Brief bio for author:Sybille Lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. She has published on SF film, games and digital cartography. In recent years her main research subjects have been related to the new media and digital culture. Her research programme in computer games examines how games can function as cultural spaces for new spatial and postcolonial practices. In her latest ERC research project Charting the Digital she looks at how and to what extent digital mapping has altered meanings of media and cartography in daily life. Abstract:In this article I discuss how digital mapping interfaces ask users to engage with images on screens in far more performative and active ways and how this changes the immutable status of the map image. Digital mapping interfaces invite us to touch, talk and move with them, actions that have a reciprocal effect on the look of the image of the map. Images change constantly through absorbing our mobile and physical actions. I approach digital mapping interfaces as mediators: They do not so much collect information as create spatial transformations for the user of the interface, thus instigating new moves on his or her part that are fed once again into the interface. I argue that it is therefore short-sighted to view digital mapping interfaces as mere points of passage. They are better understood as mediators that create spatial meanings by translating between and inviting movements of users, vehicles, programs, etc.

This article examines how maps in location-based mobile games are used as surfaces on which players can inscribe their whereabouts and other local information while being on the move. Using different examples of location-based games (LBGs) to which the map is central, our main argument is that such cartographical LBGs foreground the fluidity of mapping and emphasize the performative aspects of playing with maps. As such, we wish to move away from a conception of maps as representational texts and will show that it is far more productive to approach such cartographical games as processual and navigational practices. Instead of conceiving maps in such games as ‘mimetic interfaces’ (Juul, 2009), they should therefore be approached as what we will call navigational interfaces. To understand them as such, we will combine perspectives from game studies with non-representational understandings of maps as technological and spatial practices as developed in human geography and science and technology studies. By doing so, we wish to instigate a productive interdisciplinary debate about the relation between play and mapping as to deepen our understanding of LBGs as cultural cartographical practices.

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Original citation:Hind, Sam and Lammes, Sybille. (2015) Digital mapping as double-tap : cartographic modes, calculations and failures. Global Discourse : an interdisciplinary journal of current affairs and applied contemporary thought . ISSN 2326-9995 (in press In this article, we will ask how Latour's latest project -An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) -can help us to understand the nature of cartographic modes, calculations and failures. To this end, we will argue that in his many readings, specifically digital mapping can be said to operate through a 'double-click' mode which obscures the [REF-REP] crossing of which he now speaks of in AIME. More appropriately, we refine Latour's argument to suggest that contemporary navigational practice involves not simply a 'double-click' mentality but a 'double-tap' one. This action enables the user to not only zoom into the mapping interface -by virtue of a double-tap of a touch-sensitive screen -but also manipulate phenomena in mobile and haptic terms, as if the world was both accessible and knowable through the fingertips. This small tweak in terminology strengthens Latour's account of prevailing modern thinking, to allow for an even more robust analysis to take place. However, Latour is not the first to think in terms of 'modes'. Critical cartographers, for instance, have talked of so-called 'mapping modes'. Latour's ontological pluralism, together with these other cartographic and methodological versions, can help us to identify different operative elements in various digital mapping enterprises. We further argue that there is still considerable value in employing Latour's long-theorized notions of immutable mobility, inscription and calculation, so long as they are updated and refined for contemporary practices, and the various bridging strategies mentioned above are implemented and taken into consideration. In returning to our initial point, we then argue that there are moments in which this double-tap philosophy is laid bare and the seamless linking of the [REF] and[REP] modes of existence unravel. Taking on and extending Latour's interest in 'failure', we argue that the best way to challenge double-tap thinking, in a methodological sense, is to focus on the nuanced nature of digital mapping failures since these are instances that mapping no longer works 'without a hitch'. In such moments, the aura of unmediated technological practice slips. Instead, the bare operational bones are exposed, allowing the user to gain access to its failed state. We substantiate this final argument with reference to two cartographic cases concerning a flood event and a series of protest demonstrations.

In this article, we will use autoethnographic accounts of our use of the Apple Watch to analyse a new type of ludic labour that has emerged in recent years, in which leisure activities are redefined in terms of work and quantifiable data. Wearable devices like the Apple Watch encourage us to share data about ourselves and our activities, dividing our attention in everyday contexts as 'quasi-objects' that need our input to hybridise work and play, offering opportunities to merge leisure and labour, and also the possibility for resistant practices in the interstices between function and failure. We combine perspectives from Science and Technology studies, media studies and play studies, including the 'quantified self' and the 'Internet of Things', to argue that while the Apple Watch moves us closer to merging with the machine, its inability to provide what it promises offers a way out-a more positive understanding of intimate, wearable computing technology.

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A playful specter is haunting the world. Since the 1960s, when the use of the word "ludic" became popular in both Europe and the US to designate playful behavior and artifacts, playfulness has become increasingly a mainstream characteristic of modern and postmodern culture. In the first decade of the 21 st century we can even speak of the global "ludification of culture" (Raessens 2006; 2014). Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind in this context is the immense popularity of computer games, which, as far as global sales are concerned, have already outstripped Hollywood movies. In the US, 8-to 18-year-olds play on average an hour and a half daily on consoles, computers and handheld gaming devices, including mobile phones (Rideout et al. 2010, 2-3). This is by no means only a Western phenomenon. In South Korea, for example, about two-thirds of the country's total population frequently plays online games, turning computer gaming into one of the fastest growing industries and a key driver for the Korean economy (Jin 2012). 1 Although perhaps most visible, computer game culture is only one manifestation of the process of ludification that seems to penetrate every cultural domain (Neitzel and Nohr 2006). In our present experience economy, for example, playfulness not only characterizes leisure time (fun shopping, game shows on television, amusement parks, playful computer, Internet, and smartphone use), but also those domains that used to be serious, such as work (which should above all be fun nowadays), education (serious gaming), politics (ludic campaigning), and even warfare (computer games like war simulators and interfaces). According to Jeremy Rifkin, "play is becoming as important in the cultural economy as work was in the industrial economy" (2000, 263). 2 Postmodern culture has been described as "a game without an overall aim, a play without a transcendent destination" (Minnema 1998, 21).

To date, game studies has largely undertheorized the co-production of postcolonial stories, exploration, and mapping in games. Furthermore, as has been noted before (Carr, 2006), the work that has been done on postcolonialism and play so far often leaves the player out of the equation, even sometimes as a theoretical construct. Yet player experience is crucial to understanding such games, as narratives are not only built on the 'master' level of game mechanics, but also through the personal stories players processually (Ash, 2009; Thrift, 2008) develop through their journey of touring and mapping, thereby developing spatial stories (De Certeau, 1984; Jenkins, 2004;Lammes, 2009) that may present us with conflicting spatio-temporal accounts. Through a comparative and collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis of Civilization VI (Sid Meier, 2016) -a turn-based strategy game -we want to push this discussion further and improve our theoretical understanding and analytical purchase of the triad relation between narrative and postcolonialism in games, thereby contributing to the field of postcolonial theory and game studies. Drawing on postcolonial geography, science and technology studies (STS), non-representational theory and game studies, we argue that games, through their playful, explorative and emergent qualities, are a powerful means of rethinking and reimagining colonial (hi)stories in this postcolonial era (Lammes, 2009(Lammes, , 2010 including issues of spatio-temporality, cartography and the hybrid relation between women and machines. and negotiation, and therefore a classification of computer games can be based on how they represent -or, perhaps, implement -space' (Aarseth, 2000: 154). By sandwiching the opening cinematics between two 'mapping moments' (Dodge et al., 2011: 220-43), a strong emphasis is placed on mapping as a dominant and constant technology needed to explore and dominate the world, thereby fitting neatly in a (post)colonial cartographical discourse in which mapping is an essential 'immutable mobile' (Latour, 1990): a technology that does not lose shape when put in a different context, and is used to create and sustain asymmetrical power relations (Lammes, 2016). Thus, the opening scene of the game largely seems to celebrate colonial exploration by implementing space through mapping and other technologies.At first glance this seems to match many postcolonial readings on Civilization, which provide critical analyses of the game's Western-centric narration of history (Mukherjee, 2015), arguing that the game's structure develops an imperialist narrative (Ford, 2016), where discourses of geopolitical order become naturalised (Nohr, 2010). Although we don't contest that this game is resonating with neo-liberal ideologies through emphasising the connection between mapping and mastering territory -as our opening vignette indeed confirms -our aim is to unearth ' alternative' affordances in which mapping gains new meaning that can be critical and reflective at the same time. After all, as has also ...