Table Of ContentPortable Play in Everyday Life
Doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
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doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
Portable Play in
Everyday Life: The
Nintendo DS
Samuel Tobin
Fitchburg State University, USA
Doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
portable play in everyday life
Copyright © Samuel Tobin, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and
has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–39660–0 EPUB
ISBN: 978–1–137–39659–4 PDF
ISBN: 978–1–137–39658–7 Hardback
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2013
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
1 Introduction 1
2 The Nintendo DS and Related Devices 14
3 Recommendations and Reviews 24
4 Interface Space 51
5 I’d Rather Sit and Play: Mobile Videogames
at Home 64
6 Mobile Play In Transit 81
Conclusion 108
Appendix A, Games Cited 119
Bibliography 121
Index 127
Doi: 10.1057/9781137396594 v
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank everyone who supported this project
over the course of its development. I could not have writ-
ten this without the support and inspiration my family
gave me and I dedicate this book to them. I’d like to thank
my graduate school comrades from the New School and
the faculty there, especially Ken Wark, Orit Halpern,
Jaeho Kang, Oz Frankel, Shannon Mattern and Dominic
Pettman. I also owe my Brooklyn friends deep thanks for
putting up with me talking about Zelda and Benjamin all
the time. Finally I thank Isabel Castellanos for everything,
always.
vi doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
1
Introduction
Abstract: The introduction begins by examining why the
DS, despite its huge popularity, has not been studied or
addressed by game and media scholars. This chapter also
explores the tactics and methods that were developed in
order to address this understudied subject. These include
ethnographic and discourse analysis methods applied to
online community discussions as well as four theoretical
frame works: game, mobile and play studies as well as the
study of everyday life.
Keywords: discourse analysis; ethnography; everyday life;
game studies; mobile; play
Tobin, Samuel. Portable Play in Everyday Life: The
Nintendo DS. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
doi: 10.1057/9781137396594.
Doi: 10.1057/9781137396594 1
2 Portable Play in Everyday Life
Good enough
Videogames can be thrilling. They put us on the edge of seats, blister
our thumbs, addict us, obsess us, pull us into fantastic worlds, and
epic adventures. Except that they also very often don’t. Videogames
are frequently not thrilling, or exciting, or fantastic in theme, scope, or
execution. More often they are ordinary—not bad, just not enrapturing,
amazing, experiences. Very often, videogames are just fine. They are fun,
but not that much fun, not too much fun. Often they do not need to be
very good, just good enough for what we need them for, for what we
want them for, for what we use them for. Some people center their lives
on video gaming, becoming expert players, fans, the “hardcore,” or even
go pro and become game designers, producers, players, professors, or
critics. However most of us who play videogames fall far short of this
level of engagement or caring. For the most passionate players, and now
and then for the ordinary player, games overwhelm and subsume daily
life. However most of the time it is the reverse: we fit games and play into
the rest of our lives. And the games that best fit most portions of our
lives are not amazing, but just good enough. The demands of our run-
of-the mill, everyday lives necessitate a kind of run-of-the mill, everyday
game or form of game playing. This is what this book is about: the kind
of play that is contingent, play that gets us through the day, rather than
makes our day.
For those of us who study games, play, and players, this raises a ques-
tion: is this play that is merely good enough, good enough to study? For
that matter, is it good enough for you to read about? My answer to both
of these questions is affirmative: there is much to learn by taking seri-
ously activities that the people engaged in these practices do not.
On subway, buses, and airplanes and in the passenger seats of auto-
mobiles, in waiting rooms, in lines, in offices and classrooms, people
are playing games on mobile devices. What are they doing? Why this
explosion in mobile play? What is at stake politically, socially, and aes-
thetically in this ubiquitous ludic practice of hand-held play? To answer
these questions, we need to investigate two understudied, even seem-
ingly trivial developments: the apotheosis of videogame culture and the
saturation of modern urban life by mobile technology. I address both of
these phenomena in this book.
To study these topics it is necessary to take on issues that established
design or content-focused approaches to the study of digital games are ill
DOI: 10.1057/9781137396594
Introduction 3
equipped to handle. My focus is on videogames neither as discrete texts
nor as software, but rather on the contexts of mobile play: the when,
where, and why of how these devices are used by people in the world.
What is required for this kind of analysis is a sociological approach:
one based on empirical data, and one that can address the micro-level
practices of players and connect them to large-scale structural changes
in our increasingly ludic and mobilized urban milieu.
The understudied DS
To do this, I focus on the players of one mobile device, the Nintendo DS
(short for Dual Screen), a dedicated hand-held gaming system. I selected
the DS as the organizing object for this study because it is representative
of a range of mobile game systems and is currently the most popular and
successful of such devices. Over 330 million games were sold in the past
year for the Nintendo DS.
By studying the players of the Nintendo DS rather than the device
itself or the games played on it, I aim to shift the focus of videogame
studies from gamespace, the simulated virtual space within the system,
to playspace and what happens outside of the game, and how play fits
into the practices and spaces of everyday life. This is crucial in order to
analyze these practices at both the micro and macro scale, to connect
the minutiae of disparate daily lives to larger structures and transforma-
tions, connections sorely lacking in most academic investigations into
videogames.
While it is the most successful videogame system ever sold in the
USA, there has been no significant scholarly work on the DS in sociol-
ogy, media studies, anthropology, or game studies. Dean Chan’s article
on mobile gaming in Japan, where the DS is also king, only mentions
it twice, and Jesper Jull’s book on causal gaming, A Causal Revolution,
by-passes the device almost totally, even in sections focused on mobile
play or new and novel interfaces. A key reason for this slighting of the
DS is that while nearly ubiquitous, mobile gaming flies under the radar
of not only scholars, but of even its own players. While it is relatively
easy to locate and therefore to study passionate communities of online
gamers and home console hobbyists, it is a much more daunting task to
locate and study people who don’t think of their practices as important
to their identity or their lives.
Doi: 10.1057/9781137396594
