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stuff. During this time I stayed inside with a friend and continued to play the
monster hunter game. But the game was no longer entertaining
(“Toshi”, 25 Japanese male, interview)The quote from “Toshi” sees him playing a haptic game during the 2011 Tokyo
earthquake, tsunami, and earthquake disaster known as 3/11. Affective and personal
technologies such as social and mobile media make us rethink old psychological
models of emotion. In times of trauma, mobile media are increasingly becoming
a vehicle for material and immaterial textures and contours of grief. Everybody
deals with crisis in different ways, and this individualism is being amplified
within mobile media just as it is creating new avenues for accessing a sense of
community, support, and help.
Toshi’s immersion within the PSP game was so deep that he mistook the quake
vibrations for the monster’s movements within his game. In the moments after
he realized the horror of the real-life event, he desperately tried to contact friends
and family to no avail. In the days after 3/11 and as multiple and conflicting
news reports emerged across mass and social media, Toshi with a friend used
the game to hide from the pain and confusion. Later, it emerged that the national
broadcaster, NHK, had deliberately withheld important information about the
Fukushima reactor under the instructions of the government.
Toshi—like millions of other Japanese—shifted their trust toward mobile
media such as Twitter and LBS such as Foursquare and Instagram to help them
not only to gain a sense of intimate publics but also to have a sense of perpetual
co-presence with their family and friends. What becomes apparent in conversation
with Toshi is that his gameplay is about intentional escapism, particularly when
the world is too traumatic and confusing. The picture that begins to emerge is one
whereby there are multiple forms of presence and engagement around mobile
gaming that need to be accounted for beyond the clumsy notion of casual.
As noted elsewhere, mobile games are often problematically categorized as
casual games (Hjorth 2009). However, as Keogh notes, “a casual game does not
simply offer an easier or more shallow experience than a traditional videogame,
but an experience that is more flexible with the player’s time, more easily
incorporated into the player’s everyday life” (Keogh 2014, p. 269). It is this
flexibility and ease of incorporation, especially when adapted to mobile social
media games or involving the insinuation of game elements into an application or
service, that so thoroughly instills mobile games into the routines and habits of our
social lives. One way to understand mobile games beyond the problematic label
of casual is through ambient play and intimate co-presence. This is especially the
case with camera phone practices that often accompany and play an unofficial
role in mobile gaming. One example is China’s Foursquare equivalent, Jiepang,
whereby players deployed unofficial camera phone practices so much that the
company rebranded its application to make camera phone taking and sharing an
integral part of its social experience of place (Hjorth and Gu 2011).
Given the important role played by camera phone practices in the ambient
and co-present experience of place through digital cartographies, the site-specific