How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we
interact across digital, material, and social landscapes.
We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to
kill--waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in
solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family
room. In Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson examine
how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives. They show that as
mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and
contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a
digitally saturated world. Mobile games become conduits for what the
authors call ambient play, pervading much of our social and
communicative terrain. We become digital wayfarers, moving constantly
among digital, social, and social worlds.
Hjorth and Richardson explore how households are transformed by
media--how idiosyncratic media use can alter the spatial composition and
emotional cadence of the home. They show how mobile games connect
domestic forms of play with more public forms of playfulness in urban
spaces, how collaborative play (both networked and face-to-face) is
incorporated into private and public play, and how touchscreens and
haptic play emphasize the perception of the moving body. Hjorth and
Richardson invite us to think of mobile gaming as more than a "casual"
distraction but as a complex cultural practice embedded into our
contemporary ways of being, knowing, and communicating.
