Bart Simon

• Concordia University

In the twenty-first century, we no longer choose whether we engage in a quantified world. Quantification surrounds us in the presence of big data, algorithmic curation, mass marketing, and the sheer amount of discrete measurability that sustains all forms of global value transactions, both “speculative” and “real.” “Theatres of Calculation” combine...

Gambling scholars may be unfamiliar with the research methods used by their colleagues in game studies. Yet, as gambling becomes gamified, and gaming becomes gamblified, the intersection between our two fields continues to grow. The GameBling game jam, which took place in 2022 at Concordia University, proposed to explore this growing intersection b...

VR occupies an interesting place in the media ecosystem. On the one hand, it is an emerging, ‘cutting-edge’ technology backed by billions of USD by major corporations. On the other hand, VR is older than the World Wide Web and older than social networking sites. After many years of hype and unfulfilled potential, VR is now finally on the precipice...

The value of understanding patients' illness experience and social contexts for advancing medicine and clinical care is widely acknowledged. However, methodologies for rigorous and inclusive data gathering and integrative analysis of biomedical, cultural, and social factors are limited. In this paper, we propose a digital strategy for large-scale q...

Over the past decade, ‘immersive’ has arguably been one of the most overused terms to describe theatre productions that aim to involve audiences in unconventional ways. With the mainstream success of specific ‘immersive’ productions, this trend goes beyond the theatre and arts industry. From games distributors to Westfield shopping centres, just ab...

This article draws on over 60 interviews and 120 surveys with indie game developers to illustrate relational labour and entrepreneurship practices in cultural industries and their relationship to ‘good work’. We first outline the changing organization of games work, the shift towards so-called indie production, and the associated rejection of creat...

This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the ve...

This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the s...

Conventional smart city design processes tend to focus on instrumental planning for city systems or novel services for humans. Interacting with data produced by the new services and restructured systems entailed by these processes is commonly done via interfaces like civic dashboards, leading to a critique that data-driven urbanism is bound by the...

Commercial sea routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction. In this work, we present a serious game which aims to provide better insight and understanding of seaborne trade mechanisms and seafaring practices in the eastern Mediterranean during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The game incorporates prob...

The Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) represents a vast historical and scientific resource that, often, is not accessible to the general public due the environment and depth where it is located. Digital technologies (Virtual Museums, Virtual Guides and Virtual Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage) provide a unique opportunity for digital accessibil...

This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance...

Critical Marxist media theory has found fertile territory in a renewed critique of game cultures. The video game industry has managed to orchestrate, monetize and survey an army of player labourers who willingly work without pay. We hope to support challenges to this work by positioning players in the video game Little Big Planet and its sequels Li...

This chapter examines the notion of videogames as a resource for teaching practice. Games are often used as teaching tools, but not often used as resources for informing pedagogical practice. Media Molecule's game, Little Big Planet (LBP) for the Playstation 3, is a constructivist game with a niche online community of practice known as LBP Central....

While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an op...

This chapter examines the notion of videogames as a resource for teaching practice. Games are often used as teaching tools, but not often used as resources for informing pedagogical practice. Media Molecule’s game, Little Big Planet (LBP) for the Playstation 3, is a constructivist game with a niche online community of practice known as LBP Central....

This paper considers the cultural sociological questions that might begin to be asked when players understand themselves to be cooperating rather than competing with the computer when they play digital games. Coop play with game AI in games like Call of Duty provides the basis for understanding human relationships with computers and machines in a w...

This paper examines the tension between the materiality of information and communications technologies and the hyperreality which they are thought to produce. The setting for our analysis is Indonesia, where the most recent innovations in communications technologies co-exist alongside ancient – but still functional – ‘predecessor’ devices. Building...

Consumer game platforms are realizing Ubicomp's vision of seamless, sensor-based, embodied interaction with computation. Here we present Propinquity, a full-body dancing/fighting game using proximity and touch sensing. Relying primarily on auditory feedback, Propinquity attempts to reconfigure sensor-based gameplay as an activity where players orie...

This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperration...

This article experiments with a form of biographical method for exploring memories and play experiences of Ever Quest in the lives of two player/researchers. We posit a notion of 'played sociality' modeled on biographical understandings of life course and attempt to show how different forms of commitment to the game reverberate through the lives of...

This paper looks at the ways that the Nintendo Wii might shift the locus of game analysis away from the screen and more towards players' corporeal relationship to the screen. The Wii hardware and software, the television screen, the physical space and players' bodies constitute an intriguing form of kinaesthetic play that borrows from cultural fant...

This article explores the relationship between computer gamers and their machines in an effort to characterize cultural attitudes toward the materiality of information technology. Whereas dominant culture desires a world in which information technology performs seamlessly within the fabric of everyday life, case-modding gamers prefer to foreground...

This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical location for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating the everyday social interaction and organization of subjects in the early 21st century. Digital games are considered as exemplary objects of analysis in terms of shifts in leisure cultur...

This article revisits Foucault's concept of panopticism as it pertains to research on the new surveillance. Drawing on the work of neo-Foucauldian authors in surveillance studies the paper shows how the figures of the supervisor and inmate within the Foucauldian diagram suggest different directions for pursuing surveillance theory. On the one hand,...

Cultural Critique 53 (2003) 1-9 Francis Fukuyama's latest book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, opens with a description of Aldous Huxley's scientifically engineered dystopia in Brave New World. "The aim of this book," states Fukuyama, "is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by...

Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 256-258 Although Poole's book is not targeted at an academic audience, the first chapter makes it clear why scholars working on contemporary popular culture need to think seriously about videogames. Compared to television and film, videogames in Asia, Europe, and North America now dominate the leisure time of a large seg...

This paper considers the role of the news media as a mode of inter-specialist communication in the controversy over cold fusion in 1989. Drawing on the work of Lewenstein, Gieryn and Bucchi, media representations in the early weeks of the controversy are seen as epistemologically significant for facilitating closure by configuring "cold fusion" in...

This paper considers the problem of how to account for the observation of research on cold fusion (CF) after the apparent closure of the controversy in 1990. Despite 'losing the controversy', hundreds of scientists around the world continue to work on CF. The issue of whether the controversy is in fact closed and CF is 'dead', or whether it is stil...

In this article we will suggest that print and related traditional media have been used more successfully in constituting a public sphere than in supporting more private and localized forms of community building (Habermas 1989; Stone 1991). The costs and control of print media, in addition to the stability of the content, have reduced the applicabi...

HermanRobin. Fusion: The Search For Endless Energy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 267. ISBN 0-521-38373-0. £14.95. - Volume 25 Issue 3 - Bart Simon