Cultural Techniques of Play: A Media Philosophical Approach to the Study of Time, History, and Memory in Games (2019)
Barker, Timothy (Author)
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 27
Issue: 1
Pages: 87-110
Taking Johan Huizinga's work on games and culture as a starting point—particularly his arguments about how play can be considered as primary to culture—this paper gives a new account of twenty-first-century play as Kulturtechniken (cultural technique). Using examples including the art games and indie games That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), The Outlands (Haines and Hinterding, 2011), and Superhot (Superhot Team, 2016), the paper explores the way time is ordered in gaming and develops a media theoretical approach to explain the way play might "cultivate" a certain way of living in and thinking about the world, particularly through its time-critical operation. The three examples are chosen because in each of them we can see a different element of digital temporality, including the way time is ordered by computational systems; the way memories and histories are archived and made discoverable by digital systems; and the way interface design can facilitate experiences of being-in-time. By exploring gaming as a cultural technique, the paper enters into a field of debate in media and cultural studies that addresses the concepts of contemporaneity and digital temporality and offers a new way to approach these areas of study through a focus on games.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Stefan Poser;
(2016)
Glücksmaschinen und Maschinenglück: Grundlagen einer Technik- und Kulturgeschichte des technisierten Spiels [Lucky machines and machine luck: Fundamentals of a technology and cultural history of technical games]
(/isis/citation/CBB762118696/)
Book
Melanie Swalwell;
(2021)
Homebrew gaming and the beginnings of vernacular digitality
(/isis/citation/CBB632809359/)
Article
Boudreau, Kristin;
(2015)
To See the World Anew: Learning Engineering through a Humanistic Lens
(/isis/citation/CBB018170319/)
Book
Nicole Seymour;
(2018)
Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
(/isis/citation/CBB666319608/)
Chapter
Michael Dillon;
Sarah Dillon;
(2020)
Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game
(/isis/citation/CBB714156693/)
Thesis
Moritz Ingwersen;
(2018)
All Things Fusible: Media, Science, and Mythology in the Fiction of Neal Stephenson
(/isis/citation/CBB583734163/)
Book
John Cheney-Lippold;
(2017)
We are data : Algorithms and the making of our digital selves
(/isis/citation/CBB593815757/)
Book
Nell Haynes;
(2016)
Social media in northern Chile : Posting the extraordinarily ordinary
(/isis/citation/CBB334620660/)
Book
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture;
(2021)
Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960
(/isis/citation/CBB801245499/)
Article
Stephen Hilgartner;
(2022)
What Time Should We Arrive at the Party? The Historical and the Contemporary in Studies of Science and Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB440843607/)
Article
Cadence Kinsey;
(2018)
Blind Windows
(/isis/citation/CBB393527071/)
Book
Melody Jue;
(2020)
Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater
(/isis/citation/CBB505412067/)
Article
Christopher D. Kilgore;
(2016)
Bad Networks: From Virus to Cancer in Post-Cyberpunk Narrative
(/isis/citation/CBB669763926/)
Article
Carolyn Deby;
(2022)
Moving Beyond the Frame Flows and Relations in Hybrid Body–Screen Lifeworlds
(/isis/citation/CBB865158359/)
Book
Fred Botting;
Catherine Spooner;
(2015)
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB966967924/)
Book
Stephanie Boluk;
Patrick LeMieux;
(2017)
Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames
(/isis/citation/CBB008495727/)
Book
Colin Milburn;
(2018)
Respawn: Gamers, hackers, and technogenic life
(/isis/citation/CBB049644168/)
Article
Abraham Gibson;
(2019)
Biology in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
(/isis/citation/CBB687704019/)
Book
Alessandra Renzi;
(2020)
Hacked transmissions: Technology and connective activism in Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB354469301/)
Thesis
Felix E. Rietmann;
(2018)
Seeing the Infant Audiovisual Technologies and the Mind Sciences of the Child
(/isis/citation/CBB857801861/)
Be the first to comment!