Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated c... more 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.
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gameworlds-9781623568023/#sthash.sUni38jT.dpuf
The study of new media has developed within a wide range of academic disciplines and theoretical ... more The study of new media has developed within a wide range of academic disciplines and theoretical paradigms and has generated a great deal of excitement, hype, and confusion. The New Media & Technocultures Reader gathers texts which map the cultural implications of new media, encapsulating and challenging key debates, theoretical positions, and approaches to research.
The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.
Giovanna Mascheroni & Donell Holloway (eds) The Internet of Toys: practices, affordances and the political economy of children's smart play, 2019
To grasp the emerging possibilities of new developments in the Internet of Toys, critical attenti... more To grasp the emerging possibilities of new developments in the Internet of Toys, critical attention to the layered relationships of material technology and intangible imagination is needed. This chapter explores children's imaginative and playful engagement with toys that demonstrate AI or autonomous behaviour (here robots and virtual pets). It takes a workshop on the design of a new robotic gaming platform as a central case study. Close descriptive and analytical attention to moments of interaction with such toys is essential to fully grasp the complex relationships between global technological imaginaries-in this case of AI and artificial life-and the material and embodied workings of imagination in play.
Key companies and commentators on the new economy have identified play as a crucial aspect of ent... more Key companies and commentators on the new economy have identified play as a crucial aspect of entrepreneurship and commercial innovation. We will argue that play and place are inseparable in these discourses: from places such as Google's HQ-the Googleplex, with its ball pits and slides-to schemes and practices such as Lego Serious Play, children's play and sites of play are taken as the model for, and wellspring of, imagination and creativity, modes and spaces of thinking and experimentation that can invigorate and innovate the adult worlds of cultural and technological production. Taking as case studies Google's reimagining of cultural practices of play, and LEGO Serious Play's deployment of playful experimentation for corporate / therapeutic ends, this paper argues that to understand the possibilities of playful working places, it is necessary to question the generally uncritical assumptions about the character and potential of play itself that underpin these initiatives. At work in the toybox: bedrooms and playgrounds as the ur-places of creative cultural work
The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented re... more 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?
Editorial introduction in Seth Giddings (ed.) 2011 The New Media & Technocultures Reader to an ex... more Editorial introduction in Seth Giddings (ed.) 2011 The New Media & Technocultures Reader to an extract from Felix Guattari's 'Balance program for desiring machines'.
... Page 2. 84 2 Ari Posner, 'The Mane Event', Premiere, July 1994, p 81. ... 5... more ... Page 2. 84 2 Ari Posner, 'The Mane Event', Premiere, July 1994, p 81. ... 5 Quoted in Steven Kline, Out of the Garden Toys and Children' Culture in the Age of TV Marketing,Verso, London, p 41-2. 6 Naum Kleiman, in Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. ...
La Planète sauvage (for English-speaking audiences disappointingly translated as Fantastic rath... more La Planète sauvage (for English-speaking audiences disappointingly translated as Fantastic rather than Savage Planet) was written and directed by René Laloux, designed by Roland Topor, animated at Prague's Jiri Trnka studios and released in 1973. As an animated ...
This entry addresses the development of Virtual Reality since the 1980s as both an actual set of ... more This entry addresses the development of Virtual Reality since the 1980s as both an actual set of immersive digital media technologies, and as a technological imaginary of media, immersion, and the future of human-technological relationships inspired by these technologies. It explores the overlap between these two: between actual technologies and idealised, fictional or speculative visions of future media, and reflects on the concept of the virtual for digital media communication.
This entry addresses the figure of the robot as it appears across communication theory and roboti... more This entry addresses the figure of the robot as it appears across communication theory and robotics: as a set of fictional characters in science fiction cinema and literature, as the basis for a number of thought experiments over the nature of consciousness, humanity and its limits and future, and as actual technological developments with an impact on communication, popular culture, and everyday life.
The term cyborg, derived from ‘cybernetic organism’ refers to a diverse range of fictional and ac... more The term cyborg, derived from ‘cybernetic organism’ refers to a diverse range of fictional and actual creatures, hybrids of biological bodies and technological augmentations. In science fiction film and literature cyborgs are most commonly depicted as technologically enhanced humans, but actual everyday examples would include the heart patient with a pacemaker. The term, and its instantiations in popular culture such as Robocop and The Terminator, have been influential in communication and cultural studies approaches to technology, culture, and the body, particularly through the work of feminist theorist of science and culture, Donna Haraway.
This entry traces the origins, development, and decline of the use of the term cyberspace as appl... more This entry traces the origins, development, and decline of the use of the term cyberspace as applied to computer-networked communication since the 1980s. It pays particular attention to the blurring, in critical studies of cyberspace, of fictional visions and futures from SF literature and film, with actual technological and cultural applications and practices.
Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated c... more 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.
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gameworlds-9781623568023/#sthash.sUni38jT.dpuf
The study of new media has developed within a wide range of academic disciplines and theoretical ... more The study of new media has developed within a wide range of academic disciplines and theoretical paradigms and has generated a great deal of excitement, hype, and confusion. The New Media & Technocultures Reader gathers texts which map the cultural implications of new media, encapsulating and challenging key debates, theoretical positions, and approaches to research.
The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.
Giovanna Mascheroni & Donell Holloway (eds) The Internet of Toys: practices, affordances and the political economy of children's smart play, 2019
To grasp the emerging possibilities of new developments in the Internet of Toys, critical attenti... more To grasp the emerging possibilities of new developments in the Internet of Toys, critical attention to the layered relationships of material technology and intangible imagination is needed. This chapter explores children's imaginative and playful engagement with toys that demonstrate AI or autonomous behaviour (here robots and virtual pets). It takes a workshop on the design of a new robotic gaming platform as a central case study. Close descriptive and analytical attention to moments of interaction with such toys is essential to fully grasp the complex relationships between global technological imaginaries-in this case of AI and artificial life-and the material and embodied workings of imagination in play.
Key companies and commentators on the new economy have identified play as a crucial aspect of ent... more Key companies and commentators on the new economy have identified play as a crucial aspect of entrepreneurship and commercial innovation. We will argue that play and place are inseparable in these discourses: from places such as Google's HQ-the Googleplex, with its ball pits and slides-to schemes and practices such as Lego Serious Play, children's play and sites of play are taken as the model for, and wellspring of, imagination and creativity, modes and spaces of thinking and experimentation that can invigorate and innovate the adult worlds of cultural and technological production. Taking as case studies Google's reimagining of cultural practices of play, and LEGO Serious Play's deployment of playful experimentation for corporate / therapeutic ends, this paper argues that to understand the possibilities of playful working places, it is necessary to question the generally uncritical assumptions about the character and potential of play itself that underpin these initiatives. At work in the toybox: bedrooms and playgrounds as the ur-places of creative cultural work
The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented re... more 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?
Editorial introduction in Seth Giddings (ed.) 2011 The New Media & Technocultures Reader to an ex... more Editorial introduction in Seth Giddings (ed.) 2011 The New Media & Technocultures Reader to an extract from Felix Guattari's 'Balance program for desiring machines'.
... Page 2. 84 2 Ari Posner, 'The Mane Event', Premiere, July 1994, p 81. ... 5... more ... Page 2. 84 2 Ari Posner, 'The Mane Event', Premiere, July 1994, p 81. ... 5 Quoted in Steven Kline, Out of the Garden Toys and Children' Culture in the Age of TV Marketing,Verso, London, p 41-2. 6 Naum Kleiman, in Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. ...
La Planète sauvage (for English-speaking audiences disappointingly translated as Fantastic rath... more La Planète sauvage (for English-speaking audiences disappointingly translated as Fantastic rather than Savage Planet) was written and directed by René Laloux, designed by Roland Topor, animated at Prague's Jiri Trnka studios and released in 1973. As an animated ...
This entry addresses the development of Virtual Reality since the 1980s as both an actual set of ... more This entry addresses the development of Virtual Reality since the 1980s as both an actual set of immersive digital media technologies, and as a technological imaginary of media, immersion, and the future of human-technological relationships inspired by these technologies. It explores the overlap between these two: between actual technologies and idealised, fictional or speculative visions of future media, and reflects on the concept of the virtual for digital media communication.
This entry addresses the figure of the robot as it appears across communication theory and roboti... more This entry addresses the figure of the robot as it appears across communication theory and robotics: as a set of fictional characters in science fiction cinema and literature, as the basis for a number of thought experiments over the nature of consciousness, humanity and its limits and future, and as actual technological developments with an impact on communication, popular culture, and everyday life.
The term cyborg, derived from ‘cybernetic organism’ refers to a diverse range of fictional and ac... more The term cyborg, derived from ‘cybernetic organism’ refers to a diverse range of fictional and actual creatures, hybrids of biological bodies and technological augmentations. In science fiction film and literature cyborgs are most commonly depicted as technologically enhanced humans, but actual everyday examples would include the heart patient with a pacemaker. The term, and its instantiations in popular culture such as Robocop and The Terminator, have been influential in communication and cultural studies approaches to technology, culture, and the body, particularly through the work of feminist theorist of science and culture, Donna Haraway.
This entry traces the origins, development, and decline of the use of the term cyberspace as appl... more This entry traces the origins, development, and decline of the use of the term cyberspace as applied to computer-networked communication since the 1980s. It pays particular attention to the blurring, in critical studies of cyberspace, of fictional visions and futures from SF literature and film, with actual technological and cultural applications and practices.
Michelle Henning (ed.) Museum Media. Vol. 3 of International Handbooks of Museum Studies. John Wiley., 2015
New media technologies – from photography and film to virtual reality and websites, interactive e... more New media technologies – from photography and film to virtual reality and websites, interactive exhibits, and spectacular imagery – have prompted anxieties about the status of knowledge and education in museums since the late nineteenth century. Computer and video games appear to be only the latest entrant to the museum that promises new forms of engagement for (particularly young) visitors but at the expense of a grip on knowledge and meaning. This chapter argues that video games are useful to science museums and centres in a number of ways, but most significantly through their popularisation of computer simulation and modelling. Drawing on debates around the nature of knowledge in digital visual culture more generally, the chapter explores the implications for this simulation for museums and asks new questions about the nature of knowledge in a digital popular culture. What questions do the speculative, emergent, and inherently playful operations of computer simulation ask of scientific knowledge today?
Perron & Wolf (eds) The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, 2014
This essay outlines the conventions and pleasures of simulation games as a category, and explores... more This essay outlines the conventions and pleasures of simulation games as a category, and explores the complicated and contested term simulation. This concept goes to the heart of what computer games and video games are, and the ways in which they articulate ideas, processes, and phenomena between their virtual worlds and the actual world. It has been argued that simulations generate and communicate knowledge and events quite differently from the long-dominant cultural mode of narrative. This raises a thorny question: how, and what, do simulation games simulate?
DVD review, reflects on the relationships between the depiction of reality and mental states in l... more DVD review, reflects on the relationships between the depiction of reality and mental states in live action and animated cinema, and explores the historical links between the director Laloux and Felix Guattari at La Borde psychiatric clinic.
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Books by Seth Giddings
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gameworlds-9781623568023/#sthash.sUni38jT.dpuf
The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.
Papers by Seth Giddings
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/gameworlds-9781623568023/#sthash.sUni38jT.dpuf
The New Media & Technocultures Reader offers students further reading on and exploration of key issues and topics raised in the textbook New Media: A Critical Introduction. The Reader draws on various disciplinary stances (including visual culture; media and cultural history; media theory; media production; philosophy and the history of the sciences; political economy and sociology), offering readers a rich and interdisciplinary resource. Critical and accessible editorial commentary guides the reader between the extracts and through the debates.