DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Digital Cultures Research Centre

We are part of, UWE - University of the West of England

 Playing With Reality: An Aesthetic Framework for Understanding Pervasive Games

Pervasive gaming is one place where the development of ubiquitous computing technologies are flowing into the everyday world and the move from experiment to post-digital practice creates unexpected eddies and currents that are not part of the original vision. This PhD research is intended to address the lived experience of these games and the world that surrounds them.

There are two interrelated directions that this research explores. Firstly, the cultural context of pervasive gaming and secondly, to understand what is particular to the aesthetic experience of these games. Neither of which can truly be understood separately

Previous research has tended to focus on the games or technologies and this project is intended to take a cultural studies perspective; being sensitive to the social, cultural, political and economic situations from which these practices emerge. Pervasive gaming didn’t just appear, it was developed by real people with real world concerns. Importantly these practices are very unstable and many of the common technologies involved are moving from R&D into mainstream adoption.

Considering also that the foundations of Pervasive Gaming are concerned with the physical and lived world one of the large discrepancies in the research to date is a sensitivity to the way that lived space is experienced. The long history of relational spatiality in cultural geography has largely been ignored.

This leads to the following research aims and questions.

1. Aims

  • To carry out an appropriately critical exploration and discussion of the subject of pervasive and mixed reality games.
  • To carry out a research project that is firmly grounded in empirical, qualitative research.
  • To construct a framework for understanding pervasive gaming in relation to the specificities of culture, lived space and interaction with contemporary technology

 2. Research Questions

  • How is the practice of pervasive gaming culturally situated?
    • How does a network of actors, such as designers, players, festivals and technologies, emerge, change and stabilise?
    • How is design enabled and constrained by this technical and cultural situation?
    • How does the techno-cultural situation contribute to the aesthetics of pervasive gaming?
  • What is the common aesthetic experience of pervasive games?
    • What is different from other experiences?
    • What is the core experience of these activities?
    • What does technology contribute to these experiences?

 

 Project feed

http://www.digitaldust.org/category/playing-with-reality/feed

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