Category: digital culture

This hefty tome is definitely worth all the extra publicity we can spare: Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola have done major cultural service to game, culture and art studies (as well as to the history) by collecting and putting together an amazing volume of photos, descriptive texts and cultural essays to celebrate the fine art of live action role-playing, Nordic style. Great work, congratulations. For more, see: http://nordiclarp.wordpress.com/

May 5^th-6^th, 2011, University of Tampere, FINLAND

The games industry carries the image of innovation and creativity, but still we know relatively little about the innovation processes that take place within the industry. To date, games and innovation have been studied in several disparate fields, including cultural studies, design research and industrial economics and management. Perhaps due to such a fragmented nature of academic work on the subject, the bulk of the influential work on games and innovation is found in practically oriented guidebooks authored by experienced games industry experts.

The present seminar aims at bringing together scholars of games and innovation from diverse fields and stimulating dialogue between them. Moreover, the goal of the seminar is to encourage the further development of rigorous academic research on the topic while keeping the work accessible to game professionals.

The seminar is welcoming submissions on the praxis of game development, the characteristics of innovation in game context, supply and demand for innovation in games, creativity and games, and the relationship of game innovation and legal practices. It has been argued that the growing level of concentration of the games industry has rendered innovation virtually non-existent in game development. The submissions are encouraged to comment on this claim. What is innovation in games? How does it manifest? Can you measure it? How has it changed since digital games were first introduced? Is creativity in games domain-specific? What is the status of innovation praxis within games industry?

Full text of the CFP is here: http://gamesandinnovationseminar.wordpress.com/cfp/

I am visiting the Homo Ludens 2.0 conference in Utrech this week, organised by the Playful Identities project. Below is the text of my abstract:

“The Culture and Identity of Casual Online Play”

It is relatively easy to find examples of deep, immersive play that has effects on personal or social identity: an intensive psychodrama, live action role-play, and even some massively multiplayer online (MMO) game players report experiences that have affected the ways they perceive themselves, or human condition in general. Most of contemporary play, however, is not deep or transformative in a similar manner. This talk will focus on casual gameplay that takes place in Facebook games such as Farmville (70-80 million users in 2010), as well as through mobile phone applications such as Foursquare (a location-based game for smartphones). The aim is to discuss the significance and meaning making activities that takes place among this kind of games, and highlight their contribution to game cultures.

Casual play is typically characterised by short sessions of playful interaction with games that are not particularly challenging, complex or extensive by character. It is also possible to play this kind of ‘casual games’ in a manner that is very dedicated and immersive, but then the play style approaches that of core or hardcore gamers, rather than casual play. The non-immersive character of casual play allows participants to divide their attention to other activities and issues beside that of gameplay, making such games particularly suitable for various social uses and purposes.

Based on a series of research projects and participant observation, the expanding range of casual game experiences will be discussed, as well as the social, entertaining and cultural uses which the contemporary online casual games have been adopted for. From this perspective, casual play appears to be an enabler in different personal and social processes, sometimes momentarily moving to the centre of attention, while mostly keeping in the periphery. While the vocal parts of game cultures have mostly articulated the pleasures of strongly immersive gameplay, the players of contemporary casual games have started to put forward an alternative view on what constitutes ‘good gameplay’, based on a slightly different aesthetics of play.

– In my final paper my intention is to focus on the internal tensions and conflicts that relate to setting ‘casual’ in relation to identity, or creation of culture around such an internally ambiguous concept.