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Serious Games and the Study of Place: Mapping the places created by the technologies of experience in everyday life
- Author(s):
- Bruce Caron (see profile)
- Date:
- 1994
- Subject(s):
- Human geography, Games, Play, History
- Item Type:
- Essay
- Tag(s):
- Cultural anthropology, History of games and play, Mapping
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/hetg-ad89
- Abstract:
- In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and are completed through the activity, to a type of map that can be created and then interpreted without the experience or memory of such engrossment. The distinction between maps the interpretation of which requires a link to engrossment in activities and those that do not is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps describe. As modernity is bound up in the devaluation of knowledge/meaning tied to bodily activities (in favor of disembedded meanings, rational discourses, experimental reasoning, etc.) there is a corresponding devaluation in the production and interpretation of maps of such realms (in favor of maps of spaces, satellite images, topographical representations, etc.). The field of hyper-locality emerges in the vacuity of de-activated places. Once the activities that sustained these places disappear, there is no place left to “save,” no “there” there to take away. The task facing the ethnographer is thus two-fold; to acquire knowledge of a place (as thickly described, to use Geertz’s term) and also to develop the theoretical and practical means to map (represent) this place. In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and are completed through the activity, to a type of map that can be created and then interpreted without the experience or memory of such engrossment. The distinction between maps the interpretation of which requires a link to engrossment in activities and those that do not is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps describe.
- Notes:
- Grad school paper from early 1990s... still works.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 3 years ago
- License:
- Attribution
seriousgames_place.pdf