A research blog for speculative game design focusing on Animals and Play.
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).
Artists Anne Cleary & Denis Connolly developed a series of 5 helmets which they titled Meta-Perceptual Helmets, each of these helmets allows the participant to view the world through the eyes of different animals. The helmets created a mixed human/animal perception using lenses and mirror to shape the view of the user. The work is inspired by the vision experiments of George Malcolm Stratton in the early twentieth century who wore ‘upside-down goggles’ for periods of time to explore the plasticity of the brain. The work is part of the art of looking series which explores the viewers position in relation to…
