Posts Tagged ‘play’

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Public lecture Kenneth Gergen, June 12, Rotterdam

Monday, May 14th, 2007

My research group is organizing a two-day visit (June 12 – 13 2007) to the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, by sociologist and psychologist Kenneth Gergen. Gergen is most widely known for his book “Saturated Self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life” (originally published in 1991, second edition 2000). He is also known for his idea of “absent presence”.

The first day of his visit, Tuesday June 12, he will give a public lecture called:

Playland – Transformations in Technology, Identity and Culture

Kenneth Gergen will speak about the influence of modern communication technologies on human identities. He will specifically focus on the rise of play elements in digital culture en the transition in thinking about identity as monolithic entities

After the lecture there will be time for questions from the audience.

The lecture is in English.

Date: June 12 juni 2007

Time: 15:15 – 17:00.

Location: Room B2, Campus Woudestein, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Directions: http://www.eur.nl/adressen/plattegronden/

More information about Kenneth Gergen: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1

Entrance is free.

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“Free like once before”

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

A week or two ago (just before the migration of this blog the a new server) I walked past an outdoors advertisement in Amsterdam, near where I live. It is an ad for the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnhem. It says “Vrij als vroeger – Even terug naar de jaren ’60″ (something like “Free as once before – briefly back to the ’60s“).

(click to enlarge)

A brief look at their website tells me it’s an exhibition about leisure time in the 60s. What made me take a snapshot of this was that the picture shows a mobile phone being crushed by what appears a miller’s stone, or a giant tractor tire, I don’t know. So this advertisement basically says that freedom is to be without the mobile phone. It plays upon popular opinion that the mobile phone, handy is it may be, is also a burden and a restraint on freedom. Crush your phone and you’ll be free again :) .

What strikes me now as I am writing is the addition of the word “Even..” (briefly, or just a little moment) in the subtitle. It suggests the possibility of temporarily escaping modern day pressures (the obligations imposed by the mobile phone) when visiting this open air museum. Why would we want/need to do so? Why go to a museum for this? And what is good about a temporary solution? I mean, nobody is really going to crush his mobile? I think the ad tries to appeal to the possibility of imagining and actually visiting a time and place when things where not so complicated. The museum then creates a temporary playground for our imagination. We can actually undergo the experience of living an ideal simple life, albeit temporarily.

Openluchtmuseum Arnhem:

And here’s another advertisement I found on their website, burning a remote control:
Openluchtmuseum Anrhem - Vrij als vroeger (2)

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Playing the Urban @DeBalie Amsterdam, March 31 2007

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Below some notes I made today at the Symposium Playing the Urban.

 

Symposium Playing the Urban @Balie 31 maart 2007

http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=media&articleid=102445

 

PROGRAM

13-14h Mobile Learning Game Kit

Speaker: Jan Simons (Associate Professor New Media Studies, University of Amsterdam)

14-15h PlastiCity: A Game for Urban Planning

Speakers: Mathias Fuchs (Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader in Creative Technology, University of Salford) and Steve Manthorp (Special Project Manager, Bradford)

15h30-16u30 Logo Parc (Jan van Eyck Academy)

Speakers: Logo Parc (Daniël van der Velden, Katja Gretzinger, Matthijs van Leeuwen, Matteo Poli, Gon Zifroni)

 

This symposium was organized by fellow TKCers from Maastricht & Amsterdam “Transformations in Perception and Participation: Digital Games”.

———————– 

legenda: 

> = my remarks, thoughts, etc.

 

[Skipped presentation1]

PlastiCity is a game based on the Unreal Tournament engine (which is a first person shooter) and aims to be an aid in reconstructing/replan the awfully ugly city center of Bradford, UK. It is still in conceptual phase (read: no money yet). The aim is to put the game in public places like libraries, schools, etc.

PlastiCity

Interesting quote: “the game is not designed to function as a designer tool for architects, but as a way of bringing planners, architects, local government officials and citizens together and be silly about redesigning the city.”

> Games may serve to bring people together in complex multi-party projects: games as a new kind of public sphere?

 

Another quote: “Every game has at some point a stage of chaos”.

> The rules are stretched, things are tried out, often deconstructed or even destroyed. Like identities that are being tried out and parts of it destroyed again.

 

Game should have ‘real life’ characters in it: not the usual beautiful yuppies you see in most architecture presentations. It should be more realistic. Also with rubbish and so on.

> Games as more realistic than other media in presenting or representing the world? What is realistic about programmed garbage?

 

One member of the audience experiences a kind of motion sickness while watching the demonstration of the game. She asks: what is the value of this game-speed to represent life-speed? The speakers explain the speed of the demo is set to slow: normal gamers would use at least 3x normal walking speed to move around… (which they briefly demonstrate). 

I brought up: this phenomenon is just like what the first train travelers experienced at 20 or 30 miles/hour: disorienting the senses. Every new technology brings its own experience of space & place & mobility. The train (and car) created a speeding up of travel, which made possible suburbs and the separation of home and work. The city was adapted to this new sense of the city. 

I asked: what then may be the influence of using games as tools for creating new cities for the way cities are actually build and experienced?

Answer: first person perspective of game may be an influence on perceiving the city; as well as the feeling of being in power, in control over your environment.

 

Another audience Q: what is actually game-like about this? There is no winning this game? There are few rules? Why play?

A: the attraction is the sense of empowerment & creativity players experience in playing the game, both in destroying and rebuilding the city.

> Could it be differentiated according to involvement? Game produces Erlebnissen, while (prolonged) play may produce Erfahrung.?

 

Game offers the idea of “unbuilding” the city, creating green environments again out of built space (land is cheap in Bradford, so not unrealistic).

> I like that idea of “unbuilding”, can it be applied to identity? “Unbuilding identity” as a way of undoing previous steps, deleting memories of these events in photos, video, text messages, phone numbers, etc. It is maybe a way of “unactualizing” identity, again extracting potentiality out of previous closures and actualizations.

 

> Such games are also used strategically and politically as part of ideas about the “creative city”. Games have become entangled in a larger discourse, they are being ‘socially produced’ as young, modern, trendy, serious yet playful, appealing to people previously difficult to reach (young). If you want to be ‘now’ you have to do something with games.

 

Presentation 3 – LogoParc – was about the Amsterdam Zuidas and the way a kind of superficial ‘global architecture’ is created which is not related to the local (at least, that’s what I understood of the 2 very abstract talks). Designers at Jan van Eyk, Rietveld created a visual game-like critique on this environment. All facades of building and public space signage was removed, which created a sense of barren desolate landscape. Added were a number of large above-ground ‘sewers’ connecting the Zuidas to other global places’ like Singapore, HongKong, Tokyo, New York, Paris, etc.

> I was a little annoyed by this whole talk: very highbrow theoretical critique on so-called placelessness of Zuidas, yet these offices and public spaces are filled with real people that drive their bikes back home at the end of a working day, people who make it a place, even if architecture has done little to embed it in local Amsterdam. 

 

 

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Article about impact mobile phone

Friday, September 1st, 2006

(Via the mobile-society@groups.l.google.com mailinglist)

The SFGate has an article dated February 27, 2006 about the impact of the mobile phone. The somewhat over the top title of the article is “The world’s a cell-phone stage: The device is upending social rules and creating a new culture”. Of course the article goes on in using the usual terms like: “revolutionary”, “seismic cultural shift”, “new realms”, “upending existing social rules and creating a new culture “, etc. Some brief comments by Howard Rheingold and Paul Levinson. Last alinea kinda interesting:

Your phone is you The negative perceptions about bad cell phone use suggest that the way we use our cell phones can have a strong effect on how others perceive us. In the Cingular Wireless survey, more than one-fourth of respondents formed opinions of someone based on their ring tone, while 7 percent have ended a relationship due to rude or offensive wireless behavior. In the BBDO Worldwide study, 31 percent of Americans said a cell phone revealed as much about a person as their car. “Cell phones are now just like your clothes,” said Clifford Nass, professor of communications at Stanford. “It’s a very personalized thing. The assumption is you can wear anything you want, so this tells you something about me.” The cell phone still has a long way to go, said Levinson, in transforming our lives. “It’s still early,” he said. “Television has been here 50 years, computers 25 years. The cell phone is still in its infancy. Every sign indicates it will continue to be hugely important to us.”

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Mobile phone modding

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

(Via Mobile Cowboys)

MobModding

British site www.modyourmob.co.uk is dedicated to modding the phone. Modding the phone in moderate ways already happens quite often, I think, as a means of personalize your phone. But now telcom operator Orange has stepped into it and gives away prizes to the best mods.

Interestingly btw how the site at more than one place speaks about how this modding supposedly is “big in Japan and it’s going to be massive over here”. This sounds more like a strategy to encourage people to get into it, since we al now Japan is the furthest of al countries in mobile phone development, craze & hype, and we don’t want to stay behind, now don’t we..?

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Popularity Dialer calls you, when you want it

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

(From www.bright.nl.)

If you’ re in dire need of someone to call you to save you from a boring obligatory drink with colleagues, or to impress your company, here is the Popularity dialer. Via the website you can subscribe to make a call at a certain time of choice. Escapism through the mobile phone! Now let’s hope you have internet on your mobile phone to quickly subscribe in the toilet when you are in a café with boring people…

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“Old curtains, new screens” conference @Balie June 18

Monday, June 26th, 2006

Last week, Saturday June 18 I was at the “Old curtains, new screens” conference, organized by our colleagues from the NWO-TKC project. The conference was mainly about the use of internet for/by minority groups in eastern Europe. One of the more interesting talks was by Aniko Imre. She discussed ludic aspects in a Hungarian anime-film, translated as The District. Some ludic aspects that were brought forward are: the medium (an anime, which is normally connected to children’s entertainment), ludic use of techniques (weird flat bodies with natural-looking heads based on photographs of real people), playing with identities through language-use, confirmation yet also reversals of stereotypes (The Gypsies, the lower-class, the police, the Russians, women, etc.) and a kind of meta-ludic statement that playing with identity is fun!

See http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=52781&podiumid=media for the program.

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Mobile phones as pastime

Sunday, February 19th, 2006

Is the mobile phone becoming more and more of a device for pastime? It seems many mobile phone operators and content providers think that way. The BBC has an interesting article on new developments in the mobile phone industry, following the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

The industry is pushing the mobile phone more and more towards a ubiquitous device that offers much tighter integration with internet-based services and content, and brings you entertainment wherever and whenever you want. The mobile phone, originally marketed as a means for business and work, can now still be used when work is done. The mobile phone is becoming a pastime in itself. From Webster’s online dictionary:

1. A subject or pursuit that occupies one’s time and thoughts (usually pleasantly): “sailing is her favorite pastime”; “his main pastime is gambling”; “he counts reading among his interests”; “they criticized the boy for his limited interests”

Interestingly, the BBC article ends with the observation that content on the mobile is marketed as useful for passing moments in transitory situations, like sitting in the train, but in reality mostly used in ‘fixed’ moments, like sitting on the sofa at home or in the office.

The theme of making every moment a useful moment with the help of your mobile is also the new corporate philosophy of Vodafone, according to an interview in Dutch marketing magazine AdFormatie with – I believe – the company’s main Benelux manager. Vodafone invests heavily in its LIVE service, that brings all kinds of content to the mobile. It offer newscasts and plans to bring many other content to the UMTS phone. “Make the most of now”. According to Vodafone’s new payoff – the company dropped “how are you?” – we should all continuously live in the present and strive to make this present always a useful moment.

It makes me wonder, is there no room left for experiencing boredom, ennui, to just simply sit somewhere for no reason and enjoy the passing of time doing nothing? No more “dolce far niente”, no more “grace matinee”? Have we commodified time, submitted it to our instrumental rationality of making time a profitable good? Have we colonised time to our will of being useful all the time? And how possibly can providing yet even more information counter the boredom we already feel with so much options to choose from?

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Ludicorp – Flickr business on ‘play’

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006

Logo Ludicorp

Came across the website of Ludicorp today, the business responsible for creating and developing social software like Flickr. I think their “corporate philosophy�? – which they take from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997) – reflects quite a bit of what our research will be about:

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

Now, what are the parts that triggered me?

“work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill”

> This ‘work ethic’ is also called the ‘ProAm’ revolution (Leadbeater) where professional amateurs become numerous and deliver high quality products and services, because they are amateurs in the original sense of the word (“doing something for the love of it”).
> Points to the blurring of work and leisure. ‘Play’ is to feel free of necessity (of work).

A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow.

> ‘Flow’ is the state of experiencing only the present, of feeling in charge, of wanting to participate, of suspending disbelief, etc. (term by the guy with the impossible name: Csikszentmihalyi).

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about.

> Points to the intrinsic quality and value of the product one is producing, of the ‘magic’ in the object one is creating, just as Marcel Mauss shows is the case with reciprocate gift exchange (1908). It is not simply about the transaction that has a purely economic value, but about giving away something that is infused with one’s own personality and identity.

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Film: Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

On new years day, I traditionally go to see a movie to recover from my hangover. Yesterday it was Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog. What a great movie! It’s a tale about Timothy Treadwell, who lived closely among grizzly bears in Alaska for 13 years, and ends up being eaten by one. It’s a basically a tragical story about a guy who tries to escape from the chaotic world outside of him and tries to become a better self. Treadwell tries to take his destiny into his own hands, but at the same time becomes more and more trapped in his fixed own world that in the end dictates him and destroys him. Timothy Treadwell is a ‘dead man’: he has already partly left this world to live in a world that only exists in his own phantasy: a beautiful, loving, pure, uncorrupted natural world. Treadwell’s time among the bears of Alaska was a kind of ‘liminoid phase’ (Victor Turner) between regular life and a next stage, in this case very literally: death.

The film has many aspects that have to do with identity, visible in the may paradoxes that were evident in Timothy Treadwell:
- Treadwell played with his own image: he developed a story about himself as being from Australia; he was performing outrage & anger in one of the last scenes against the park rangers (the forces that be in the human world), yet could easily switch back to being calm in the next second.
- Treadwell wasn’t always very consequent in his self-construction, e.g. when claiming that he was ‘the only person out there’, while it appeared that he was in company of a woman at least some of the time, which he tried to hide from public eye (camera).
- On the one hand, Treadwell was very vain, constantly fussing about his hair and doing stuff with bandana’s trying to conceal his receding hairline. On the other hand, he didn’t give much about material goods and status.
- He constantly stressed how dangerous it was among the bears, yet when something happened that didn’t coincide with his romantic view of noble, harmonious nature, he couldn’t accept it, as when a young bear got killed and eaten by starving elder bears.
- Treadwell anthropomorphised the animals, ascribing them human behaviour and characteristics.
- Treadwell’s work wasn’t about the bears as much as about himself becoming a new being: he confessed a few times in front of the camera about his troubled youth and told how he had overcome his problems. He shot many sequences of ‘action-takes’ that could later possible be used in a dramatised film about his life.
- Treadwell’s attempt to carve out a life of his own, be unique in what he does (“nobody can do this”), celebration of individualism, escapism from institutional structures, is a very modern thing, typically of this age.

Go see this film!!

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