Big Games and Hipsters: Cool Capital in Pervasive Gaming Festivals

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Pervasive and street gamers are compared and contrasted with the infamous subculture known as hipsters, showing that although they are quite different social groups their aesthetics operate in similar ways. Specific attention is given to the emergent, socially relative nature of these aesthetics and the operation of ‘cool’ cultural capital. These findings are based on ethnographic field work carried out in 2010 at the Come Out and Play festival.

Education Entertainment & Humor

Big Games and Hipsters
Cool Capital in Pervasive Gaming Festivals

who am i

_ Dan Dixon
senior lecturer - university of the west of england
resident at pervasive media studio
member of digital cultures research centre

_ PhD - Playing with Reality
an aesthetic framework for pervasive games
ethnography based
critical, cultural, practice

contested term

Alternate reality games Transmedial games
Augmented reality games Urban games
Mixed-reality games Street games
Ubiquitous computing games Smart street sports
Ubicomp games New sports
Locative games Big games
GPS games City-wide games
Mobile games Interesting games
Massively multiplayer mobile
games

hipster aesthetic

_ referential symbolism, intentionally ironic

_ authenticity and difference

_ inversions of childhood and adult

_ cool as cultural capital

(digital) hipster aesthetic

_ highly referential (but not ironic)

_ lo-fi and hand-made aesthetic

_ childhood games with adult complexity

_ cool gaming as cultural capital

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Big Games and Hipsters: Cool Capital in Pervasive Gaming Festivals

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Big Games and Hipsters: Cool Capital in Pervasive Gaming Festivals

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