Locating the Game in Computer Games: From Game Structure to Game Semantics
Espen Aarseth 2009-12-03
Title
Locating the Game in Computer Games: From Game Structure to Game Semantics
Description
The talk will focus on a few central problems in Game Studies: The question of where to locate game meaning, game defintions and how to avoid them, and the conundrum of games vs stories. In all these problems, the choice of ludic perspective (e.g. are games artifacts, systems or activities?) limits our ability to discuss games across disciplinary boundaries. What is needed is a metaperspective that will offer the field a chance to move on.
Pokéwalkers, Mafia Dons, and Football Fans: Play Mobile with Me
Katie Salen 2010-01-14
Title
Pokéwalkers, Mafia Dons, and Football Fans: Play Mobile with Me
Description
This talk will address a theoretical reconfiguration of experience, a repositioning of the techno-social within the domains of mobility, games, and play, and embodiment. The ideas aim to counter the notion that our experience with videogames (and digital media more generally), is largely "virtual" and disembodied-or at most exclusively audiovisual.
Notions of the virtual and disembodied support an often-tacit belief that technologically mediated experiences count for nothing if not perceived and valued as human. It is here where play in particular can be put to work, be made to highlight and clarify, for it is in play that we find this value of humanity most wholly embodied. Further, it is in considering the design of the metagame that questions regarding the play experience can be most powerfully engaged. While most of any given game’s metagame emerges from play communities and their larger social worlds (putting it out of reach of game design proper), mobile platforms have the potential to enable a stitching together of these experiences:
experiences held across time, space, communities, and bodies. This coming together thus represents a convergence not just only of media, participants, contexts, and technologies, but of human experience itself. This coming together is hardly neat, nor fully realized. It is, if nothing else, multifaceted and worthy of further study. It is a convergence in which the dynamics of screen play are reengaged.
The Dual Structure: Experiencing Digital Games in the Intersection of Gameplay and Media
Frans Mäyrä 2010-02-04
Title
The Dual Structure: Experiencing Digital Games in the Intersection of Gameplay and Media
Description
The fundamental character of games has been the source of considerable theoretical discussion in the field of emerging field of game studies during the last decade. The lecture will focus the idea that games can most fruitfully be approached in dialectical manner: as particular hybrid phenomena that exists both as certain type of digital media, and as acts or performances within and around them. The philosophical issue of the ‘being’ of games becomes thus re-proposed as a question of methodology into their meaning, use, and cultural significance: if games are what we do with them, think about them, and speak about them, how should we approach them in scholarly practice? Drawing from examples of some recent research projects, the lecture will illustrate the challenges and benefits of doing interdisciplinary and multi-methodological study into games cultures. Are there ways to consolidate the requirements of fundamental research with that of applied, design oriented and collaborative research practice typical of today’s industry and innovation oriented research world?
Visualization as a New Language of Cultural Theory
Lev Manovich 2010-04-22
Title
Visualization as a New Language of Cultural Theory
Description
Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large.
However, the use of visualization in cultural research is still in its infancy. Based on the work in the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego over last two years, I will present a number of visualization techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research. The talks will be illustrated by example from our current work including visualizations of 100 hours of game play and 1 million Manga pages.