This is the text of this week’s lecture. I’m going to suggest that online business models and the behaviours they help to enact might usefully be seen as ‘playful’, or ‘game-like’. I’m going to focus on eBay, but I’ll add other illustrations. The lecture is broadly taken from a paper I published with Janice in… [Read more…]
November 24, 2009
The Register doesn’t like Wikipedia much (but then they don’t like much much). So it doesn’t surprise that the glee is explicit here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/24/wiki_contributors_declining/ Fewer people are working on Wikipedia for free it seems. There could be a number of explanations. It may be that as the content has filled up, many feel that they… [Read more…]
October 5, 2009
The idea here is that you have to guess the flavour of these corn snacks to win a prize. You do this on a website of course, after you enter all your details. Pepsico/Walkers/Doritos really do think your data is that cheap. I found the idea a bit odd for several reasons. Firstly, here is… [Read more…]
September 11, 2009
Videogames are typically something males do right? They are written by men for men. There are stats to confirm this – science of a sort. And you only have to read game journalism to see that it is for men. More than this, when you talk to men about videogames, they often tell you about… [Read more…]
September 8, 2009
I’ve just got back from the DiGRA conference at Brunel University. On the train up I was reading John Law’s After Method and either by coincidence, or due to some heightened awareness on my part, many of the issues raised by Law came out in conversation and presentation at the conference, including Ian Bogost’s keynote. … [Read more…]
July 23, 2009
This is the summary of my DiGRA 2009 paper… I want to think about achievement in videogames as a form of individualised progress. According to Desmond’s history of consumer behaviour the Enlightenment has produced a society that emphasises increases in living standards through the accumulation of goods because it has placed a focus on rationalism… [Read more…]
June 11, 2009
Here is the text of a short talk for the department seminar tomorrow… It seems rather obvious and not at all theoretical to claim that consumer culture is playful, yet there are plenty of play metaphors in consumer research. But is play only metaphor, or possibility in consumption? I want to spend a few minutes thinking… [Read more…]
March 4, 2009
Extract from a longer set of conclusions about adult videogame play… According to Turner (1992) the liminal group festivals that society may use to manage the life-plan of individuals has been replaced by liminoid events that are instead instigated by the individual. This is similar to what Bauman (2001) calls ‘bottom up’ modernism. The individual… [Read more…]
February 27, 2009
...for parents digital play is further subject to changes in playing style and management. Previously I explained that for John, a growing child was actually the ‘excuse’ to start playing games, even if John’s busy work left little time for the complexities of many games, but for adults who already have an established play routine, the arrival of children may be disruptive.
February 27, 2009
We start to see interactive games and other playful, digital media as part of the trajectory of an increasingly playful consumer culture that may produce practices through which further change may occur
January 21, 2010
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