Games: mobility, haptics and physical space
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?
