Inspired by ideas generated at the ARC CRN Workshop: The game of being mobile – mobile technologies, gaming cultures and the haptic, held at RMIT University (Melbourne, 10th-11th July 2008), a number of the participants contributed abstracts to the proposal of a special issue of Mobilities Journal. The proposal has been commissioned for publication in July 2010, to be edited by Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson – see below for the proposal and abstracts.
Mobilities Special Issue
Contemporary Ecologies and Modalities of Mobile Media
This proposed special issue for Mobilities Journal aims to discuss relationships between notions of mobility and new media practices, with the aim of rethinking screen and media cultures in the twenty-first century. Drawing from philosophical, new media and ethnographic approaches, this special issue considers the various dimensions of mobility and immobility in the particular context of mobile technologies and mobile games, focusing on the socio-cultural specificities of mobile media use and creativity, the mixed realities of mobile gaming, the emerging haptics of the mobile screen, and the increasing deployment of mobile interfaces in existing game-worlds.
From the corporeal effects of location-aware gaming to the creative capital and socio-cultural practices surrounding mobile media content generation, the realm of the mobile device is becoming increasingly widespread and ever-present in contemporary culture. The nexus of mobile media, games and mobile content generation highlights the ongoing importance of the local, the contextual, the creative and the corporeal in determining definitions of mobility, play, place and space. With these issues in mind, this special issue brings together researchers in mobile gaming and mobile media to discuss past, present and future outcomes for the convergent role of mobile technologies, mobile media content and game cultures as part of socio-cultural practices.
Chris Chesher considers the instrumental use of mobile devices as a means to both navigate game-space and communicate with in-game characters, requiring a technical mastery that translates from game to world and back again. Larissa Hjorth discusses the gendered practices of user-generated mobile media content, and the emergence of ‘imaging communities’ and defining modes of mobility in the Asia-Pacific. Ian MacColl and Ingrid Richardson describe the hybrid realities of location-based mobile gaming and their incursion into the everyday lifeworld, with a particular focus on embodiment and the ‘corporealisation’ of mobile game-play. Andrew Murphie provides a deep analysis of the economies and politics of mobility in contemporary culture, revealing a complex palimpsest of perceptual ecologies––proprioceptive, visceral and haptic––specific to mobile technics and gaming. Finally, Rowan Wilken details the use of mobile media such as mobile games and mobile art as a means to connect with others outside of one’s immediate and familiar social sphere –– as a way of ‘touching’ others both sensorially and as a communicative imperative.
Abstracts
Computer games interfaces and the informatisation of everyday life
Chris Chesher (University of Sydney)
Computer games and everyday life are converging on common conventions for mediating space at the information interface. We might call this the informatisation of everyday life. For example, the perception and control systems in the recently released platform game Grand Theft Auto IV are characterised not only by a highly detailed photorealistic 3D game world, but also by the prominence of mobile media interfaces. Global positioning and mobile phone displays help players navigate around the space of the game world, and even build relationships with in-game characters. Users’ familiarity with these technologies in everyday life allows game designers to introduce these instrumental devices into the game while retaining aesthetic realism.The easy overlap between games and world suggests that at the same time as games are becoming more world-like, everyday navigation of physical and social spaces is becoming more game-like. Lefebvre's dialectic of perceived, conceived and lived spaces is complicated by the intervention of information visualisation at the very locus of perception. Mastery of the techniques of using communication devices and games is generating a kind of tactical social capital, while control over spatial data infrastructures establishes opportunities for the exercise of strategic power. At the same time, lack of access to expensive and complex technologies is increasingly a force for social exclusion.
Cartographies of personalisation: Gendered Mobile Media in the Asia-PacificLarissa Hjorth (RMIT University)
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Asia-Pacific provides a compelling model for analysing emerging forms of mobility, post-industrialism and postmodernity. The region is a powerful player in the circulation of mobile technologies––both materially and symbolically––and in shaping the emerging lifestyle patterns associated with them. The cultural and economic power of global mobile technologies in the region can no longer be sublimated under the symbol of Japan as the production epicentre of portable technologies such as the Sony Walkman. Concurrent to the rise of mobile technologies globally, the region has grown to become both a powerful economy and a conveyer of soft cultural capital. Through various forms of innovative mobile technology in locations such as Tokyo and Seoul, and the potentialities of colossal new markets––particularly China––the region now plays an important role in global production and consumption circuits. In sum, the region’s formidable economic power has now transformed into a rising cultural currency globally. The question this raises of course is, given how central mobile phone consumption and production have been in the rise of the region as arguably this century’s new global power (Arrighi et al. 2003), to what extent is the transnational imaginary vested in, and represented by, the cultural index of the mobile phone?
Moreover, as the rise of the mobile phone into mobile media is marked by gendered practices of user created content (UCC), gendered mobile media provides much insight into the region in the twenty-first century. These examples of UCC––from camera phone self-presentation to text poetry––construct micro ‘imaging communities’ that are becoming one of the dominant narratives for twenty-first century everyday life. As new communities created by the practices of mobile media, imaging communities can be seen as micro expressions of various modes of mobility. These mobilities refer to the various post-industrial modes of intimacy, labour and capital within contemporary life.
Through gendered mobile media, we can see how these modes reconfigure intimacy and labour and reconceptualise forms of mobility, and immobility, in the region. This paper explores case studies in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and Melbourne arguing that within the myriad of mobilities, there are four defining forms of mobility that are central in the structuring and ordering of gendered mobile media practices in the region. The four defining and yet interrelated modes of mobility can be found within different disciplinary fields –– mobility studies, mobile media, capital (particularly social), and developmental studies of labour. These four mobilities are interwoven into the fabric and technics (that is, the structures and modes) of gendered mobile media; a dynamic regional process that creates new mobilities. Through these examples, this paper provides a space to reflect upon the material and symbolic dimensions of gendered mobility (and immobility) in the twenty-first century narratives of post-industrialism.
Ludic Mobilities: the Corporealisation of Mobile GamingIan MacColl (Queensland University of Technology)
Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University)
Traditional critiques of computer and video games argue that the ‘magic circle’ defines the parameters of game-play, marking off a temporary world wherein particular game rules apply. In this view to play a game means, materially or conceptually, ‘entering’ the magic circle of the game. Yet increasingly, ‘synthetic worlds’ (Castronova) such as those created through massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) problematise the notion of a magic circle or dedicated game-space, or at the very least point to the porosity between everyday life and game worlds. Further erosions of this boundary between the actual and ‘as-if’ structures of experience are effected by mobile, location-based and alternative reality games, where the physical, local environment, and one’s pedestrian or vehicular mobility through it, become co-opted or absorbed both as dynamic game-space and game-play. Thus, the ludic experience leaks into the spatial, temporal, social and corporeal affordances of everyday life.
In this paper we consider the permeability of the ‘magic circle’ surrounding alternate reality, pervasive, location-based and augmented reality mobile games, and the increasing prevalence of hybrid realities in the everyday lifeworld. In particular, through a scenario-based approach––telling ‘stories’ about mobile gaming––we explore the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of emerging hybrid or mixed realities. In so doing we aim to contribute to a critical understanding of the proprioceptive, haptic, visceral and kinaesthetic ‘ecologies’ of contemporary mobility and mobile gaming as developed by Murphie in this issue.
Proprioceptive contagion and the politics of lived experience
Andrew Murphie (University of New South Wales)
What is at stake in the move from console gaming to mobile gaming is precisely what is at stake in any movement from containment to increased mobility. It is also what is at stake––both conceptually and in practice––in the move from the self-contained and artefact-determined nature of ‘artificial realities’ to the complexity of contemporary mixed realities. These mixed realities bring together different forms of mobility, in which very different ecologies contaminate each other.
This article discusses the play within new forms of ecological mobility. It seeks to understand the opening, challenges to, and repotentialising of work (labour) and love (association) within the mixed ecologies of uncontained mobility. It does so by looking ‘beneath’ the normal considerations of subjects, psychologies and state (static) forms of organisation, examining instead the proprioceptive, haptic and visceral ecologies from which more visible and semi-stable processes such as the subject or object emerge as necessary and functional illusions.
Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst of work Christophe Dejours, the theories of proprioception and change of Brian Massumi, and the notion of a relational parallax of ‘transcritique’ in the work of Kojin Karatani, the article depicts a seductive dance between complex emergent organisations and a kind of vertigo, literally ‘at play’ in the middle of the experience of contemporary mobility. This dance becomes the vehicle via which the limits of structure, Capital and models/nodes of living are travelled. The conclusion is a new set of questions concerning the digital, technics in general and mobility. These take as their point of departure the recontextualisation of traditional and somewhat fatigued media studies' questions of ‘violence and media effects’. By-passing the traditional frames of such questions in normative psychological terms allows us to head instead towards the more fundamental work of habit as the ongoing synthesis of experience within work (labour) and love (association). Only then can we understand the proprioceptive and visceral work that is now as important to economies of mobility as ‘cognitive or immaterial labour’ (or for that matter, the ‘creative industries’ as they appear in urban, mobile settings). This suggests a different politics of the lived information-scape, of mobility and of proprioceptive ecologies.
A Community of Strangers? Mobile Media, Art, Tactility, and Urban Encounters with the Other
Rowan Wilken (University of Melbourne)
A great deal of critical attention has been given to examinations of what social capital theorist Robert Putnam might term the ‘bonding’ aspects of mobile media use – that is, how we use these devices to connect with people within our existing social networks. Far less critical attention is paid to what Putnam would call ‘bridging’ forms of mobile media use –– that is, the ways in which these devices can be used to make connections outside our immediate social sphere. This paper is concerned with the latter and, in particular, with detailing key instances where mobile media (mobile gaming, and mobile media art) have been used to make connections with relative strangers.
These attempts at connecting with others are interpreted and developed in two directions. First, they are read as a continuation of earlier experimental art practice that sought to engage with issues of mobility and difference. This includes the work of architect Cedric Price, and media artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. Second, these experimental forms of mediated social interaction are also read against key (poststructuralist) philosophical deliberations on community and difference, by the likes of Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, and Alphonso Lingis. The paper concludes by exploring the possibility of conceiving of ‘touch’ not only in sensory terms, but also and more particularly as a philosophical imperative, a reorientating force in thinking through the possibilities permitted by mobile media technologies for reaching out to and engaging with (‘touching’) others.
