Vol 17, no 3, August 2011
Distractedly engaged: mobile gaming and convergent mobile media
Guest Editors: Chris Chesher (University of Sydney), Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University), Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University) and Jason Wilson (University of Wollongong)
From casual mobile phone games to networked, location-aware hybrid reality, mobile gaming and mobile social applications are increasingly diverse, widespread and powerful cultural practices. Designers and players of mobile games and applications are participating in reconfigurations of experiences of location, space, place and corporeality and raising new questions about the human-technology relation more generally. Moreover, with the success of devices such as the iPhone, the mobile phone is becoming a key area for new games and social media. In light of this phenomenon with its unique characteristics for networked interactivity and participation, what are some of the emergent issues for embodiment and engagement?
The motivation behind this special issue of Convergence is to stimulate discussion, debate and research into the burgeoning area of mobile gaming and mobile social applications. We hope papers will effectively apply philosophical, new media and/or ethnographic approaches that critically extend the discourse about emerging and cross-platform ‘screen cultures’, new forms of telepresence and dynamics of mediatic distraction and engagement. In particular, the issue seeks to counter the notion that our experience of screen media is largely ‘virtual’ and disembodied – or at most exclusively audiovisual.
We seek papers that explore the following:
- Different forms of mobile gaming and mobile social applications and how they impact upon notions and experiences of distraction, engagement and technological embodiment.
- The gendered nature of technologies and how this manifests in stereotypes around gaming and mobile new media.
- The role of mobile media in networked, cross-platform and hybrid reality gaming, and the divergent or convergent relation between online and offline gaming.
- The relation between mobile gaming and the burgeoning user-created content (UCC) environment of Web 2.0, participatory media culture and convergent screen media.
- Mobile gaming and screen cultures theorised in terms of spatial, contextual and corporeal practices.
- Interpretations of mobile gaming and social applications that focus on the cultural specificity and geo-spatial located-ness of such experiences.
- Critical analyses of the relationship between mobile gaming and other media cultures.
- Enquiries that focus on the emerging complex new media literacies associated with mobile gaming and mobile social applications, and the concomitant modes of embodiment and presence.
- In the context of these themes, critical explorations of recent innovative mobile games and handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.
Deadline for full and final submissions: 31 July 2010
Inquiries and submissions to: Jason Wilson (University of Wollongong, Australia)