploring strong-field deviations from general relativity via gravitational waves

Two new observational windows have been opened to strong gravitational physics: gravitational waves, and very long baseline interferometry. This suggests observational searches for new phenomena in this regime, and in particular for those necessary to make black hole evolution consistent with quantum mechanics. We describe possible features of "compact quantum objects" that replace classical black holes in a consistent quantum theory, and approaches to observational tests for these using gravitational waves. This is an example of a more general problem of finding consistent descriptions of deviations from general relativity, which can be tested via gravitational wave detection. Simple models for compact modifications to classical black holes are described via an effective stress tensor, possibly with an effective equation of state. A general discussion is given of possible observational signatures, and of their dependence on properties of the colliding objects. The possibility that departures from classical behavior are restricted to the near-horizon regime raises the question of whether these will be obscured in gravitational wave signals, due to their mutual interaction in a binary coalescence being deep in the mutual gravitational well. Numerical simulation with such simple models will be useful to clarify the sensitivity of gravitational wave observation to such highly compact departures from classical black holes.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures. v2: references and CERN preprint number adde

Just gaming? Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy on studying games

The academic study of computer and video games is a rapidly growing multinational and multidisciplinary field. The first UK international conference on computer games in 2001, a UWE event organised by Helen Kennedy and Jon Dovey at the Watershed Media Centre, marked a key point in the development of ‘game studies’ from a loose network of researchers into a field with its own research association: DiGRA – the Digital Games Research Association

Playing with non-humans: digital games as technocultural form

The relationship between the human and the technological has been a persistent concern in the dramas and images of digital games. Gameworlds are populated with mutants, cyborgs, robots and computer networks – avatars are augmented with headup displays, exoskeletons and impossible weaponry. Yet in significant ways digital games can be seen not only as representations of a putative future technoculture – as a technological imaginary of new media - but also as actual instances of a technoculture here and now. To play a digital game is to plug oneself into a cybernetic circuit. Any particular game-event is realised through feedback between computer components, human perception, imagination and motor skills, and software elements from virtual environments to intelligent agents. This cybercultural language has been regarded with some suspicion within the humanities and social sciences. For intellectual traditions founded on social constructivism any sense of technological determinism is problematic – historical and cultural agency, it is presumed, resides solely in the human and the social. This paper will argue that a full understanding of both the playing of digital games, and the wider techno-cultural context of this play, is only possible through a recognition and theorisation of technological agency. The paper will draw in particular on theoretical positions developed within the Sociology of Science and Technology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore how social constructivism might be challenged by the consideration of what Bruno Latour calls ‘the missing masses’ - the mass of non-human devices and objects that, he asserts, make up the \u27dark matter\u27 of society. These masses are unobservable using established sociological lenses, but are theoretically necessary to the existence of human relationships and activities (Latour 1991). Whilst actor-network theory is concerned with artefacts, agents and networks from transport and health systems to road furniture and allergies, this paper will argue that digital game play – given its centrality to the development and dissemination of popular computer hardware, software and cultural practices - is a privileged, paradigmatic instance of an emergent digital popular technoculture (Turkle 1984). In these terms digital game play is a vivid instantiation of Donna Haraway’s figurative cyborg: an ambiguous and monstrous intimacy between the human and organic and the technological and inorganic (Haraway 1990). Digital games aestheticise this cyborg world, but they also realise it: this is an aesthetics of control and agency (or the loss of these) through immersive, embodied pleasures and anxieties; rather than (just) of dramatic scenarios and screen-presented action (Friedman 1999, Lahti 2003). The common experience of digital game play as characterised by the loss of distinction between game, software, machine and player, resonates with the ANT critique of the ‘object hypothesis’ (that entities are bounded, and discrete from other entities and their environment) (Woolgar 1991). Of the boundaries under threat, perhaps the most significant is that between subject and object – precisely the boundary that digital game play transgresses. The playing of the GameBoy Advance game Advance Wars 2 will be analysed, identifying the diverse agencies and valencies of elements or nodes in its circuit – player, console, and software. The latter will also be analysed as itself an actor-network – of algorithms, simulation and cellular automata. The implications for established analytical terms and boundaries in the study of the consumption of popular media will be addressed. Firstly: how is the user/player ‘configured’ (Woolgar 1991). Secondly: what are the subjects and objects of this simulation-conflict between cellular automata? Digital game studies has yet to engage with a sustained debate on the implications of its fundamentally technologically based foundation – i.e. the ‘digitality’ of digital games. This paper calls for such a debate and offers some initial thoughts on issues and directions. References Friedman, Ted (1999) ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space’, in Greg Smith (ed.) On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology, New York: New York University Press: 132-150. Haraway, Donna (1990) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism / Postmodernism, London: Routledge Kember, Sarah (2003) Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, London: Routledge Lahti, Marti (2003) ‘As we become machines: corporealized pleasures in video games’, in Mark JP Wolf & Bernard Perron (eds) The Video Game Theory Reader, London: Routledge: 157-170 Latour, Bruno (1991) "Technology is society made durable

Rethinking Canada’s approach to children’s digital game regulation

Background: Connected digital games offer exciting opportunities for children to connect, play, and learn, but first they must navigate industry trends that jeopardize their rights, including invasive data collection and manipulative gambling mechanics.Analysis: A policy analysis reveals that Canada’s existing digital game regulation largely relies on a U.S. industry-made classification system and is ill-equipped to address these issues. Comparative analysis shows that despite previous similarities in their approaches to game regulation, Canada has now fallen behind the United Kingdom, where shifting approaches to “age-appropriateness” are producing promising new frameworks for supporting children’s rights across the digital environment.Conclusion and implications: This article concludes with a call to action for a rights-based Canadian response to the problematic issues that have emerged within the children’s game landscape