As scholars such as Goggin (2009a) have noted, the rapid uptake of 'smartphones' has reshaped the ways in which software developers, users, and academics consider the interrelationship between mobility, culture, technology hardware, and the Internet. In addition, this uptake has added a significant new layer of encrustations around what we might define as 'standard' uses of mobile technologies. Once limited to the playing of preloaded (offline) games on mobile handsets, smartphones have allowed for not only mobile interactivity and enhanced visuals, but also the possibility of downloading apps that allow the user to add multiple new dimensions to the gaming experience. These developments are but one more factor in 'thinking about games as assemblage, wherein many varying actors and unfolding processes make up the site and action' (Taylor 2009, 332). Taking the theoretical perspectives of adaptation (Goggin 2009a; Farnsworth and Austrin 2010) and assemblage (Taylor 2009; Goggin 2009b) we will discuss three apps linked to the enormously popular World of Warcraft game, and the ways in which these applications both reshape how we might think about and use technology, and how smartphones and mobile applications also reconfigure social, technological, and generic relations.
Recent attention to the question of preservation and exhibition of video games in cultural institutions such as museums indicates that this media form is moving from being seen as contentious consumer object to cultural heritage. This empirical study examines two recent museum exhibitions of digital games: GameOn 2.0 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm (TM), and Women in Game Development at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, Oakland (MADE). The aim is to explore how games are appropriated within such institutions, and thereby how they are configured as cultural heritage and exhibitable culture. The study uses actor-network theory in order to analyse heterogeneous actors working in conjunction in such processes, specifically focusing on translation of games and game culture as they are repositioned within museums. The study explores how games are selectively recruited at both institutions and thereby translated in order to fit exhibition networks, in both cases leading to a glossing over of contentious issues in games and game culture. In turn, this has led to a more palatable but less nuanced transformation of video games into cultural heritage. While translating video games into cultural heritage, the process of making games exhibitable lost track of games as culture by focusing on physical artefacts and interactive, playable fun. It also lost track of them as situated in our culture by skimming over or ignoring the current contentious nature of digital games, and finally, it lost track of games as being produced and experienced in a particular context, or games of culture.
Patrick´s work centers around digital games as participatory culture. He has written his dissertation about co-creative game design and has given a Uppsala University TEDx talk about the topic. He has been working in a research project at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology and writes about participation in preservation and exhibition of games as cultural heritage. He is also serving as board member for the Cultural Heritage Incubator of the Swedish National Heritage Board.
This article argues that the innovation in the interface design of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft is to a substantial part originating in the user-created interface modifications called add-ons. This is shown in an analysis of the connection of the development in interface design to the creation of interface modification add-ons by players. The analysis is informed by interviews with specialists in the community of add-on programmers and focuses on the content and functionality of the add-ons mapped against the respective standard interface elements including an explanation of the problem they solve for the player and a measure of the similarity between them. The article also gives an outlook on the influence of these interface-modifications on the actual practice of game play as well as on game design and interface design by the game producer.
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