While American screenwriters were resisting AI capture, a vibrant community of digital creatives and arts organizations across Québec and Canada formed the alliance ArtIA. ArtIA advances commons-based alternatives to cultural AI, in response to the observation that while AI is rapidly transforming creative tools and workflows, the cultural sector lacks the critical resources, reference frameworks, support systems, and training needed to navigate this shift. The AI commons is conceptually contested, as corporate and governmental discourses increasingly frame AI as a “common good,” while probabilistic AI systems, common training datasets, and debates over AI as public infrastructure generate a muddled appropriation of the commons. ArtIA advances commoning as a situated practice grounding visions of the future in cultural needs, sectoral challenges, and traditions of commoning in Québec and Canada. This paper traces the 18-month stakeholder consultation organized by ArtIA, which enrolled 204 participants and collectively aimed to imagine and develop concrete interventions toward an AI commons situated at the intersection of Canadian AI governance as industrial policy and the localized practices of digital creation. Findings grounded in situational analysis and action research show the enrollment of four interrelated actor groups—cultural organizations, digital creatives, commons networks, and researchers. These actors formed new alliances and produced three concrete imaginaries for a creative AI commons: (1) Artisanal AI, (2) Common Compute, and (3) Critical AI Literacies. In closing, we argue that technologies developed and governed at the right scale—accessible, situated, and collectively stewarded—can operate as material levers for social solidarity, collective agency and shared responsibility that ideological politics and industrial policies cannot.

Background: Minecraft is widely used in classrooms but also criticized for reflecting colonialist and extractive logics, leading some educators to question its pedagogical value and consider it a bad object.Analysis: This article argues that students' familiarity with Minecraft makes it a useful site for ethical and critical learning. It reviews major critiques of the game and presents the Allegorical Build as a pedagogical approach that engages, rather than avoids, these ideological tensions.Conclusions and implications: Engaging critically with games like Minecraft can help students examine the relationship between digital culture and colonial industrialism. Rather than dismissing such platforms, effective pedagogy meets students where they are-within the game itself. Contexte : On utilise souvent Minecraft dans les salles de classe, mais certains critiquent ce jeu vid & eacute;o pour sa logique colonialiste et extractive, ce qui conduit plusieurs & eacute;ducateurs & agrave; remettre en question sa valeur p & eacute;dagogique et & agrave; le consid & eacute;rer comme un mauvais objet.Analyse : Ce document soutient que la familiarit & eacute; des & eacute;l & egrave;ves avec Minecraft en fait un outil utile pour un apprentissage & eacute;thique et critique. L'article passe en revue les principales critiques du jeu et pr & eacute;sente l'Allegorical Build (la Construction all & eacute;gorique) comme approche p & eacute;dagogique qui s'adresse & agrave; ces tensions id & eacute;ologiques plut & ocirc;t que de les & eacute;viter.Conclusions et implications : Aborder de mani & egrave;re critique des jeux comme Minecraft peut aider les & eacute;l & egrave;ves & agrave; examiner la relation entre la culture num & eacute;rique et l'industrialisation coloniale. Plut & ocirc;t que de rejeter de telles plateformes, une p & eacute;dagogie efficace va & agrave; la rencontre des & eacute;l & egrave;ves l & agrave; o & ugrave; ils se trouvent, c'est-& agrave;-dire dans le jeu lui-m & ecirc;me.

Knowledge or information commons is a critical concept in communication and information policy necessary to understand generative AI (genAI) governance. We introduce the concept of the commons as an existing problem for AI governance and develop a conceptual framework for commons management solutions for genAI. We then evaluate if commons management informs active AI governance. Focusing on efforts in the United States, we analyse regulatory submissions to the Office of Copyright, drafting a new policy for generative AI. The case selection follows an established link in the field between intellectual property and commons management. Collectively, through mixed computational and qualitative analysis, we argue that submissions demonstrate the importance of commons management to AI governance, but the insufficiency of commons management solutions for AI. We conclude by outlining how common theory must address the challenge of AI.

In the twenty-first century, we no longer choose whether we engage in a quantified world. Quantification surrounds us in the presence of big data, algorithmic curation, mass marketing, and the sheer amount of discrete measurability that sustains all forms of global value transactions, both “speculative” and “real.” “Theatres of Calculation” combine participatory and agential elements of games, with the dual-layered performance space of the literal and non-literal, to create a context that can address hyper-quantification and the digital world.

This paper considers the importance of the 1960’s project to build The Fun Palace in East London. A flashpoint for cultural-politics and design at the intersection of leisure, class, and technology, this case has important lessons for thinking about contemporary game design and game culture. Drawing on an esoteric branch of cybernetics developed by Gordan Pask for the Fun Palace and through a case study with modded Minecraft we point to directions in human-machine interaction and play that have been lost since the 60s and could be found again.

Following the emergence of commercial VR headsets, a variety of venues have begun showcasing VR content in public spaces. In this chapter, we aim to address some of the challenges faced by curators exhibiting VR pieces in these settings. As such, we explore tactics to stimulate audience engagement in the pre-headset moment, while also examining how a moderator can aid immersion in VR. We illustrate these points by presenting a case study during a partnered event. This approach has allowed us to explore different curatorial strategies for creating communal forms of engagement in experiencing VR in public spaces.

The value of understanding patients' illness experience and social contexts for advancing medicine and clinical care is widely acknowledged. However, methodologies for rigorous and inclusive data gathering and integrative analysis of biomedical, cultural, and social factors are limited. In this paper, we propose a digital strategy for large-scale qualitative health research, using play (as a state of being, a communication mode or context, and a set of imaginative, expressive, and game-like activities) as a research method for recursive learning and action planning. Our proposal builds on Gregory Bateson's cybernetic approach to knowledge production. Using chronic pain as an example, we show how pragmatic, structural and cultural constraints that define the relationship of patients to the healthcare system can give rise to conflicted messaging that impedes inclusive health research. We then review existing literature to illustrate how different types of play including games, chatbots, virtual worlds, and creative art making can contribute to research in chronic pain. Inspired by Frederick Steier's application of Bateson's theory to designing a science museum, we propose DiSPORA (Digital Strategy for Play-Oriented Research and Action), a virtual citizen science laboratory which provides a framework for delivering health information, tools for play-based experimentation, and data collection capacity, but is flexible in allowing participants to choose the mode and the extent of their interaction. Combined with other data management platforms used in epidemiological studies of neuropsychiatric illness, DiSPORA offers a tool for large-scale qualitative research, digital phenotyping, and advancing personalized medicine.

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, ‘immersive’ has arguably been one of the most overused terms to describe theatre productions that aim to involve audiences in unconventional ways. With the mainstream success of specific ‘immersive’ productions, this trend goes beyond the theatre and arts industry. From games distributors to Westfield shopping centres, just about every organisation seems to be discussing how ‘immersive’ events can give their product an edgier public profile or increase sales. The need for a post-immersive manifesto comes from an assumption that the use of the term immersive is not helpful. And, in many ways, the use of the word ‘immersive’ to describe theatre productions can often be detrimental to the contract of expectations set up with audience members, guests, players, participants. This experimental manifesto is the result of five years of partnership between Technoculture, Arts & Games (Concordia University, Montréal) and ZU-UK (G.A.S. Station and MA in Contemporary Performance at University of Greenwich, London).

This paper looks at the ways that the Nintendo Wii might shift the locus of game analysis away from the screen and more towards players' corporeal relationship to the screen. The Wii hardware and software, the television screen, the physical space and players' bodies constitute an intriguing form of kinaesthetic play that borrows from cultural fantasies about virtual reality. This play, while conditioned by the goal driven and control logics of gameplay nevertheless leads to a production of 'gestural excess' as bodies twist, contort and perform in ways that the game as such neither demands nor necessarily accommodates.

Throughout the history of the Mediterranean region, seafaring and trading played a significant role in the interaction between the cultures and people in the area. In order to engage the general public in learning about maritime cultural heritage we have designed and developed a serious game incorporating geospatially analyzed data from open GIS archaeological maritime sources, and archaeological data resulting from shipwreck excavations. We present a second prototype of the seafaring serious game, and discuss the results of an evaluation which involved a large multi-site user study with participants from three continents.

Based on empirical research, this article addresses the role of cultural intermediaries in the production, distribution, and reception of independent or “indie” digital games. Festival and showcase curators, local community organizers, co-working space managers, promoters, critics, funders, granting agencies, and other support actors are central to sustaining indie game cultures, but are often overlooked. Our research makes visible the diverse taskscapes of cultural intermediaries; the wide variety of brokering, translating, value-ascribing, connection-making, and care work involved; and the attendant tensions and challenges. We contend that cultural intermediary work in the game industry is characterized by precarity, extensive and largely invisible behind-the-scenes work, complex networks of interdependence and support, blurred boundaries between the personal and the professional, and a delicate balance between autonomy and integration.

Conventional smart city design processes tend to focus on instrumental planning for city systems or novel services for humans. Interacting with data produced by the new services and restructured systems entailed by these processes is commonly done via interfaces like civic dashboards, leading to a critique that data-driven urbanism is bound by the rules and constraints of dashboard design [1]. Informed citizens are expected to engage with new urban information flows through the logic of dashboard interfaces. What datastreams are left off the dashboard of engaged urban experience? What design opportunities arise when dashboard visualizations are moved into the domain of mixed reality? In this two-day workshop, participants will construct prototype mixed reality interfaces for engaging the informational layer of the built urban environment. Using the Unity game engine and the Microsoft HoloLens, participants will focus on generative design in the space of data-driven interfaces, addressing issues of data access, civic agency, and privacy in the context of smart cities. Specific attention will be paid to interfaces that facilitate harmonious co-existence between humans and non-human systems (AI, IoT, etc.).

This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the very conditions of its production. Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Svetlana Boym, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Chandra Mukerji, we consider the block-, grid-, and code-level cultural techniques associated with playing the game as allegories for our increasingly complex relationship to digital culture. Minecraft is not the apotheosis of cultural domination by code as much as it is a playable parable about its complications.

This article draws on over 60 interviews and 120 surveys with indie game developers to illustrate relational labour and entrepreneurship practices in cultural industries and their relationship to 'good work'. We first outline the changing organization of games work, the shift towards so-called indie production, and the associated rejection of creatively constrained, hierarchically managed production models. In the move towards small-scale games making, indies jettisoned producers because producers represented industry modes of work, values and creative constraints. But indies are now struggling to manage production processes without producers. We use developer narratives to highlight how this 'missing producer' work is redistributed in the form of cultural entrepreneurship, cultural intermediation and relational labour. This relational labour simultaneously supports and undermines sustainable production practices, as developers take on impossible workloads associated with networking and connecting with others. We next illustrate how the inherent valorization of growth and expansion in cultural entrepreneurship discourses may force developers to mimic industry practices and organization in order to find funding, but these practices inherently conflict with their desire to focus on making games as small, sustainable and creatively autonomous teams. Ultimately, we want to demonstrate how interviews and time spent with indie developers help us account for otherwise invisible and ambiguous cultural labour practices and discourses, thus allowing us to make sense of the larger context of cultural production and its possible futures.

Commercial sea routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction. In this work, we present a serious game which aims to provide better insight and understanding of seaborne trade mechanisms and seafaring practices in the eastern Mediterranean during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The game incorporates probabilistic geospatial analysis of possible ship routes through the re-use and spatial analysis from open GIS maritime, ocean, and weather data. These routes, along with naval engineering and sailing techniques from the period, are used as underlying information for the seafaring game. This work is part of the EU-funded project iMareCulture whose purpose is in raising the European identity awareness using maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in the Mediterranean sea.

This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the socio-material possibility of indie game making itself. In its highly publicized outward-facing role, the Megabooth ascribes legitimacy and value to specific games and developers, but its behind-the-scenes logistical and brokerage activities are of equal if not greater importance. The Megabooth mediates between a diverse set of actors and stakeholders with multiple (often conflicting) needs and goals and in doing so helps constitute the field of production, distribution, reception and consumption for indie games. ‘Indie-ness’ and independence are actively performed in and through intermediaries such as the Megabooth.

This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance of the idea of unseriousness for the theorization of gameplay as a sociocultural activity of last resort in a contemporary world defined by the grave seriousness of life.