From the moment that you insert the token and the gaming session starts up, the player suddenly has multiple lives. During these games, you can win additional “life” elements, which accumulate as little icons around the edges of the screen. This function creates a positive reinforcement in the player; they have the possibility to fail many times without the game finishing. Professor Pier Luigi Cappucci, in a paragraph of his book “Il corpo tecnologico” descibes to us this phenomenom: Man has always created “virtual” constructs, learning to distance himself from the physical and direct experience of the phenomenal world. (…) mediating ...

Video games have changed the way we interact with space. From their very inception, these increasingly complex virtual worlds have been forcing new perspectives and new ways of interacting with the world beyond. Once they were able to represent cities, their role in shaping our everyday urban experience became even more acute, thrusting players into environments that they would otherwise have never come close to and exposing them to representations of urban life which will have had countless effects on the way players experienced cities in real life. But while it’s long been accepted that film, music and other established forms ...

Finding Fanon 2, made by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, uses the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. Finding Fanon 2 was commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

On this Ep, NM is joined by *Civilization* publishers Lucas Mascatello and Richard Turley, as well as *Highsnobiety* Editor-in-Chief, Thom Bettridge to discuss “SELECT YOUR CHARACTER,” the style-centric site and media brand’s latest white paper, which explores the overlap between gaming, fashion, and realms of the real. Created in collaboration with Mascatello and Turley, the 136 page doc looks at the changing terms of luxury, scarcity, and even winning itself. CW: 6 Millen-Xers talking about gaming.

Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations.

“Both embracing and eliding the experience of mediation, (video game environments stage) worldliness for us as a mobile task to explore and engage with, with our eyes, hands, brains, and bodies all participating in seeing and/as doing… Life can thus (also) be redescribed as an ongoing process of navigating between cinema and photography, with image-making becoming a mode of world-making, for gamers and non-gamers alike.”

Molleindustria, the “brand” name of Italian game designer Paolo Pedercini, has been a project of reappropriation of video games and a call for the radicalization of popular culture since 2003. On the occasion of the “All Work, No Play” exhibition at Aksioma Project Space in June 2015, a significant selection of its games was made. The exhibited games deal with the theme of the conflict between life and work, as (video)games can be used to address critically socio-political issues such as flexibility, precariousness and alienation. In this essay, Paolo Ruffino, member of the art group IOCOSE and academic, explores the ...