Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history ... more Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history and near total market dominance of the wargaming industry. However, over the last decade Oldhammer, a game and hobby community, has sought to contest this hegemony by rejecting Game Workshop’s 21st century games, miniatures, and aesthetics in favor of an attempted return to an earlier vision of the Games Workshop hobby and an accompanying possibility of alterity. We explore how Oldhammer uses memory and craft to return to the conditions of possibility which allowed for other possible tabletop futures and even the potential for resistance. In doing so, we draw on theories of memory, craft, and nostalgia to show how Oldhammer, however imperfectly, contests corporatization and control.
ªSaveº Debugging Game History: A critical lexicon, Henry Lowood, Raiford Guins (eds). MIT Press... more ªSaveº Debugging Game History: A critical lexicon, Henry Lowood, Raiford Guins (eds). MIT Press 2016This chapter focuses on an under theorized but important digital media practice, the ways in which video games players `save' their games and their play. To save is both to play and to manage that play; it is at once inside and outside of play, at the same time instrumental and ludic. When players save games they engage in a complicated series of negotiations between their needs, skills, and goals as players, their everyday lives and the technical systems with which they play. As saving techniques and technology have changed so to have possibilities for play and pleasure as well as new range of problems and compromises. This perspective has implications for non-game digital media as well and might help us in particular to address issues related to archives, access and labor.Keywords: Pause, Archive, Play, Score, Console, Arcade, MAME, Cheat, Work
The video arcade is an important site for game studies and game history. So far it has been large... more The video arcade is an important site for game studies and game history. So far it has been largely addressed as a site of play. This paper decenters play and the player in the arcade by exploring another subject I call hangers. It explores the genealogies of player control, engagement and the policing of play practices in the American video arcade in the 1980s. In describing these tensions and tactics, as well as the technical, social, and environmental interventions attempted by arcade operators and guests we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the arcade as a social space. full text at: http://gamescriticism.org/articles/tobin-3-a/
Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history ... more Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history and near total market dominance of the wargaming industry. However, over the last decade Oldhammer, a game and hobby community, has sought to contest this hegemony by rejecting Game Workshop’s 21st century games, miniatures, and aesthetics in favor of an attempted return to an earlier vision of the Games Workshop hobby and an accompanying possibility of alterity. We explore how Oldhammer uses memory and craft to return to the conditions of possibility which allowed for other possible tabletop futures and even the potential for resistance. In doing so, we draw on theories of memory, craft, and nostalgia to show how Oldhammer, however imperfectly, contests corporatization and control.
ªSaveº Debugging Game History: A critical lexicon, Henry Lowood, Raiford Guins (eds). MIT Press... more ªSaveº Debugging Game History: A critical lexicon, Henry Lowood, Raiford Guins (eds). MIT Press 2016This chapter focuses on an under theorized but important digital media practice, the ways in which video games players `save' their games and their play. To save is both to play and to manage that play; it is at once inside and outside of play, at the same time instrumental and ludic. When players save games they engage in a complicated series of negotiations between their needs, skills, and goals as players, their everyday lives and the technical systems with which they play. As saving techniques and technology have changed so to have possibilities for play and pleasure as well as new range of problems and compromises. This perspective has implications for non-game digital media as well and might help us in particular to address issues related to archives, access and labor.Keywords: Pause, Archive, Play, Score, Console, Arcade, MAME, Cheat, Work
The video arcade is an important site for game studies and game history. So far it has been large... more The video arcade is an important site for game studies and game history. So far it has been largely addressed as a site of play. This paper decenters play and the player in the arcade by exploring another subject I call hangers. It explores the genealogies of player control, engagement and the policing of play practices in the American video arcade in the 1980s. In describing these tensions and tactics, as well as the technical, social, and environmental interventions attempted by arcade operators and guests we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the arcade as a social space. full text at: http://gamescriticism.org/articles/tobin-3-a/
Everyday Play
This cluster is an exploration of intersections, vagaries, tensions and overlaps o... more Everyday Play
This cluster is an exploration of intersections, vagaries, tensions and overlaps of everyday life and play broadly conceived. What is the relation between play and the everyday? Are they contained within each other? Do they overlap or are they impossible to reconcile? Does play exist with the everyday or does it interrupt or displace it? By looking at a broad range of both "everydays" and "plays" we can start to understand what is at stake ...
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Books by Samuel Tobin
Papers by Samuel Tobin
This cluster is an exploration of intersections, vagaries, tensions and overlaps of everyday life and play broadly conceived. What is the relation between play and the everyday? Are they contained within each other? Do they overlap or are they impossible to reconcile? Does play exist with the everyday or does it interrupt or displace it? By looking at a broad range of both "everydays" and "plays" we can start to understand what is at stake ...