The Beauty and the Beast board game is an ingenious engineering of cinematic, narrative and architectonic space into a slot-together cardboard allegory. A tie-in…
Tag: toys
AI has always been a toy
We should look to the digital game for the most compelling and generative toyetic source of concepts and material developments in artificial life and…
Mr Happy
This video essay ‘Monsters, mini-games and Mr Happy’ was originally published in Audiovisual thinking: a journal of academic video, no.2, September 2011. The journal seems…
transmedia toyetics
An MA Global Media Management workshop with Maggie Li and Megen de Bruin-Molé: incorporating toy mechanics and media into transmedia storyworlds. Here are monsters…
touch toyetics
A toy stops being a toy when it is no longer touched the relationship between the hand and the toy [is] an example of…
redefining the toyetic
Critical attention to toys demonstrates that the instrumental nature of machines and systems is less stable than generally assumed. And it shifts ontological questions…
industrial creativity
Lovely responses from year 2 BA Graphic Arts students to my talks on the ideologies and practicalities of industrial creativity and play. I love…
artificial animals games intelligence
A lecture for year 1 BA Games Design & Art, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
Toy Theory
My book, Toy Theory, will be published by MIT Press in 2023. Here’s a section of the proposal: Headline Rethinking culture, media, technology and the…
toy cinema
Video of a short lecture on precinematic and postcinematic toys for Estrella Sendra’s SOAS module ‘Introduction to Film Language, History and Theory’ October 2020
ethology of AI
What are the implications of taking the animality of AI and A-Life entities as real and not metaphorical or symbolic? This question in turn…