Ingrid Richardson

Pocket Technospaces: the Bodily Incorporation of Mobile Media

Handheld media and communications technologies are becoming increasingly composite interfaces, combining the functionality of standard telephony, text-based interaction, e-mails and Internet browsing, digital video cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, and game consoles. As devices such as these penetrate and transform everyday cultural practices and spaces, they are effectively transforming the relation between body and world, ready-to-hand and telepresent interaction, and actual and virtual environments. This article focuses on the spatial, perceptual and ontic effects of mobile devices as nascent new media forms, with particular attention paid to the use of games and media content in devices which include telephony as part of their functionality. I will examine both how mobiles are used as phone 13game hybrids, and how they also work not simply as communicative conduits but also as 18handy 19 or pocket containers of data, media content, photo archives and secure microworlds. To date there has been limited attention paid to the corporeality of mobile phones as itinerant game and/or media devices, or to the phenomenological impact of physical mobility on game play and new media consumption/deployment, and the particular sense of transmediatic space and perceptual dispersion that they generate. With these issues in mind, I will consider the impact of recent mobile phone technologies, and share some of the insights afforded by a small ethno-phenomenology of mobile phone and media use in urban Western Australia that is currently in progress.

The hybrid ontology of mobile gaming

This article examines the hybrid ontologies that typify networked and mobile location-based games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of ‘mixed reality’ game-play. In particular, it focuses on the potential cultural and corporeal effects of mobile gaming since the introduction of the iPhone and subsequent touchscreens, and the specific technosomatic arrangements such devices demand in everyday life. Mobile media and game-play in both urban and domestic places evoke particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of the interface. Location-based mobile games and applications also modify our experience and perception of ‘being online’, and effectively disassemble the actual/virtual dichotomy of internet ‘being’ into a complex and dynamic range of modalities of presence. Finally, this article suggests that the kind of ontological and ‘containment’ metaphors we use to describe the space of screen-based game-play — in particular, the magic circle, and tropologies of the screen as a fixed window or frame — are ill-suited as descriptors for the complex layering of material and virtual contexts specific to mobile location-based and mixed reality gaming.

Ludic Mobilities: The Corporealities of Mobile Gaming

Abstract Traditional critiques of computer and video games argue that the ‘magic circle’ defines the parameters of game‐play, marking off a temporary world wherein particular game rules apply. In this view, to play a game means, materially or conceptually, ‘entering’ the magic circle of the game. Yet, increasingly, online multiplayer games, mobile location‐based games (LBGs) and hybrid reality games (HRGs), erode the notion of a magic circle or dedicated game‐space. In this paper I examine the hybrid ontologies and realities that typify networked and mobile location‐based and hybrid reality games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of ‘mixed reality’ gamers. A number of alternative corporeal and ontological metaphors for game worlds are proposed as substitutes for the magic circle, including the porous and organic cell membrane, the permeable window or frame, and the network. The composite, interconnected and dynamic ontology of the network trope, it is suggested, provides a more authentic figuration of the game environments specific to LBGs and HRGs, and also helps us to interpret the ‘playful turn’ in contemporary new media culture and the infiltration of a ludic sensibility into the mobilities and practices of everyday life.

Pokémon GO: Mobile media play, place-making, and the digital wayfarer

This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016) to the role of mobile media in commodifying (Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of play (Isbister, 2016; Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and game theorists in this commentary highlight, the game sits at the nexus of several technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn; the ubiquity of location-based and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our individual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes; the increasing importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the ongoing augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid experience of the lifeworld.

Imaging the visceral Soma : a corporeal feminist interpretation

Abstract Feminist philosophers of technoscience have long argued that it is vital that we question biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, that we disable the conception of medical visualising technologies as neutral or transparent conduits to the “fact” of the body. In this paper we suggest that corporeal feminism is well situated to provide such a critique. Feminist phenomenologists over the past decade have theorised embodiment in a number of critical ways, many deriving concepts from the work of Merleau-Ponty, and emphasising the pliability and diversity of our body images and corporeal schematics. Others such as Elizabeth Wilson, Cathy Waldby and Drew Leder have considered the interdependence of our inner biology or viscerality with the socio-cultural inscriptions of embodiment. In this paper, these adaptations of phenomenology, and their account of the specificity and depth of embodied being, will be discussed and applied to the discourse of biomedicine and the apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Mobile media, domestic play and haptic ethnography:

In this article, we explore the material, sensory and corporeal aspects of digital ethnography, primarily in the context of mobile media use in the domestic environment. We align our methodological approach to the ‘sensory turn’ in theory, situated loosely under the rubric of new materialism, and outline the insights that a post-phenomenological method can offer. Drawing from our current research into everyday media use conducted within Australian households, which involved a range of data collection methods aimed at capturing the embodiment of mobile media, we explore the significance of play in and around haptic interfaces. Mobile games are evidently integral to our embodied ways of knowing, and there are a number of challenges faced by the mobile media researcher who seeks to document, understand and interpret this contemporary cultural and everyday practice.

A cultural somatics of mobile media and urban screens: Wiffiti and the IWALL prototype

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, penetrating and transforming everyday cultural practices and spaces.

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.

Careful Surveillance at Play: Human-Animal Relations and Mobile Media in the Home

When we first entered homes to study mobile games and home automation, we envisaged our projects would focus on humans and various modes of interaction and co-presence. Yet as our research progressed, it became clear that in many homes, humans and their pets are intimately entangled in various forms of digitally mediated kinship. In this chapter we consider how this entanglement takes place within the dynamic space of the household, affecting the agencies and spatial organization of the home. This chapter seeks to reflect upon how human and non-human relationality occurs in and around domestic media and the attendant ramifications for how digital visual research is configured and the techniques are deployed. First, we review some of the debates surrounding human-animal relations and look at how the use of pet wearables can generate non-Anthropocentric understandings of care and intimacy. Second, we explore some of the ways that pets become co-involved with humans in touchscreen games, by highlighting the cross-species nature of play, and considering what a ‘more-than-human’ taxonomy of haptic play within the home might look and feel like.

Stories from the Field: Playing with Mobile Media

Mobile media has become a crucial part of everyday storytelling. As we move through our daily rhythms and rituals, mobile media weave multiple cartographies—visual, social, spatial and temporal. Far from placeless, the history of mobile media has been one in which the important stories of place and locality are reinforced. By contextualising story-making through early explorations into mobile media as art and alternative modes of learning, Hjorth and Richardson reflect upon how play can provide a productive lens for understanding mobile storytelling. They then explore a series of play workshops that were founded to think through the role of mobile games in everyday life and as part of place-making techniques.