
Ingrid RichardsonRMIT University | RMIT · School of Media and Communication
Ingrid Richardson
PhD
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72
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (72)
In this article, we explore the tension between the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience and how, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, proximity and (tactile) intimacy with other bodies in urban and domestic spaces becomes fraught with the risk of viral contagion. Informed by haptic media studies, the corporeal or...
In this chapter, we seek to conceptualize the shifts in mobile gaming through two key rubrics – ambient play and digital wayfaring—to coalesce the multiple forms of domestic, casual and urban play that constitute mobile gaming. This chapter begins with a contextualization through a short history followed by a discussion of pervasive games as vehicl...
This study explores scenarios of use concerning the play practices of children on mobile devices, and the subsequent domestic tensions that arise out of such practices. In the domestic media landscape, mobile media has increasingly featured in the contested and contradictory practices of the home [Morley (Home territories: Media, mobility and ident...
The wellbeing of higher degree research (HDR) students, or postgraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of concern. In Australia, international students have queued for food parcels, while headlines report stark drops in international enrolments and the financial bottom line of universities. We undertook a pilot study using ethnograp...
The wellbeing of higher degree research (HDR) students, or postgraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of concern. In Australia, international students have queued for food parcels, while headlines report stark drops in international enrolments and the financial bottom line of universities. We undertook a pilot study using ethnograp...
This article explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. City spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can...
This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies aims to make an interdisciplinary contribution to ongoing feminist conversations around gender, technology and trust–with a particular focus on mobile and social media debates, dialogues and empirical examples. We strategically conceptualise the contingent relationality of gender and technology and...
In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures...
In contemporary life, the mobile phone is integral to digital and material placemaking practices. In this article, drawing on ethnographic analysis conducted in Perth and Melbourne (Australia) in the first months of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, we explore how this relation has been recalibrated as an effect of ‘stay-at-home’ restrictions. W...
In mid-2016, the streets of cities around the world were populated by digital wayfarers taking part in the augmented reality (AR) game, Pokémon GO. The game popularized the digital overlay technique of AR, in which real-time pedestrian movement is integrated with mobile location-based functionality and network information. In the years that followe...
Researching everyday media practices is a messy and tricky business fraught with uncertainty. In this panel the authors ask how stories of failure, especially during fieldwork, can be rethought as a meaningful emergent method and approach. How can we productively reframe failure as a core part of the research process that cannot be subsumed into th...
How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we interact across digital, material, and social landscapes.
We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill—waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambie...
This chapter offers an account of the theoretical and methodological approach that was applied to a three-year multi-city research project into domestic practices around digital media, mobile media, and games (in collaboration with Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University). I first provide some conceptual background by explaining an ethnographic approach to...
Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies
“Minecraft is undoubtedly one of the most influential games of the past decade. Exploring Minecraft brilliantly situates this multiplatform and multisensory game within today’s pervasive play culture, focusing on its role in players’ everyday lives across domestic and educational spaces, and across cultural and generational contexts. In times of so...
In this chapter we explore the multiple and complex ways in which Minecraft occupies domestic spaces. Through ethnographic research conducted in Australian households we articulate how the game is played in the home as a vehicle for intergenerational literacy and intimacy. In this chapter we explore the multiple and complex ways in which Minecraft...
This chapter provides an overview of the book’s key themes—social play, informal creative literacies and quotidian platformativity. We reflect on what it means to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural phenomenon.
This chapter turns the focus to Understanding Play—that is, providing a more focused and detailed investigation of playful, creative, informal and incidental literacies—and identifies both the interdisciplinary and innovative methodological approaches that are used to analyse and interpret playful literacy practices. We suggest that Minecraft has b...
In this chapter, we explore the creative metagaming and paratextual play practices that surround Minecraft, apprehending the many ways that the game encourages and enables sociality and informal literacies beyond the core gameplay. The terms metagaming and paratextuality describe the way players engage outside the boundaries of the primary game, un...
We then conclude with this chapter which serves as an overview of key themes and insights to be gained from the book, and investigates some of the broader issues for the future of social play, informal creative literacies and quotidian platformativity. We reflect on the recalibration of the digital in light of COVID-19 and social distancing. As we...
This chapter begins with a critical discussion of nascent playful and creative practices within contemporary media culture and reviews the scholarly literature across relevant disciplines (including game studies, media studies, education, visual culture and digital/haptic ethnography). The chapter then identifies diverse modalities of play, includi...
This chapter focuses on Minecraft’s core gameplay and provides a critical exploration of the game’s diverse affordances. Framed around insights gained from our ethnographic research, we examine how the design of the game offers a range of different ways to play. These include: the expressive and inventive power of creative mode, the interactive cha...
In Chap. 7, we turn from the home to consider how the use of Minecraft is being deployed in institutional contexts, including school classrooms, extra-curricular workshops, libraries and museums. In this chapter we draw from workshops and interviews conducted in Victoria (Australia). This context is important as it is the largest educational jurisd...
This paper explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. City spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can b...
This paper explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. City spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can b...
Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies
Mobile media has become a crucial part of everyday storytelling. As we move through our daily rhythms and rituals, mobile media weave multiple cartographies—visual, social, spatial and temporal. Far from placeless, the history of mobile media has been one in which the important stories of place and locality are reinforced. By contextualising story-...
In this article, we explore the material, sensory and corporeal aspects of digital ethnography, primarily in the context of mobile media use in the domestic environment. We align our methodological approach to the ‘sensory turn’ in theory, situated loosely under the rubric of new materialism, and outline the insights that a post-phenomenological me...
When we first entered homes to study mobile games and home automation, we envisaged our projects would focus on humans and various modes of interaction and co-presence. Yet as our research progressed, it became clear that in many homes, humans and their pets are intimately entangled in various forms of digitally mediated kinship. In this chapter we...
Mobile smartphone devices have seen the rise and proliferation of a variety of new modes of digital play. In particular, the short and sporadic modes of engagement that define mobile screen practices have seen the smartphone become home to a range of ‘casual’ game genres that promote quick and flexible engagements, in stark contrast to the enduring...
This chapter explores the conflation of portable, handheld, and mobile gaming devices, and the particular relationship between mobile phone games and handheld consoles in Japanese media history. Through a case study of mobile game development in Japan (DeNA, GREE, Nintendo, and Sony), Hjorth and Richardson seek to rethink this conflation within the...
This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of...
Feminist philosophers of technoscience have long argued that it is vital that we question biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, that we disable the conception of medical visualising technologies as neutral or transparent conduits to the “fact” of the body. In this paper we sugges...
Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shift...
Drawing on case studies across the Asia-Pacific region, Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media explores the 'playful turn' in contemporary everyday life, and the role of mobile devices, games and social media in this transformation. © Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson 2014. All rights reserved.
The ubiquitous rise of mobile gaming has often been attributed to the success of the smartphone and its application ecology. However, mobile gaming has many histories subject to intersecting contextual trajectories—socio-linguistic, geographical, technocultural, medium, and platform specific. That is, the definition and constitution of ‘mobile gami...
The mobile interface is now a multi-variant medium that incorporates a number of platforms—predominantly smartphones and tablets or pads supported by iOS and Android operating systems, but also inclusive of Nintendo and Sony portable game consoles and supported software. It also circumscribes an expanding range of use-contexts and, as we have sugge...
While Hyunjin waits for Soohyun in a café in Shinchon (Seoul, South Korea) she toys with her Samsung Galaxy, experimenting with a few of the photo apps she’s recently downloaded. She particularly likes Instagram and applies a filter to transform her ordinary coffee into a polaroid picture from yesteryear. She appreciates the fact that she can send,...
The ubiquity of touchscreen smartphones has placed mobile games in the hands of a growing number of people, across gender, generations, and situational contexts—at home, at work, and on the move. At the same time, the ease of app development has provided many game developers—and consequently, players—with more elastic innovation around game genres,...
In China, the total number of mobile phones in 2012 reached 1.04 billion, while 380 out of the 590 million Internet users are on China’s media rich Twitter, Sina Weibo (CNNIC 2013). The significant role played by mobile phones as the dominant portal for social and online media was highlighted in the CNNIC 2013 report—Statistical Report on Internet...
The opening quote is from Toshi (not his real name), who was playing a haptic game during the 2011 Tokyo earthquake and tsunami known as 3.11. His immersion in the PSP game was so deep that he mistook the quake’s vibrations for the monster’s movements within his game. In the moments after he realised the horror of real life events, he desperately t...
A young woman is running in a park while playing the mobile location-based game, Zombies, Run! Suddenly the sound of approaching zombies can be heard on her mobile and she dashes down an unfamiliar lane in the park. She escapes the zombies. Then she looks around. She has never seen this part of the park before. There is a golden streak of sun danci...
Perhaps more than any other form of gaming, social games have been significant in their popularisation of gaming and the dispersal of small and casual games to a broad demographic, not least due to their more recent migration to mobile devices. The immense uptake of social games through SNSs—though often short-lived for any particular game—has resu...
A few years ago, Soohyun would have been preoccupied with South Korea’s first social network site, Cyworld minihompy. She and her friends would often meet in their online ‘mini-rooms’ and exchange virtual gifts symbolic of their friendship. Now Soohyun uses Kakao, a mobile social media platform. KakaoTalk allows her to text and talk for free, inclu...
In this chapter we turn to the broader contexts of creativity, playfulness, and gaming—across social, locative, and mobile media—and to the argument made by a range of media theorists that we are in the midst of a cultural turn towards a lusory sensibility, that is, in turn, affecting a playful sociality. This shift is seen in the integration of SN...
This article examines the hybrid ontologies that typify networked and mobile location-based games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of ‘mixed reality’ game-play. In particular, it focuses on the potential cultural and corporeal effects of mobile gaming since the introduction of the...
Traditional critiques of computer and video games argue that the ‘magic circle’ defines the parameters of game‐play, marking off a temporary world wherein particular game rules apply. In this view, to play a game means, materially or conceptually, ‘entering’ the magic circle of the game. Yet, increasingly, online multiplayer games, mobile location‐...
Late teens and young adults are prolific users of interactive and networked mobile media, and already possess a certain level of literacy with the capabilities of newer generation mobile phones. That is, they are well-attuned to the recent shift to user-generated micromedia; indeed, their communicative and media practices are characterized by infor...
In this paper we apply some of the insights of Bruno Latour and actor network theory to suggest that games and virtual spaces can be interpreted as aesthetic forms which are established and stabilised by a 'collective' of humans and technologies. The 'agents' that comprise any collective or network – whether it be a simple human-tool relation or a...
Conestoga-Rovers & Associates (CRA) uses mobile computing technology to reduce the cost of collecting the and managing field data along with improving the quality of the information. Mobile computing not only saves the time and cost but also transfers the data seamlessly from mobile computers to centralized database. It communicates high degree of...
In this paper we argue that the mobile phone must be considered both in terms of telephone functionality, and as an emergent entertainment media interface. As services based upon telecommunications - mobile telephony, the internet, video-on-demand, personal video recorders (PVRs), interactive television (iTV) - become progressively experienced as e...
In this paper we explore the use of "third screens" in "third places". We introduce "third screens" as a mundane technology and "third places" as settings for social interaction. We advocate dwelling with technology as a basis for appropriation and iterative co-evolution, with the use of commonplace technologies as an important prerequisite.