This paper puts forward the perspective that social play spaces are opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and engagement. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer active participant engagement and the development of the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built physical interface devices and multiplayer video games.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0579
This paper suggests that recent developments in video game technology have occurred in parallel to play being moved from public into private spaces, which has had impact on the way people interact with games. The paper also argues and that there is potentially value in the creation of public play spaces to create opportunities to utilise both technology and body for the benefit of community culture and experiences through gaming. Co-located social gaming coupled with tangible interfaces offer alternative possibilities for the local video game scene. This paper includes a descriptive account of Rabble Room Arcade, an experimental social event combining custom-built tangible interface devices and multiplayer video games. The event was designed around games that promoted a return to simplicity through the use of unique tangible controllers to allow casual gamers to connect to the game and to each other, whilst also transforming the event into a spectacle.
This paper presents an alternative perspective in which to view creative generation and the practice of game design. A design research methodology incorporates sketch-based creative practice and the discussion of two theoretical frameworks: database and absurdity. The absurd is a rebellious embrace of a chaotic world, while the database is a new media structure for collecting, thinking and producing. These frameworks are competing yet complementary concepts that allow for exploration and ordering. The creative practice described within embodies a database compulsion: the process of sketching many rough ideas instead of perfecting a single idea; the creation of a toolbox of general components, expressions and universal units; the creation of work that is non-linear, repetitive and/or random. Emerging from this structure, and yet rebelling from established order, is the notion of the absurd. Using Steve Hodges’ notion of the digital absurd, a playful, absurd sensibility is proposed with the following qualities: unconvention; frustration; purposelessness; repetition. The practice of sketching, coupled with the frameworks of absurdity and database, demonstrates a new media and interdisciplinary approach of playful ordering and re-ordering, re-classifying and reframing of game design and idea creation.
Makin' Cake is a participatory installation which demonstrates media as not transparent or neutral but as embodying and propagating values, ideas and attitudes. The installation provides participants with an immediate and provocative experience. It is played with spectators in a situation that invites critical reflection and discussion.
The Makin' Cake installation [ Figures 1-3] is a skill-based competitive single player game with a twist. Players type-in 1950's cake recipes as fast as they can and get points for every word. The twist is extra points are given for swearing. The installation demonstrates that media are transparent to the point of being empty. They do not contain fixed messages that (only) need to be uncovered, recognized or identified, but meaning is always constituted or produced by media users in context. This is an active, creative, on-going and fluent process between the audience and the work. The installation calls for participants to recognize the possibility and, in effect, the necessity to take control, decide what things mean, appropriate media for their own purposes, subvert them, and play with them.
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