Exploring Screen Culture Via Apple's Mobile Devices by Soukup Charles;

Author:Soukup, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 5

Apps as Gamification in Everyday Life

Since my daughter was about three years old, she has loved to play on my iPad. In fact, like most of her friends, she typically prefers to play on the iPad more than any other activity, more so than her crayons/markers, dolls, books, and movies. She loves the iPad so much that we have a series of limitations involving how long and when she can use the device—including setting the timer on my iPhone with a loud alarm indicating her thirty-minute allotment is over. When she uses the iPad, she truly “plays” on the device as she shifts between games and apps effortlessly—moving between her favorite games (cooking games involving making cupcakes, ice cream, and so on), sending text messages to her grandparents, checking the weather, playing videos (on the PBS kids app), taking and scrolling through photographs, and many other activities. Observing her, she clearly loses track of time and space when in the iPad environment. She appears, for lack of a better term, meditative—in state of calm focus. In other words, for my daughter, the iPad induces a flow-like state.

In this chapter, as a continuation of the analysis of iOS devices from Chapter 4, I argue that game-like or gamified apps are particularly well suited to the media logic of relevance by framing, focusing, and filtering the complexities of a media-saturated culture via clear rules and simple numerical outcomes. I reveal the experiences associated with the iOS software that evoke a distinctive emotional relationship between individuals and mobile devices—specifically, I argue that a sensual pleasure is associated with the game-like routine practices of the Apple iOS. The pleasure emerges from the intersection of play, everyday ritual, control, and aesthetics that creates a flow-like experience for the individual. As a gamified experience, the routine practices of hypermediated everyday life are further simplified and clarified and ultimately transformed into the pleasures of video gaming. Enlisting the methods and procedures described in Chapters 3 and 4, the following analysis describes the gamified practices associated with Apple’s mobile devices as a source of (quasi)transcendent pleasure via everyday performances—a perverse intersection of sacred ritual forms and consumer culture.

Cultural Software

As discussed in Chapter 4, everyday life in the contemporary culture is dominated by software. In order to understand the role of digital technology in everyday life, researchers should examine the unique characteristics and practices associated with “cultural software” (Manovich, 2013, p. 34). As Manovich (2013) argues, the software interface changes all dimensions or “properties” of a mediated object, phenomenon, or experience (e.g., a photograph changes when viewed in a web browser, Photoshop, or Adobe Acrobat and a social interaction is altered when experienced via Facebook, Skype, or text messaging). In this chapter, I am studying the iOS as a software interface. Manovich suggests that the software medium is “defined by application software and experienced by users,” where “a ‘medium’ is a paring of a particular data structure and the algorithms for creation, editing, and viewing the context stored in this structure” (p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.