Pervasive Presence: Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines
Pervasive Presence: Blast Theory’s Day Of The Figurines by Matt Adams, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi Day Of The Figurines is a massively multiplayer board-game for up to a thousand participants which players can interact with remotely via SMS messages through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. The piece was developed by Blast Theory in collaboration with Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab as part of a larger research project, IPerG, funded by the European Commission's IST Programme. IPerG includes Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), HUMLE and ICE Laboratories, the Interactive Institute, Play Studio & Zero Game Studio, the University of Tampere, Hypermedia Laboratory, Nokia Research, Fraunhofer Institute, FIT, Sony NetServices and Gotland University. The team's scientific coordinator is Steve Benford from Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab. The coordinator is Annika Waern from SICS. IPerG’s principal research objective is the investigation of pervasive games, i.e., games that ‘are no longer confined to the virtual domain of the computer, but integrate the physical and social aspects of the real world' (Magerkurth et al, 2005: 2). Pervasive games, which operate by ‘interweaving digital media with our everyday experience’ (Capra et al, 2005: 89), ‘re-mediate’, to borrow Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term (2000), aspects of situationism and flâneurism, as well as performance and game, role play and theatricality, activism and ‘smart mobbing’ (Rheingold, 2002). As in the case of Donna Haraway’s seminal reading of cyborg (1991), the pervasive game operates as excess, a contamination of social reality with fiction, everyday life with technological augmentation, the ‘real’ with representation.
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