The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures 2009
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Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Maaike Lauwaert The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures 2009 https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089640802 Buch / book Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Lauwaert, Maaike: The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures. Amsterdam University Press 2009 (MediaMatters 3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089640802. Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0/ This document is made available under a creative commons BY- Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz NC 3.0/ License. For more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ media The Place of Play matters Toys and Digital Cultures amsterdam university press maaike lauwaert The Place of Play The Place of Play Toys and Digital Cultures Maaike Lauwaert Amsterdam University Press MediaMatters is a new series published by Amsterdam University Press on current debates about media technology and practices. International scholars critically analyze and theorize the materiality and performativity, as well as spatial practices of screen media in contributions that engage with today’s digital media culture. For more information about the series, please visit: www.aup.nl The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cover illustration: Goos Bronkhorst Cover design: Suzan de Beijer, Weesp Lay out: JAPES, Amsterdam ISBN 978 90 8964 080 2 e-ISBN 978 90 4850 796 2 NUR 811 © M. Lauwaert / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Table of contents Introduction 7 1. Changing Practices, Shifting Sites 7 2. Core and Periphery of Play 12 Part I: New Children, Different Toys 21 3. The Child as Consumer 26 4. Domesticating Play 30 5. The Child in the City 35 6. Toys as Containers, Mediators and Promoters 39 Part II: From Solitary to Networked Geographies of Play 45 7. LEGO Toys: from Wooden Blocks to Plastic Bricks 50 8. Brand Extension & Product Differentiation 58 9. Bringing the Fans into the Company 62 10. Many-to-Many Geographies of Play 66 Part III: Commercial Geographies of Play 71 11. Toy Towns and Simulated Cities 73 12. A 21st-century Dollhouse: The Sims 83 13. Unwanted Play Practices in The Sims Online 94 14. Commodified Geographies of Play 103 Part IV: Serious Geographies of Play 107 15. Participation Tools 111 16. Participation Processes 119 17. Purposeful Play 122 18. Serious Geographies of Play 124 Conclusion 127 19. Changing Geographies of Play 127 20. Making Do 132 Notes 137 Bibliography 139 Index 153 5 Introduction 1. Changing Practices, Shifting Sites Daniel Siskind (1970) received his first LEGO™ set in 1975. His parents had brought it with them from a trip to Europe. Ever since, he has been ’hooked on playing with Lego building bricks’ (Siskind, personal website). In 2000, Siskind started his personal website to sell his MOC (My Own Creation) LEGO sets. Sis- kind’s favorite themes for MOC sets are castles, trains and war paraphernalia. Siskind ships his MOC sets in a box with a printed picture of the design on it, like a real set. A manual with building instructions accompanies the LEGO pieces. His Blacksmith Shop, designed in 1999, contained 637 pieces and sold for $150. Some of the pieces for the Blacksmith Shop were taken out of production by LEGO and were thus hard to come by. All MOC sets are relatively expensive – definitely more expensive than official LEGO sets – because designing and assem- bling the sets is a time consuming process and the seller has, of course, to buy all the items for the set him- or herself. Someone from the LEGO Direct division, who later approached Siskind with a licensing proposal, bought the Blacksmith Shop in 2000. Siskind agreed to the licensing proposal and sold his rights of the design to the LEGO Company for an undisclosed amount. By the end of 2001 the set was on sale as an official LEGO set (item #3739) for $39.99 containing 622 pieces. Some minor changes were made to Siskind’s design, both to the exterior and interior of the shop. The out-of-use bricks Siskind originally integrated in his design were not part of the official set. The set is at this time no longer on sale on the official LEGO website. When the Blacksmith Shop was launched by the LEGO Company in 2001, it was promoted as the first in what was to become a series of official LEGO MOC sets. On the LEGO website news section, it read: ‘The Master Builders search for designs that they like in places like personal home pages, Brickshelf, at LEGO- related events, and – you guessed it! – in the LEGO Club!’ (LEGO, Brick Street Journal). However, no second MOC set was released as an official LEGO set. So far, Siskind was thus granted a unique honor: to see his personal creation be turned into an official, commercial LEGO set. Most of the Lugnet (LEGO Users Group Network) users, an international group of LEGO fans, were overjoyed with Siskind’s success, and they expressed hope that this move by the LEGO Company signaled a turn of events in their policy towards active LEGO users. Although no second MOC set was released as an official LEGO set after the Blacksmith Shop, the LEGO Company increasingly cooperates with dedicated LEGO fans. Jake McKee from LEGO Community Development works hard to con- 7 nect his LEGO colleagues with LEGO fans and thus ’bring the fans into the com- pany’ (McKee, 2005). The recently launched LEGO Factory – which includes both a digital design tool and an exchange platform – is exactly about this effort to bring LEGO fans into the company (LEGO Factory). In LEGO Factory, fans can design their own sets with the free software, share their designs with other fans and buy any of these custom sets directly from LEGO. The official LEGO online store sells some of these Factory custom sets created by Adult Fans of LEGO or AFOLs (LEGO, Factory Exclusives). LEGO Factory signals a change in how the LEGO Company puts so-called User-Generated Content (often abbreviated as UGC) to use. Instead of having headhunters browse user sites and visit LEGO events, everyone can now add their creations to the LEGO Factory Gallery. Bringing the fans into the company marks a wider shift noticeable in many layers of society and culture, a shift based on the early philosophy of the Internet: the many-to-many approach rather than the one-to-many approach. As media theorists Jenkins and Thorburn write: 'Networked computing operates according to principles fundamentally different from those of broadcast media: access, par- ticipation, reciprocity, and many-to-many rather than one-to-many communica- tion' (2003, p. 2). Instead of having LEGO designers work in secrecy behind closed doors on new LEGO sets, the LEGO Company will invite the fans, the users to ‘sit at the table’ with the designers and work together on future LEGO sets. The many-to-many model originally stems from specific ways in which the In- ternet can be put to use and from certain software applications. In the one-to-one Internet paradigm, users communicate through e-mail or FTP (file transfer proto- col) with one another on an individual basis. Websites have added to this the dis- play of information for many visitors to access: what one could call a one-to-many paradigm. Technological innovations and new Internet applications such as file sharing (through P2P or peer-to-peer networks), blogging (maintaining a perso- nal website that documents or comments), tagging (adding comments on blogs or websites) and Wiki sites (to which anyone who is registered can add informa- tion, make changes or create new entries) have created a situation that is referred to as ‘participatory culture’, ‘many-to-many culture’ or the ‘Web 2.0 revolution’. Many a software application nowadays incorporates sharing and publishing op- tions that encourage the social and participatory use of this software. The term ‘prosumers’ is often used to indicate the shift in the many-to-many culture to- wards consumers becoming producers of media content. Increasingly, technology is at stake in toys, games and playing. With the im- mense popularity of computer games, questions concerning the role and function of technology in play have become more pressing.1 A key aspect of the increasing technologization and digitalization of both toys and play is the vagueness of bor- ders between producers, consumers and players. In these so-called participatory cultures characterized by a many-to-many model, players do not play with a toy designed behind closed doors but become co-designers of their own toys. With 8 the place of play this many-to-many approach, not only money is fed back into the circuit of capital that moves from production to commodity to consumption and back to produc- tion, but also the voluntary, unpaid labor of devoted fans. This tightens the bond between company, commodity and consumer considerably. Participatory cultures are often hailed as a democratizing force, the ultimate means of consumer or user empowerment. After all, one can now take on a more active role as consumer or user, be it as designer or co-designer of new products or product updates, as reviewer of consumer goods or as an expert helping out other users.