Brendan Keogh

Pokémon Go, the novelty of nostalgia, and the ubiquity of the smartphone

None of the elements that contribute to the phenomenon of Pokémon Go are particularly new. Augmented-reality and location-based games, artworks, and marketing campaigns have existed for well over a decade. Meanwhile, the Pokémon franchise of videogames, trading cards, comic books, and anime has existed for more than two. Even the data that Pokémon Go is built from is generated by players of Niantic’s earlier locative game, Ingress. If there is nothing “new” about the phenomenon of Pokémon Go, then what is there to learn from its rapid ascension in the cultural zeitgeist? In this article I maintain that it is the increased ubiquity of the smartphone and its tendency to reconfigure existing media and cultural practices that has allowed the novelty of augmented reality and the nostalgia of Pokémon to converge in a perfect storm of branding, design, preexisting data, and established technologies.

Playing for Fun, Training for War Can Popular Claims About Recreational Video Gaming and Military Simulations be Reconciled?

In the cultural controversy surrounding “violent video games,” the manufacturers and players of games often insist that computer games are a form of harmless entertainment that is unlikely to influence the real-world activities of players. Yet games and military simulations are used by military organizations across the world to teach the modern arts of war, from how to shoot a gun to teamwork, leadership skills, military values, and cultural sensitivity. We survey a number of ways of reconciling these apparently contradictory claims and argue that none of them are ultimately successful. Thus, either military organizations are wrong to think that games and simulations have a useful role to play in training anything other than the most narrowly circumscribed physical skills or some recreational digital games do, in fact, have the power to influence the real-world behavior and dispositions of players in morally significant ways.

Waiting to play: The labour of background games

Mobile smartphone devices have seen the rise and proliferation of a variety of new modes of digital play. In particular, the short and sporadic modes of engagement that define mobile screen practices have seen the smartphone become home to a range of ‘casual’ game genres that promote quick and flexible engagements, in stark contrast to the enduring and committed engagements demanded by home consoles and desktop computer games. People frequently play mobile games while doing other things – waiting at the bus stop, lying in bed and watching television. This has seen the increasing popularity of a new genre of videogame play almost exclusive to mobile platforms: the background game. As we define them, background games require the player to set up a series of tasks which are then completed over a duration of actual hours while the player goes about their day. In this way, such games can be considered ‘ambient’, as they become seamlessly embedded into players’ everyday lives. Drawing from interviews conducted with mobile game players in Brisbane and Perth, this article works to articulate how background games are engaged with within existing practices of mobile and social play to interrogate and complicate existing understandings of ‘play’ and ‘labour’ around digital games.

Virtuous, virtual, but not visceral: (dis)embodied viewing in military-themed videogames

The dominant visual representation strategies of warfare through the virtual bodies of military-themed first-person shooter videogames obscures the corporeal embodied experiences of warzones. These games typically reinforce certain representational schema in which only certain kinds of bodies are visible. This article argues that the multi-million dollar videogame industry is intimately connected to institutional practices of war-making in the global order, and that it is crucial to pay attention to the embodied consequences of such a relationship.

Instantaneously punctuated picture-music: Re-evaluating videogame expression through Pilgrim in the Microworld

Published in 1983, David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld performs an autoethnographic analysis of videogames that details how he acquires the gestures and postures required by skilled videogame play. While often seen as a curious experiment in early videogame analysis, Sudnow points to a descriptive mode of evaluating videogames that sees the audiovisual and mechanic aspects as irreducibly constituting a holistic embodied experience of the videogame as played. This article highlights the interventions that Sudnow’s under-examined work can provide contemporary critical videogame scholarship to account for how videogames meaningfully fuse embodied gestures with audiovisual spectacle. At a time when scholars are paying increased attention to the embodied aspects of videogame play, this article argues that Sudnow provides a unique opportunity to re-evaluate the expressive potential of videogames as not just ‘digital games’ nor as ‘computer toys’ but as performed, haptically augmented audiovisual media.