Background:
Accounting for half of the $138 billion Global Game Market, mobile games are serious drivers in not only economic but also social and cultural realms. And yet, to date there has been no longitudinal cross-generational studies on mobile games. The 3-year research ‘Games of Being Mobile’ sought to address this oversight by conducting the first national survey of mobile games in Australian households. As an ethnographic project, it sought to put mobile games in context: socially, intergenerationally and culturally.
Contribution:
The research generated exhibitions, workshops and a toolkit:
- The Art of Play (2016) was a participatory exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne) that coalesced game play techniques of Lego and Minecraft.
- Workshops were held at CCP and MPavilion to engage education groups to co-design their own Social Play Toolkit that encouraged social play and game literacies in the classroom.
- The Design and Play exhibition (RMIT Design Hub, 2016) – co-curated with Lisa Byrne – presented research projects, installations and artist works to explore play as a creative, social, cultural and political act and mode of practice.
Taken together, this portfolio evidences the power of mobile games as vehicles for intergenerational social connection, informal creativity and enhanced literacies.
Significance:
These projects were supported by the ARC Discovery Project scheme and Young & Well CRC. Design & Play was visited by over 3000 people over two weeks, featured in The Saturday Age, and led to a special issue of Convergence journal (2019, vol. 25 (1)). The research deployed participatory art and co-design workshops to extend knowledge transmission, research translation and impact by working with key partners such as CCP, Design Hub, MPavilion, Clifton Hill PS and Kyoto International School. It further led to the publication of co-authored books Ambient Play (2020, MIT Press) and Exploring Minecraft (2021, Palgrave).
History
Subtype
- Curation (Exhibition)
