Pervasive Gaming – Hannah Nicklin

: Well, what image would you use to illustrate the monstrous in the city? Shared via CC, click through for originator

For those limited number of people interested in this kind of thing, pleased to announce I’ve had the following paper (and accompanying playful experience) accepted in a conference/symposium called “Performing the Monstrous in the City” at QMU in September. Interestingly they seem to have invited 2.8 Hours Later lot to feature, too, which is interesting. Not least because I think they actually offer a pretty poor experience (at least in terms of what they promise; i.e. a gaming/interactive experience, which it mostly isn’t. Read a bit on what I think interaction is over here. It’s definitely not ‘hot’ interaction in those terms, and extremely linear and much closer to film than games or performance. What it is extremely interesting as is an exercise in pre-marketing. Anyway, this is a LONG bracket. Stopping now)

What I shall be talking about:

Playing with the monstrous; restructuring the ‘other’ through loveliness, adventure, and curiosity.

The city makes us all monsters; it channels us and distracts us, and fills our lives and heads with monstrous noise. It casts all others as potential monsters; it provides no ‘safe place’ or ‘home’. As media, message and surveillance culture become more pervasive, new tactics of resistance are required. Games and play are a growing and powerful route to reconstructing the monstrous on and of our streets.

This paper will consider the playful practices of the Agency of Coney, looking at the power of first-person performative experience in breaking down the monstrous of the city, and the ‘other’. The paper will use the lens of Coney’s three main principles of ‘making good play’; adventure, curiosity, and loveliness; and look at the Agency, it’s training, and activity, to consider new strategies for re-connecting individuals with the monstrous other – in the people and the city space they move through every day.

A 20 minute paper with accompanying playful experience.

The playful experience will be a practical example of the application of playfulness, delivered as small adventurous, curious and lovely tasks that can be discovered and completed by anybody at the conference, at any time during the day.

Can you tell me about an object you own that is tied to a particular memory? In one tweet or two, using the hashtag ‘#dust’, or write it in a couple of sentences below; about the amount of writing you could fit on a post-it. You can send me pictures if you want, but tell me about an object that is significant to you and, shortly, why it is significant. You can leave your comment anonymously below by using ‘anon’ as a name and ‘anon@anon.com’ or another fake email address in the comments form.

I am making something with Nikki Pugh called ‘Dust’. It is a response to a manifesto that claims we will make things with you, not for you. This is one of the ways it’s with. You can read about where the project is at right now over here. If you can offer me a story, it will be made into a Dust Mote. Things that people will find and keep. The stories will also feed into and inform the longer-form narrative fragments in the work. Head over here for full context.

And because this is a two way thing, here’s a couple I will submit:

Object 1: A porcelain badge, square with rounded corners, the transfer of a rabbit with a balloon on the front.

This object broke. It was the last thing in my daily life that came from the boy whose hair smelled like raku firings. It fell off my bag in St. Pancras about 3 years ago and shattered. I still have the largest fragment.

Object 2: A small plush rat.

[no picture]

Bought because it looked lonely. Bought just before something went completely, bafflingly wrong. Now hidden.

…

I need some less emo objects, huh?

Tag: Pervasive Gaming

Coming soon to an academic conference near you…