Digigran

To London of course, but before that to Blackburn to visit the Parallell Realities exhibitions with my good friend, digitalplayer. We had great fun. There was one amazing exhibition focused on games, where you could sit on a huge purple dragon, whose great nostrils were the source of a zapping action and eliminate alien monsters on a screen located directly opposite. Players had to scramble up to a seat about five feet from the ground and manoeuvre the monster by tilting its head up and down whilst simultaneously firing the zapper. Both of us took a turn. DP scored 220 (dead things?) and I scored zero. You see it's just not in my nature to kill and maim. I am typical of those girls I interviewed in my first study of computer usage who only wanted to save creatures from disaster They hated shoot-em- ups but enjoyed a game called Lemmings, whose purpose was to stop the foolish creatures from hurling themselves over cliffs.
It was however fun playing with the dragon, though few of the town's children had managed to cotton on to the idea that you could climb on to it, and the museum guards didn't seem to want to tell them, more the pity.
We also messed about with the pieces of a giant Korean Monopoly game which covered an area equivalent to a smallish dining room and scrabbled around on the floor to view a display of miniature plastic figures through a magnifying glass. These were set between the skirting board and the wall at about an inch from the ground. The guardian critic, Alfred Hickling, thought the display looked as if it could be 'the history of the world explained through the medium of cake decoration.' It reminded me of a display in the museum of childhood at Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, where you are invited to peek into small displays, one through a mousehole! I shall take Alexander to visit there one day.
The gaming dragon turned out to be a very good preparation for my next trip to London, Emerald Street, to a seminar of the ESRC funded seminar series on Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures. The group describes itself as a ' bunch of academics; an international group who are variously interested in literacy, digital cultures, cultural studies, play, language, learning and chewing the fat over issues and theories associated with these, SEE. We heard presentations on all manner of gaming research. I was particularly engaged by the presentation of Valerie Ines de la Ville (now wouldn't you just die for a name like that!) from Poitiers. Poitiers University boasts a centre for children's products, based in the business school, which supports the development of new animations and their spin-offs. I was full of both admiration and horror of the account of the work there. Admiration because there exists a centre which takes children's concerns to the very heart of it's planning and thinking, horror because there appeared to be an unacknowledged element of colonialism and gender stereotyping in all that was shown. Take the latest animation figure Kirikou who presents an African child surviving in the jungle and is completely naked. One would wonder about the binary opposition of naked (savage) and clothed (civilised) thst haunts the imagery, as if France had not produced the most sophisticated theorist on the question. See Levi Strauss.

There, I need to have more time however, to explore the way in which commercialism reinforces hegemonic difference between races and genders. The boys and girls interviewed in the Making Games Project displayed very different attitudes to that very same question of killing an enemy. The girl interviewed showing her contempt for the boy's (a much more experienced gamer prediliction for exterminating obstacles in his path. It was something we could have examined more closely, I think.
I must however, once more return to the meat world of marking and e-mails and bxxx ethic reviews and more importantly get back to thinking of childhood pleasures with Alexander in mind. Next time I blog, I intend to concentrate on contented little babies. So good night and good luck. Now who did I last hear saying that ?