Social
Spaces

The game Pong was released in 1972 by Atari. It showed two bats and a little ball and was inspired by the game ping pong. Later – in 1975 – it was designed as console version, so it could be played, making use of a television screen. After that, many variations were released by the computer industry, like Breakout. Not only the industry, but also “users” on the internet have adapted the game many times. The game is an exchange device, a social object (MacLeod, 2007). It is an object around which many people have gathered, all over the world. My own students have adapted the game for very different goals.

Gregory Bers made it into a game that could be played in railway stations. He observed how people were just waiting, without interacting socially, waiting for a train. He made Pong into a game that could be played by people in public environments, using their feet. It is a strange object in a railway station, but certainly could trigger social interaction between two strangers, starting to play and the people standing around it.

Pong has been adapted again by other students in a variant called Noisepong by Wout Standaert and Jim Bollansée. They wanted to rethink the rules of music production. They experimented with making music while interacting socially, while playing. They designed a multitouch table where little squares and circles floated around. With the known bats in the Pong game little balls can be played around – activated by fiduciary markers1 – and bump into the squares and circles in different colors, all representing different musical instruments and sounds. Playing Pong on the table produces a musical piece, which is socially produced.

Noisepong: new soundscape from Wout Standaert on Vimeo.

Probably the makers of the original Pong did not expect that so many variations on their game would be produced, for very different contexts and goals and different kinds of sociality. Lygia Clark was right to say that True participation is open. We will never be able to know what we give to the spectator-author (Clark in Bischop, 1968). Spectators are authors and use the things the cultural industry creates in a personal and especially unpredictable way for social reasons. Mobile media made ‘usage’ even more unpredictable. Mobile media are a form of mediated communication or “any communication in which the participants communicate via some sort of medium, such as written letters,.. (Donath, 2004)”. Mobile media are new media that came with a lot of promises for more participation by people in culture and society, which are elaborate, reworked old analogue media, associated with terms like “digitality, interactivity, hypertextuality, dispersal, virtuality (Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant & Kelley, 2003, p. 13)”. The term ‘new media’ is used here because of its broad cultural and inclusive meaning (Lister et al, 2003, pp. 9-14), unlike other terms which often have a merely technological connotation.

Outside of the Media & Design Academy, the students of Karmen Franinovic (Interaction Design | ZHDK, Zürich) made a variation of the game Pong – without explicitely referring to it – using mobile technologies. They produced a toy, a ball, that is location aware. Throwing the ball at a wall or a physical object in a city is a way of claiming that specific spot. Like gangs in a city, the players of the game Urban defender claim the streets as quick as possible. Instead of focussing on the strategical purpose of an area, like an eating district or a business area, the personal relation with the area is the important motive for claiming. The makers made the game especially for kids and young adults, since they appeared -after some research – very attached to (claiming) places.

While interactivity is an intrinsic trait of new media, participation is only a trait that appears according to how a culture uses and implements interactive technologies. Mobile media are thus a participatory medium when they are used in a participatory way. The former variations on Pong were aiming to trigger participation of different groups of people in different contexts. They stimulate various actors – via a specific way of creating media – to participate in the production of difficult to predict and highly hybrid social objects in different places at the same time, mixtures of personal and mainstream images, factual and fictional, physical and virtual information. These social objects take the form of a music game that allows a collaboratively created musical piece or a foot or ball game that enables people to participate in a specific place in the city or the railway station. These social objects have become the glue in a highly mobile and complex society.

This blogpost is part of my Phd dissertation

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