new media ethology
The research project will consolidate and develop qualitative methods for analysing the everyday interactions of people and digital media hardware, software and services. It will bring together digital media businesses, academics and media researchers: firstly to share ideas and to draw on their best practices and methods in understanding emergent media technocultures; and secondly to offer and extend approaches and methods developed in my own doctoral and postdoctoral research, and by the Play Research Group at UWE. The project will develop through workshops and seminars, and through the production of written and audiovisual case studies for use by the project’s partners in their own research.

project blog

play research group

PhD

Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form (UWE 2006)

recent practice-based research

circuits
a video essay that examines continuities in, and transformations of, children’s culture and play across virtual and actual space

the machines want to play
a powerpoint presentation from the future by the robot ludologists:

nanodocumentaries

interlude
delegates
a hundred damage
natur morte

current research trajectories:

microethology
non-scientific, improvised, opportunistic approach to recording, describing and analysing everyday technocultural events. The object of study for a microethnography of videogame play is not a media cultural practice, a human subject, or a set of technologies, but rather the event in which the three come together (with the human and nonhuman researchers). Or, more accurately, it is the event that is constituted by, and constitutes, these part(icipant)s. Moreover, the event foregrounds the temporal dimension of videogame play, emphasises the dynamic between the elements in play: entities coming together, material and aesthetic chains of cause and effect or feedback.

(from 'Events and collusions: a glossary for the microethology of videogame play')

simulation & reality
I am particularly interested in rethinking the notion of simulation for everyday technoculture. The following is an extract from a draft of the second edition of New Media: a critical introduction:

Simulation is a widely and loosely used concept in the new media literature, but is seldom defined. It often simply takes the place of more established concepts such as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’. However where the concept is paid more attention, it has a dramatic effect on how we theorise cultural technologies [...]

Looser current uses of the term are immediately evident, even in new media studies, where it tends to carry more general connotations of the illusory, the false, the artificial, so that a simulation is cast as an insubstantial or hollow copy of something original or authentic. It is important to invert these assumptions. A simulation is certainly artificial, synthetic and fabricated, but it is not ‘false’ or ‘illusory’. Processes of fabrication, synthesis and artifice are real and all produce new real objects. A videogame world does not necessarily imitate an original space or existing creatures, but it exists. Since not all simulations are imitations, it becomes much easier to see simulations as things, rather than as representations of things. The content of simulations may of course (and frequently does) derive from ‘representations’. [...] The simulation exists regardless of whether we are fooled by its content or not. Thus the problem to which simulation draws our attention is not that of the difference between ‘simulated’ and ‘real’ content, but rather that of the material and real existence of simulations as part of the furniture of the same real world that has been so thoroughly ‘represented’ throughout the history of the arts and media. In other words a simulation is real before it imitates or represents anything.

play

Drawing on both my microethological work and theories of play and games, I am concerned with exploring the ontology of play. In what ways might concepts of affect, embodiment, time-space, and non-representational theory be articulated to describe and theorise play in, or more precisely as, everyday life. My concerns are to explore the possiblities of ‘deep description’ of moments or small events of play, including the participation of children’s media in the constitution of a play event without media technology. I have been struck by the ways in which not only characters, scenarios and artefacts (weapons, powers, etc.) from media universes populate the collective imaginative eruptions of play-events, but also how the specific forms, spaces, conventions and modes of engagement of videogames play their part.

toys

I am interested in toys as the material culture of play, and I am fascinated by their ambiguous status as ambiguous objects anticipating and structuring play, simulating the world whilst being built as new worlds. I hope to conduct research on archives of historical toys, as well as continuing microethological studies of contemporary toy events. A particular interest is an idea of contemporary toys as multitudinous - i.e. not the treasured transitional object of Winnicott's writings, but the numerous and minutely differentiated collections of Pokemon, Lego, and Go-Go Crazy Bones.

MA dissertation

the emerald hill zone: Sonic the Hedgehog & the visual culture of late capitalism

conference papers

Another day in cyberspace: playing with the material and the imaginary
presented at The Challenge of Computer Games conference, Lodz, Poland, 2002

Playing with Theory: videogames, the technological imaginary, and a new media studies presented at Playing with the Future: developments and directions in computer gaming, University of Manchester, April 2002