Jinan Travel

Using a sketch-map which someone had drawn for me Jinan Travel , I found my way to this lesser temple. Its mural panels show old women wearing Jinan Travel necklaces of skulls. The women’s breasts hang down to their waists and their faces have expressions like demons. Another panel is of an active human skeleton brandishing parts of a dismembered man. Another shows a washing line of drying human skins, some complete with heads; others portray people being skinned. It was all a bit gruesome.

Chesher takes this paradigm further by engaging the notion of the haptic into the discussion. Chesher argues that games call upon an in-between form of sensory experience, the glaze’ (2004). As a conflation between the gaze and the glance, games straddle and remediate older media practices through their interactive, conversational form. Identifying three types of glaze spaces – the glazed over’ (game immersion), sticky’ (holding the player within a visceral immersion that is hard to interrupt) and identity-reflective’ (whereby the player can multitask, slipping between game and other worlds) – Chesher argues these three dimensions’ of the glaze move beyond a visual orientation, also drawing on the other senses such as aural (hearing) and haptic (touch). For example, console games are sticky: they hold the player to the screen via a visual link to a virtual space, while also emphasizing that link with a haptic attachment to the hand-controller and peripherals. Casual gamers must deliberately avoid this stickiness’ so that they are perpetually ready to resume their temporarily interrupted activities. These different modes of engagement come into further question and expansion via urban mobile games. Indeed, there is still much to be elaborated upon within this area of research (de Souza e Silva and Sutko 2009).

The sensibilities of the phoneur, of derive and of Parkour, and the new media practices of the glaze, come together in innovative mobile urban games-as-art (Flanagan 2009). Much of the first generation experimentation and exploration of mobile media artwork from the late 1990s onwards has taken the form of hybrid reality and LBGM (de Souza e Silva 2006; Davis 2005) as they challenge the role of co-presence and everyday life; forging questions around the boundaries between the virtual and actual, online and offline, haptic (touch) and cerebral (mind), delay and immediacy (Hjorth 2008, 2009a). Examples include the Pac-Manhattan (US), Proboscis’s Urban Tapestries (UK), Blast Theory (UK), Aware (FIN), Mogi game (JP) and INP’s (Interactive and Practice) Urban Vibe (SK). In these projects we can gain insight into some of the possibilities of games: to challenge our sense of place and play. These projects also highlight the relationship between games studies and new media discourses – a synergy exemplified by work of Mexican new media artist, Rafael Lazano Hemmer. The next section briefly outlines different forms of urban mobile gaming and then turns to a case study of second generation LBS games.

Jinan Travel Photo Gallery



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