Drawing on examples from my recent book Gameworlds: virtual media & children’s everyday play, and from your own experiences and memories of play, this masterclass will address the passage of games into the postdigital media age. We will explore the nature of children’s play today in an environment saturated with digital media devices and networks, and the ways in which long-established games, toys, and play patterns are erased, sustained or transformed by computer-based media. Along the way, we’ll ask questions about the most productive methods and concepts for studying the intimate and intangible experiences of playful technoculture.
Seth Giddings is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and Design at University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art. His research and teaching address the design, testing and everyday use of playful technologies from popular video games and participatory media to experimental mobile games, toys, and robots. His book Gameworlds: virtual media & children’s everyday play is published by Bloomsbury (2014). He is a co-author of New Media: a critical introduction (Routledge 2009) and the editor of a companion volume The New Media & Technocultures Reader (Routledge 2011). Recent projects include researching the development of a robotic gaming platform, digitally augmented playground equipment, and a location-based dance game for smart phones. He is currently developing research on hybrid-reality toys, and distributed imagination and proprioception.
Acknowledgement
Seth Giddings visit and masterclass are part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grant, Games of Being Mobile, and co-hosted by the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) and Centre for Games Design Research (CGDR) in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT University.
Date: Tuesday 10 May
Time: 1:00pm – 5:00pm
Venue: RMIT Emily McPherson, corner of Victoria and Russell Streets, Building 13, Level 3, Room 5, Melbourne.
http://sethgiddingsmasterclass.eventbrite.com.au