Posted: February 23, 2012 | Author: Dan | Filed under: game studies, playing with reality, presentations | Tags: Anthropology, game studies, pervasive games, PhD, ritual, Turner |
In September the lovely folks at playARK in Cardiff asked me to come speak at their festival. They videoed me fiddling with their lighting set up and showing footage of half naked cricketers.
Posted: October 12, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: mindblank | Tags: Anthropology |
An excellent bit of anthropological analysis on the culturally relative effects of alcohol. It’s not the booze, but the british to blame for the binge.
The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.
And coffee culture would not be any better. I’m glad I’ve gone teetotal on the coffee. I seem to be getting into fewer fights since giving it up.
If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem – a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands.
I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.
Posted: August 23, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, DCRC, liminal, pervasive games, PhD |
Originally I had thought I was coming here to fill in a technical piece of my PhD puzzle, how Blast Theory achieve their award winning experiences through technology. However the lasting impression I get is not that this is achieved the use of technology, but instead that they do this through detailed production processes and a real attention and absolute care paid to the nuts and bolts of the experience.
Rather than being experts in whizzy technology (though they do have a deep understanding of how to use it) their skills like in the planning of the process of experiences. It is fascinating to hear all the three artists discuss the intricate, step by step details of the various works (often dating back 10 years) and it is very telling that they all remember the step by step details with high degree. To achieve this sort of recall points to them having spent a lot of time finessing these processes. This goes all the way back to kidnap, and for example getting entry forms just right.
Most of the attention Blast Theory gets for their work is focussed on the glitzy main event, the GPS game, virtual world, or the technology. However it is the attention that they pay to how a participant enters and leaves that experience that really distinguishes their pieces. And it is here that they show that they can achieve liminal experiences by ushering people carefully across the threshold and into their works. The beginnings and ends, which usually have nothing to do with high tech, are the mechanisms that assist this liminality.
Another interesting point about their processes is that although they say they “want to make you do things you’ve never done before” they are not trying to make you do actions you haven’t tried before. The things they want to get you to do are made up of fairly mundane, everyday physical actions, and these, pieced together and executed in a different context are what bring about the experiences. Other liminal experiences also have this same relationship: pilgrimages are just extended commuting; rituals involve lots of small, easily repeatable symbolic actions; festivals often involve simple things such as processions, or easily replicable dances. The individual actions can be mundane, but take on different symbolic meaning in the context of the participant’s liminal state.
Victor Turner’s description of the Isoma ritual that he writes about in The Ritual Process feels very similar. The whole ritual is complex, and the doctors involved are the only ones that appreciate the whole, but the other participants take part by digging holes, slaughtering chickens or singing simple songs.
Having just read another review of the – i’m still gutted I didn’t go this year – game 2.8 hours later, it is interesting to see the reviewer describe some of the same carefully considered details emerging to build that liminal game space.
Posted: August 9, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, DCRC, liminoid, PhD, ritual, Turner |
Turner makes the liminoid distinction in From Ritual To Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. He does this to differentiate between similar types of activity that occur in pre-industrial and industrial societies. There are activities in modern, global, industrialised society that appear to be very similar to pre-industrial ritual. Religious events, music festivals, theatre, play and games all fit into this category. They tend to follow the same anti-structure that ritual follows.
However, apart from many of the other differences, Turner charts two main differences. The first is that all these activities don’t necessarily result in social state change, they may, but most often things go back to normal, no matter what happened during the liminoid experience. The other, and I think key difference that all this hinges on is the aspect of choice. For pre-industrial societies the rituals are necessary, there is no choice in the matter, the individuals and society must go through them, they have no choice. And on most counts they are not nice experiences for either the participants and/or the social group around them. In one example of a circumcision/manhood ritual, adolescents are excluded from the tribe and must resort to stealing food to survive. If they are caught they are beaten. They are outside society, and outside the laws and so can and must do this successfully to survive. They have no choice in this, and those they steal from also have no choice. It is not a pleasant experience for either side.
Contrast that with most street games and the aspect of choice becomes clear. Players of these games choose to take part in what are generally pleasant and nice experiences. If they were more challenging they would be unlikely to come back for more. And quite contrary to the much discussed aspect of players/public not know who is in or out of the game, generally these games are quite clear about that and involve a high level of awareness and choice from non-players. From experience it is generally quite difficult to get passersby engaged (though this has a lot to do with locations) in games, they may not know it is a game, but they do know it is something they don’t want to be involved in. These games are nice, and unless they are nice to the public they don’t get involved.
Rather than a clear binary, there is more of a continuum from liminal to liminoid. For example there can be obvious peer factors in ensuring that people take part in what could be seen liminoid activities. This is not to say that street, or pervasive, games can’t be more liminal. In fact one of the things that really interests me about some of Blast Theory’s work is in the aspect of choice, and the sometimes uncomfortable experiences that choice, or lack of it can bring. Pieces such as Ulrike and Eamon Compliant and Kidnap really play with choice and have produced distinctly uncomfortable experiences. There is plenty of room for critical engagement between choice and liminoid experiences.
Posted: August 3, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: BT Residency, game studies, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, Culture, DCRC, game studies, games, huizinga, play, ritual, Turner |
In game studies returning to Huizinga has a slightly religious quality about it. Like going back to the source, or font of wisdom. Quoting from Huizinga is a little like quoting from scripture, his work has that place in the discipline and authors expect it to have the force of gospel. It is also like scripture in that there is a poetry to it and everyone gets their own thing out of it. My turn.
Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play. (Huizinga, 1949, p5)
In Homo Ludens, he charts the parallels between ritual and play. He shows that many of the key formal characteristics are similar and quite definitely says that ritual comes out of play. If play is to be taken as performance and mimicry then that goes against what Turner says in the Anthropology of Experience, in that ritual doesn’t come out of performance, but out of redressive social activity. Which leads on to Chapter 3 of Homo Ludens, where Huizinga discusses play in its function to explore and construct social structures. This works nicely with Turner’s take on ritual being a place to break down social structure and experience relations through the anti-structure of communitas.
Huizinga’s first characteristic of play is that it is free and voluntary. Which makes it unlike a rite of passage according to Turner. Play becomes liminoid rather than liminal in that there is a choice as to whether you do it or not.
His second characteristic of play is that it is outside “ordinary” life in its character, duration and location. This is exactly the liminal aspect that rituals achieve and so there is functional similarity here.
Play creates order and there are rules to play by. Having a three year old makes me very aware that so called paidia, or free play, has very definite and unbreakable rules. Again rituals have very set, symbolic structures that give them power and practicality. Turner’s anti-structure is intended to be the set of rules that function inside liminal processes, not just the negation of structure.
Finally play has no material interest, or the achievement inside a game does not carry over into the real world. This is always a hotly debated aspect of games, and has largely been debunked. Ritual by its very nature causes a real world change in the participant(s). They go from one life stage to another, experience crises or cross the boundaries between seasons. The effects of ritual is very closely tied into the real world. However liminoid experiences are those that are only expected to make a change in the individuals perceptions and not have a wider social-structural effect.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga hit on some interesting similarities, but was too quick to jump in to equating play and ritual as having similar social functions. Through Turner’s communitas, anti-structure and liminoid distinctions the similarities and differences can be discussed in a more nuanced way. Turner never mentions Huizinga, but I would be surprised if he had not encountered the work, and I would be interested in knowing his opinions.
Posted: August 2, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: announcements, BT Residency, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, communitas, DCRC, liminal, liminoid, pervasive games, PhD, residency, ritual, Turner |
For this residency project I’ll be using the work of Victor Turner. There are three broad, interrelated and interconnected aspects of his theory of Ritual and Liminality that I’m interested in.
- The Ritual Process: The three part, pre-liminal, liminal, post-liminal, cycle of ritual experience
- Communitas: The feeling of togetherness and solidarity during a ritual activity
- Liminal vs Liminoid: The relationship between necessary rituals in pre-industrial societies and elective liminal-like activities in industrialised society
These are ordered as the chronologically appeared, but have to be taken together as a way to analyse pervasive games. The three part ritual process itself originates with the french, formalist ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep. Turner doesn’t really go out of his way to differentiate his use of the three part process from Van Gennep, and seems to use it straight out of Rites of Passage (1909). In one of his earlier books, The Ritual Process (1969), Turner describes his concept of Communitas, based on his observations of the Ndembu and analysis of other ethnographers work. Over a decade later, in From Ritual To Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982), he describes the liminal/liminoid distinction as he becomes more interested in performance studies and the developed world.
Posted: August 1, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: announcements, BT Residency, game studies, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, brighton, DCRC, pervasive games, PhD |
So here I am, sitting all by myself in the darkened Blast Theory studio, at a coffee table with all of the Day of the Figurines tiny little figures from The Goody Bullets set into it. It is a little like sitting over some lilliputian cryogenic facility, or maybe the B-Ark.
(Update: It was the table used for The Goody Bullets, not DotF. Goody Bullets was an SMS/figurine game made for the V&A Decode exhibition open late night)
For the next month I will be working on a residency in the Blast Theory studio, producing a chapter in my PhD and hopefully a paper from that as well. This work will tie up with my ethnography of big and street games and provide a view on a very different type of game, experience or performance.
Here is an excerpt from my proposal that introduces what it is I intend to do here whilst here.
This is an academic residency, intended to engage with Blast Theory’s practice over an extended period. The most important thing for me is to gain access and insight into developmental processes, of both work in progress and finished pieces.
One of the theoretical influences on my PhD is Victor Turner’s book, The Ritual Process. At its heart is a three stage process, developed from the work of Van Gennep, of separation, margin and reaggregation. Although his early work focuses on ritual (liminal) experiences, in tribal societies, his later work turns to ritual-like (liminoid) experiences in modern culture.
Blast Theory’s work wonderfully mirrors this process and many pervasive games tend to follow this three part trajectory. Blast Theory’s heavily designed and scripted introductions, include practices seemingly lifted directly from tribal culture, such as stripping participants of their possessions, fit well with the separation phase, moving one from the everyday. These are followed by periods that involve confusion, questioning of norms and social sensitisation. Finally there is some form of coda or after effect that means the experience will resonate or provoke reflection to either the individual or a wider social group.
Posted: April 8, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: announcements, playing with reality | Tags: Anthropology, blasttheory, DCRC, ethnography, excitement, pervasive games |
This August, I’m doing a one month residency in Brighton with Blast Theory. In my opinion their pieces relate very well to Victor Turner’s Ritual Process and I intend to spend the time grilling them about their work and getting close to their creative practice. Through this I want to see how applicable the Turner anthropology is to the field of pervasive games. In the month there I’ll be writing a chapter of my PhD using their work as case studies and stepping stones.
It is really old news, but I’ve only got around to posting about it. But as the months are rolling by I’m getting increasingly excited about it again. This will be a great opportunity and the chance to do some concerted writing and PhD production.
Posted: October 4, 2010 | Author: Dan | Filed under: learning | Tags: Anthropology, Critical Debates, Culture, DCRC, PhD, philosophy, Process |
As part of my PhD I get the opportunity to take a couple of appropriate modules. This year I’ve just started Critical Debates in Cultural Theory. Week one kicks off with some unpacking of the term culture.
A couple of great quotes from Raymond Williams.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English Language.
I don’t know how many times I’ve wished I’d never heard that word.
He has a great etymological perspective. The english word Culture has developed from the Latin noun cultura, meaning: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour. Basically the husbandry of natural growth.
Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process.
It is only later, and largely through academic disciplines, that the term comes to mean material culture. This quote ties in nicely with my reading of Turner, et. al. when they are talking about a turn to the experience, and not the transmission of culture. It also resonates wonderfully with the the Process Philosophy of Whitehead, Pierce and Dewey, to which I am drawn, but am woefully under read.
Which I suppose is where the whole post-structural critique steps in and gives structuralism a kick in the ahistorical.
How do you solve a problem like Culture?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Culture?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!