Seth Giddings

Dionysiac Machines Videogames and the Triumph of the Simulacra

/ This article rethinks concepts of the simulational and the simulacral for popular digital culture. It plays concepts of the modern world as hyperreal against the more modest, pragmatic, but vital, insights of game studies into the literally simulational nature of computer media and videogames. Through a reading of Deleuzes essay Platonism and the Simulacrum, taking the GameBoy Advance game Advance Wars 2 as a case study, and proposing the significance of automata, it suggests ways of thinking about the artificial and simulacral character of contemporary technoculture and its devices, not as the implosion of reality, but of its production.

A 'Pataphysics Engine: Technology, Play, and Realities

This article plays a game with Jean Baudrillards thought and the intellectual traditions on which it draws. Or rather, it plays Baudrillards game but with a cheat code. The game or program here is the hyperreality of the contemporary world—Baudrillards integral or virtual reality characterized by the dominance of things—of objects over subjects. The cheat code identifies and accentuates the development, application, and interconnection of theories of play, waste, technology, and multiple realities in aspects of 20th-century French avant-garde and social scientific thought and practice. It suggests ways in which everyday technoculture, not least videogame culture, can be addressed as at once playful and simulacral.

Accursed Play: The Economic Imaginary of Early Game Studies

Revisiting early critical responses to computer and video games as a cultural form—before the establishment of games studies as an academic field in the early 2000s—reveals a consistent fascination with games as economic phenomena. Not just as a new commercial competitor in the established popular media marketplace but as models of economies in their own right, models that mesh with player’s everyday lives, constraining, facilitating, and forming gameplay. This article will identify and explore some of the most salient themes and phenomena in this early games scholarship and will follow them through subsequent enquiry into games as economies either isomorphic with the systems of consumer capitalism and neoliberalism from which they issue or metamorphic—phantasmagorical or ironic inversions of prevailing social and industrial conditions.

What is the state of play

If children played their games invariably in the way the previous generation played them, the study of youthful recreation could be a matter merely of antiquarian scholarship. But they do not. Despite the motherly influence of tradition... children’s play is like every other social activity, it is subject to continual change. The fact that the games are played slightly differently in different places, and may even vary in name, is itself evidence that mutation takes place. (Opie & Opie, 1969, p. 8)

Incremental speed increases excitement: bodies, space, movement, and televisual change.

The authors argue that both Pong in the mid-1970s and the Wii today have transformed the television set in dramatic ways that have captured the popular imagination. Through a series of case studies, the authors pay close attention to the continuities and “incremental” changes in everyday televisual culture. Informed by phenomenological approaches, they present a comparison between Breakout and Wii Sports to suggest that the short history of videogame “plesiovision” should be rethought. The Wii’s genuine novelties are worthy of analysis in their own right but also highlight the significance of kinaesthesia in popular technoculture, suggest ways of theorising and studying proprioceptive bodies (both human and nonhuman), across videogame culture and televisual history.

At work in the toybox: bedrooms, playgrounds and ideas of play in creative cultural work

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 headquaters (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 article 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.

Ludic Economics 101: Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games – their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism - as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions – as important as these are – the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.

Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies: Ludic Economics 101

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games – their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism - as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions – as important as these are – the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.

Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games – their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism - as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions – as important as these are – the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.

Pokémon GO as distributed imagination

The appeal of Pokémon GO is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality 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 nonactual actions and characters, and these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s culture over decades, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and postdigital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon GO today?