Uncle Roy all around you: mixing games and theatre on the city streets

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Flintham Martin Anastasi Rob Benford Steven Drozd Adam Mathrick James Rowland Duncan Oldroyd Amanda Sutton Jon Tandavanitj Nick Adams Matt Row-Farr Ju
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

We describe Uncle Roy All Around You, a mixture of game and theatre that took place in central London in late May and early June of 2003. Street players, equipped with handheld computers and wireless networking, journeyed through the streets of the city in search of an elusive character called Uncle Roy, while online players journeyed through a parallel 3D model of the city, were able to track their progress and could communicate with them in order to help or hinder them. We describe how Uncle Roy All Around You mixed elements of pre-programmed game content with live performance and behind the scenes orchestration to create a compelling experience, especially for street players. We suggest that finding ways to scale this approach to support larger numbers of participants is an important challenge for future research.

 

The place of mobile gaming: one history in locating mobility in the Asia-Pacific region

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Hjorth Larissa
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

In media cultures of late, the synergy between two global dominant industries – mobile communication and gaming – has attracted much attention and stargazing. As part of burgeoning global media cultures, gaming and mobile media are divergent in their adaptation at the level of the local. In some locations where broadband infrastructure is strong and collectivity is emphasized (such as South Korea), online multiplayer games prevail. In locations where convergent mobile technologies govern such as Japan, mobile gaming platforms dominate. In order to address the uneven adoption and definitions of mobile gaming – that range from encompassing casual mobile games to pervasive (location aware) gaming – this paper will attempt to sketch how we can think about mobility, and mobilism, in a period marked by divergent forms of regionalism and localization. Drawing from cultural studies, anthropological and sociological accounts of mobility and emerging consumer practices in the region, this paper seeks to move beyond current conflations and futurism surrounding convergent mobile gaming.

 

Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family Gender, and Gaming

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Enevold Jessica
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds.