Big Games and Hipsters
Posted: September 30, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: game studies, playing with reality, presentations, publications | Tags: bourdieu, capital, DCRC, fields, game studies, pervasive games | Leave a comment »Here’s a copy of the paper I presented at ISEA in Istanbul. Presentation below.
Pervasive and street gamers are compared and contrasted with the infamous subculture known as hipsters, showing that although they are quite different social groups their aesthetics operate in similar ways. Specific attention is given to the emergent, socially relative nature of these aesthetics and the operation of ‘cool’ cultural capital. These findings are based on ethnographic field work carried out in 2010 at the Come Out and Play festival.
Momus, Pervasive Gaming, Art and Commerce
Posted: August 22, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: playing with reality | Tags: art, DCRC, design, fields, markets, momus, pervasive games, PhD | Leave a comment »Only today do I come across an excellent post from the playful, weird, sino-celtic musician-cum-artist Momus. Seems he was invited to Hide and Seek in 2008 and did some digging around Pervasive Games. It’s a great post and I’m both happy and annoyed as he has a few conclusions that are strikingly similar to my PhD work. It is great to see someone who is critical, and an outsider to the scene, doing some research about the subject and forming some interesting conclusions. He hits on the some of the exclusivity I’ve witnessed and coincidentally mentions hipsters. Hipsters and exclusivity seem always go together somehow. He wants in, but also out… and ultimately, from what I know, he was out.
This unethical exclusion, this flagrant rudeness, is something Charlie Booker and Chris Morris rammed home time after time in Nathan Barley, the story of an infuriatingly ludic prankster / media node who constantly flaunts his freedom and disinhibition in front of unfree and inhibited people.
And
What happens when fun and games become values you can’t question? [...] Fun and games, at that point, become orb and sceptre, ball and chains. Liberation, at that point, becomes difficulty and differential calculus. It becomes emotion, idealism, seriousness, quietness, dignity.
Also today I was talking to a PR person about how to sell pervasive gaming to big brands and extend audiences. Marketing departments, quite understandable, don’t get pervasive games… I don’t think I do yet either.
One thing I’ve found it really fascinating from my research is that practitioners around pervasive gaming consider themselves to largely be designers. Those working professionally are in what look like small design companies. They fit into that field and market and are attempting to situated themselves commercially as such.
There are interesting tensions and orbits between whether the practice of pervasive gaming is art or design. Some of the most successful companies working in this field certainly take money from both the art and design worlds and are constantly recontextualising themselves to appear as one or the other to the commissioners that provide money to each. Not that I consider these to be two clear cut categories by any stretch, but there is a lot of chasing back and forth between these two checkpoints.
The practice of design, and situating this form of gaming alongside brands, is one which doesn’t naturally allow for the sorts of critical engagements that Momus raises as problems he saw in pervasive urban gaming. In fact brands want differentiation and distinction as part of their message and it is interesting to see that play out. Not that art is entirely innocent either, in that work made largely for the gallery context is already exclusive by its nature. Can you ever win?