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March 10, 2005

Games

Two More by Jane McGonigal

"ABSTRACT: Ubiquitous computing and mobile network technologies have fueled a recent proliferation of opportunities for digitally-enabled play in everyday spaces. In this paper, I examine how players negotiate the boundary between these pervasive games and real life. I trace the emergence of what I call “the Pinocchio effect” – the desire for a game to be transformed into real life, or conversely, for everyday life to be transformed into a "real little game.” Focusing on two examples of pervasive play – the 2001 immersive game known as the Beast, and the Go Game, an ongoing urban superhero game — I argue that gamers maximize their play experience by performing belief, rather than actually believing, in the permeability of the game-reality boundary." From A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play by Jane McGonigal, Digital Games Research Associaton (DiGRA) "Level Up" Conference Proceedings, November 2003

"ABSTRACT: The increasing convergence and mobility of digital network technologies have given rise to new, massively-scaled modes of social interaction where the physical and virtual worlds meet. This paper explores one product of these extreme networks, the emergent genre of immersive entertainment, as a potential tool for harnessing collective action. Through an analysis of the structure and rhetoric of immersive games, I explore how immersive aesthetics can generate a new sense of social agency in game players, and how collaborative play techniques can instruct real-world problem-solving." From This Is Not a Game: Immersive Aesthetics & Collective Play, by Jane McGonigal, Digital Arts & Culture 2003 Conference Proceedings, May 2003.

Posted by jo at March 10, 2005 05:25 PM

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