:MeetPi

I’ve been prompted to think a bit about games and space because of an upcoming workshop at RMIT in July. The workshop is being organised by Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson and focuses on mobile technologies, gaming cultures and the haptic. Nice topic for me, because it bring together interests I have in games, society and technology and augmented reality. It also fits in nicely with my Australian games industry research project, because I have to go and interview some people in Melbourne sometime in July. Why not wrap the two together?

I was chatting with someone the other day about casual games and the idea of soccer mums as gamers. This idea – soccer mums as gamers – came from a chat I had recently with Neil Boyd at the AIE Canberra. The point here is that new markets for games are apparently appearing in spaces where people have time to kill and in this way, casual games have the potential to open new markets for gamers. Some people have scoffed at the idea of the average soccer mother sitting passively in a four wheel drive (instead, they’re on the sidelines, encoraging children to engage in acts of extreme violence against the opposition and sometimes, the referee).

Someone I mentioned it to made a really great point: these “downtimes” – waiting while the kids play weekend sports, commuting, sitting in airports, waiting in queues, etc. – are about the only spaces in modern sub/urban life where gaming does not need to compete with other media for attention, and as games move into mobile devices (anyone have a mobile without a game?), the chances become high that you may have a game in your pocket at just the right time.

Two interesting questions occur to me here. First, what happens to us as our few spare moments away from media are absorbed? Is there anything special about downtime, spaces where we have nothing to do but be quiet and inside ourselves? Now that I am time poor, I value any time I get to think. Some of the best and most valuable thinking time for me is when I’m in the shower or washing the dishes. Yes, there’s something meditative about washing the dishes!

Second, what happens to games when they move into this space, a space as much characterised by physical difference (the supermarket versus the home office) as it is by a difference in levels of attention? A game that is played in snippets while waiting in a queue at Woolies is going to need to be designed differently to a game that you focus on entirely when you’re in front of a computer screen. Would Bioshock work on a mobile platform? Can it even be adapted?

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I’ve just got back from Perth where Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland ran the second Internet Histories Workshop. I presented a paper on the role that AARNet played in the development of the internet in Australia. My main point: that internet history cannot and should not be represented by a single monolithic narrative, but that instead, we need to document and record what I call local histories. Local histories are the points at which people come into contact with the technology. Local histories can be individual’s recollections, or histories of the way groups of people used the internet (for example, Gerard’s work on the Pegasus ISP and the use of the Internet in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales). The role of AARNet here is to function as a local history, but also to link other local histories, which until 1995 had to be connected via AARNet since there was no other tier 1 ISP in Australia. I’ll publish a link to the paper once I check with Mark and Gerard about where we’re going with an edited collection.

There were a number of other papers presented, all great. The day went really fast given that it was filled with 30-minute papers and we never left the conference room in the WA State Library. The keynote, Professor Shin-Dong Kim from Hallym University in South Korea presented a fascinating paper about the uptake of the Internet in South Korea – a place renowned for its high penetration of high speed broadband. Kim linked the development of the Internet in South Korea to the importance of education in South Korean society, seeing this – more than just government policy – as a major social factor in the way South Koreans have embraced broadband.

One of the topics that came up was the need for some kind of national archive or place for the preservation and documentation of Australian internet history. The materials internet historians work with are quite ephemeral, worse than material stored on tape or disk – and much worse than even paper. FTP sites quoted in source documents often no longer exist, the data never backed up. Entire servers go missing, and a whole lot of stuff (like FTP sites) was never indexed by sites like the Wayback Machine (which only goes way back to 1996 anyway).
Harold Innis would no doubt have loved the way the Internet has so clearly demonstrated such a strong spatial bias, and such a weak temporal association. I think any archiving project will need to be aware of this, and do something about turning bits and bytes back into something more permanent and durable.

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I’ve just moved my blog from the Creative server at the uni to edublogs. There are a few reasons I decided to move. The main one is that I don’t want to keep updating the Wordpress software – it’s a pain, and if I don’t do it, then it leads to security problems. Someone else maintains this site so I don’t need to worry. Second, with all the talk of outsourcing IT at the University of Canberra, I’m a bit less confident that I’ll even have a server to play with. I’d hate to lose my posts, so I thought I should strike while the iron is hot.

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