Group items tagged

"The future of games culture: I can see a time where we sell tickets to stories, ones that are told through the written word, film, games and theatre to various degrees. I would love to be in a violent shipwreck as part of an immersive experience and then go home and play a survival horror game continuing that story."

From HASTAC: "In the unsettledness of this field, this forum recognizes those disciplinary forces that frequently attempt to silo the study of digital games into a narrow set of purposes, such as edutainment or gamification, or relegates digital gaming completely into the margins of "low" or "pop" culture. We seek to address how games have contributed to the digital humanities specifically, and how they might impact its future. In other words, where is video game studies in the digital humanities? And more broadly where can we identify intersections in cultural criticism, video game studies, and video game development? "

I'm reading this book right now...Here is the blurb from MIT: "For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games-games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry-and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of "playing house" include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims; her discussion of language play includes puns, palindromes, Yoko Ono's Instruction Paintings, and Jenny Holzer's messages in LED. Flanagan also looks at artists' alternative computer-based games, examining projects from Persuasive Games and Gonazalo Frasca and other games created through the use of interventionist strategies in the design process. And she explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns-among them Darfur, worldwide poverty, and AIDS-can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice-which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium-can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices."

Looks like a great read! I'm adding this to my Amazon book list.

This appears to be an extension of the "Influence of Gaming" transcript

The facilities are following scholar­ship. Games are now used in English classes studying interactive narratives, media-studies classes looking at the cultural impact of violent games, as well as courses in game design offered at about 300 colleges. "The argument is really pretty simple," says David S. Carter, an engineering librarian at Michigan. "We have faculty who are doing stuff involved in video games, so the library needs to be doing something to support that teaching and that research."

Article by Chris Chesher analyzing player relationships to console games; key term/concept is "glaze", which results from combining (theoretically) "gaze" and "glance" as modalities for relating to cinema and tv screens...

From Slashdot pertaining to the pros and cons related to Wikipedia as the source for video game history: "Wikipedia requires reliable, third-party sources for content to stick, and most of the sites that covered MUDs throughout the '80s were user-generated, heavily specialized or buried deep within forums, user groups and newsletters. Despite their mammoth influence on the current gaming landscape, their insular communities were rarely explored by a nascent games journalist crowd. ... while cataloging gaming history is a vitally important move for this culture or art form, and Wikipedia makes a very valiant contribution, the site can't be held accountable as the singular destination for gaming archeology. But as it's often treated as one, due care must be paid to the site to ensure that its recollection doesn't become clouded or irresponsible, and to ensure its coalition of editors and administrators are not using its stringent rule set to sweep anything as vitally relevant as MUDS under the rug of history."

"Ian Bogost, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture who studies video games, puts it simply: "If you want to study things, you have to have them."