Hybrid game systems such as LEGO Dimensions and Disney Infinity both acknowledge and exploit the tendency of children’s imaginative play to grab, mix and hybridise diverse fictional worlds and characters. The event of gameplay described here takes place as much within a persistent landscape of transmedia franchises, improvised songs, quotes, and distracted references connect to the LEGO Movie, the Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter universe. Conceptual and ethnographic work in media studies and game studies has repeatedly demonstrated both the fluidity of play across virtual and actual spaces (Giddings 2007, 2011), and has drawn attention to the multiplicity of communicative, playful and symbolic domains that overlap in play. In part they are a response to engrained assumptions that actual and virtual play spaces are distinct and separate, with the latter a threat to the former. The promise of these hybrid toy-videogame systems, and broader developments in the ‘Internet of Toys’ (Mascheroni and Holloway 2019) is to collapse the boundaries between the virtual spaces of videogames and digital networks and the actual environment and objects of everyday play.
We have earlier experimented with Nintendo Amiibo figures, connecting them during play with Splatoon, a cartoony first person shooter game. There are also Skylanders and Disney Infinity sets, but the research session does not allow enough time for them to be opened and played with.
#Gandalf exploit tv#
The room also contains a Nintendo 3DS console and a Wii U connected to a TV screen.
The two brothers, neighbours of mine, are sitting on the rug, setting up a LEGO Dimensions set, working with a printed book of instructions, opening bags of bricks and clicking minifigs together. – It’s a cape-astrophe! Dumbledore! Dumbledore! – His cape gets its own box! …cape gets its own box, it’s cape-able of doing it! – I only use black and very very very dark grey… Why am I quoting Batman? Black and dark grey, black and dark grey
– I’m going to build Dumbledore Dumbledore, Dumbledore… Microethology of toys-to-life (from proposal for Toy Theory book) Unbox: The speed and slowness of Lucy, Batman, Batman, Gandalf, and Dumbledore
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