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Author: Alan Hook

Alan Hook is a Lecturer in Interactive Media and a Researcher in New Media and Play at Ulster University. Alan teaches Games Studies and Interactive Media within the School of Media Film and Journalism. His teaching and research focusing on play as a form of interaction and how participation in games and transmedia texts effects and shapes behaviour both in and outside of the game.

Alan is currently studying towards a PhD in Design at Lancaster University in Imagination Lancaster, the open and exploratory design-led research centre with Prof Paul Coulton (Chair of Speculative and Game Design).

The Nature of Play

Henricks, T. (2008). The nature of play: An overview. American Journal of Play, 1(2),157- 180 In this literature review of play studies, Henricks draws on a range of ideological approaches to the nature of play, and renders a range of discipline discourses to understand play as both action and interaction. The review situates itself in the Humanities and Cultural Studies, drawing heavily on Huzinga and Sutton-Smith but also urges the reader to understand that the ideological dispositions of the researcher inform the frame of analysis and the outcomes of each particular study. The overview touches on child psychology, history, cultural…

Design fiction: how to build a Voight Kampff machine

Sturdee, M, Coulton, P, Lindley, J, Stead, M, Ali, H & Hudson-Smith, A 2016, Design fiction: how to build a Voight Kampff machine. in CHI EA ’16 Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, pp. 375-386, CHI 2016, San Jose, United States, 7-12 May. DOI: 10.1145/2851581.2892574