Hugh Davies

Core Members

Hugh Davies is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher. He is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform. Hugh’s practice explores histories of media devices and cultures of games and play in the Asia Pacific Region.

His curation of videogames has included the 2018 Longitude exhibitionand involves ongoing consultancy with museums internationally. His practice-led research seeks to map new histories and futures for intercultural communication and understandings of place in the Asia Pacific Region.

Hugh Davies is currently developing new ethnographic methodologies for researching games in both actual and screen spaces. He recently pioneered embodied videogames ethnographic techniques in his project Hong Kong Architecture in the Videogames Vernacular. This project paired the exploration of Hong Kong in 150 videogames with real-world psychogeography in that city.

More recently he completed an audio-game walking tour prototype called TIMeR with Olivia Guntarik and Troy Innocent. Featuring stories of land, river and sky with Boonwurrung elder N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs, the TIMeR experience encouraged players to reconsider understandings of various locations across the Melbourne CBD. This research forms part of a larger Linkage Project to create the cultural trails in Queensland and Bendigo supported by Creative Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Hugh is currently co-authoring a book on Minecraft with Larissa Hjorth, Ingrid Richardson and William Balmford.

Google Scholar Link: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=FZyE98cAAAAJ&hl=en

Website: https://hughdavies.net

Labs

Creativity, Learning, Digital Arts, and Design

Creativity, Learning, Digital Arts, and Design positions research participants as ‘creative agents’ and authors of their own experience.

Publications

(In Press) An ethnographic co-design approach to promoting diversity in the games industry

Fanology: Hand-fans in the prehistory of mobile devices

Situating ‘careful surveillance’

Travel Frog: Traversing cultural borders with mobile games

Mobile Minecraft: Negotiated space and perceptions of play in Australian families

Understanding Games and Game Cultures

Digital games are one of the most significant media interfaces of contemporary life. Games today interweave with the social, economic, material, and political complexities of living in a digital age. But...

Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity

Drawing on ethnographic insights, this book seeks to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural practice and an interdisciplinary phenomenon.