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"Giddings, Seth"
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Gameworlds : virtual media and children's everyday play
\"Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Poke;mon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Rethinking Canada’s Approach to Children’s Digital Game Regulation
Background: Connected digital games offer exciting opportunities for children to connect, play, and learn, but first they must navigate industry trends that jeopardize their rights, including invasive data collection and manipulative gambling mechanics. Analysis: A policy analysis reveals that Canada’s existing digital game regulation largely relies on a U.S. industry-made classification system and is ill-equipped to address these issues. Comparative analysis shows that despite previous similarities in their approaches to game regulation, Canada has now fallen behind the United Kingdom, where shifting approaches to “age-appropriateness” are producing promising new frameworks for supporting children’s rights across the digital environment. Conclusion and implications: This article concludes with a call to action for a rights-based Canadian response to the problematic issues that have emerged within the children’s game landscape.
Journal Article
Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form
This thesis addresses the videogame as a new media form. At argues that videogames, videogame play, and videogame players, are paradigmatic forms of a popular new media technoculture and that their study should be central to the emerging field of new media studies. However the importance of videogames to, and their embodiment in, everyday lived experiences and popular culture, the intimate and playful circuits between players, videogames, and computer hardware are not adequately accounted for in established theoretical frameworks and methodologies. The thesis is concerned less with meanings constructed around computer media, and more with the materiality and agency of new media artefacts and entities in play. The adequacy of key terms in Cultural and Media Studies and Film Studies, terms such as 'text', 'representation', 'interactivity', 'identification' and 'subject' to the videogame and everyday technoculture is questioned. Alternative theoretical resources such as those offered by Science and Technology Studies, critical posthumanism and actor-network theory are suggested and explored. 'Cybertextual analysis' is proposed, and developed, as a method for studying the videogame as a software system, as a primarily simulational rather than representational form. Particular attention is given to the operations of software automata such as non-player characters and artificial intelligence. Video microethnography articulates this cybertextual analysis with the everyday context of a small-scale event of videogame play. This event is studied as the collusion (the coming together in play), of a heterogenous network of human and nonhuman part(icipant)s: the conventions, rules and prescriptions of games software; children's embodied knowledges, pleasures, anxieties, imaginations; play practices and rules; screen media images and characters; and the kinaesthetics and virtual physics of videogameworlds.
Dissertation
Drawing without Light
Pokémon Snap loads on the Nintendo Wii console. The game's title music has the familiar sound of an SLR camera's shutter mixed into its cheerful melody, an audio hint at the game's theme and - perhaps - a ghostly echo of a passing technology. Its registration screen is a 'photographer card', reminiscent of a journalist's press credentials, but the player is positioned more as a tourist on safari than a jobbing photojournalist. We are transported around a 3D rendered island beach on a little train, our eyes drawn to the reticule, the focal point of the interface's first-person view point.
Book Chapter
Exploring strong-field deviations from general relativity via gravitational waves
Two new observational windows have been opened to strong gravitational physics: gravitational waves, and very long baseline interferometry. This suggests observational searches for new phenomena in this regime, and in particular for those necessary to make black hole evolution consistent with quantum mechanics. We describe possible features of \"compact quantum objects\" that replace classical black holes in a consistent quantum theory, and approaches to observational tests for these using gravitational waves. This is an example of a more general problem of finding consistent descriptions of deviations from general relativity, which can be tested via gravitational wave detection. Simple models for compact modifications to classical black holes are described via an effective stress tensor, possibly with an effective equation of state. A general discussion is given of possible observational signatures, and of their dependence on properties of the colliding objects. The possibility that departures from classical behavior are restricted to the near-horizon regime raises the question of whether these will be obscured in gravitational wave signals, due to their mutual interaction in a binary coalescence being deep in the mutual gravitational well. Numerical simulation with such simple models will be useful to clarify the sensitivity of gravitational wave observation to such highly compact departures from classical black holes.
Paper