Name: Jesper Juul, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" by MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing in GAME STUDIES
Duration: 1 h 9 min 4 s
Description: This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.

GAME STUDIES

Mary Flanagan pushes the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Mary Flanagan, "The Unanticipated Processes And Consequences Underlying Games"

We live in the era of computation and play. Everywhere we look, there is a computer, translating the world around us into patterns for production of labor or consumption of entertainment. And now more than ever, we play everywhere: our work should be playful, as it should be our dieting, our love life, and even our leisure. We play as much as we can, in this world of computers.

In this talk Sicart will look at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers. He will propose a theory of play that includes the materiality of computation in its definition of the activity, and will suggest that our forms of playing with machines are both forms of surrendering to the pleasures of computation, and forms of creative resistance to the reduction of our worlds to computable events.

Miguel Sicart is a games scholar based at the IT University of Copenhagen. For the last decade his research has focused on ethics and computer games, from a philosophical and design theory perspective. He has two books published: The Ethics of Computer Games; and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press 2009, 2013). His current work focuses on playful design, and will be the subject of a new book called Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014). Miguel teaches game and play design, and his research is now focused on toys, materiality, and play.

Miguel Sicart: “Playing in the Age of Computing Machinery"

This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.

Jesper Juul, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player"

Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990′s and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games, or Eurogames, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century.

Attendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work.

Dr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637, a board game published in 2009. In addition, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages, published in 2010 by Information Today.

Scott Nicholson, "Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design"

In the last few years a new trend of designing video games intended to fulfill a serious purpose through impacting the players in real life contexts has emerged. These games claim to raise awareness about social and political issues such as inequity, injustice, poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, and oppression. Their intent is to reach a specific purpose beyond pure entertainment. But what are the specific attributes of purposeful games and how can they be researched? Which game design challenges arise and how are they addressed? How do players make meaning of their game play experiences in general? And what is the future of purposeful games research?

In this talk three perspectives of Mitgutsch’s recent research on purposeful games are outlined: To begin, insights from a recent study on meaningful experiences in players’ lives are examined and the research method of playographies is discussed. In the second part, a research-based game design project on subversive game design and recursive learning is presented and the background of the game Afterland is highlighted. Finally, the narrative of serious games and the design of purposeful games are discussed. On this basis, recent research results will be explored and future challenges for game design and purposeful games research will be outlined.

Dr. Konstantin Mitgutsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. In 2010 he was a Max Kade Fellow at the Education Arcade at the Program of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He worked at the University of Vienna for several years and published books in the field of game studies and education. Since 2007 he organizes and chairs the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI).

Konstantin Mitgutsch, "Purposeful Games: Research and Design"

“This game meant everything to me” – statements like this emphasize how players encounter deep and meaningful experiences playing video games in their lives. Playful mediated experiences strike players’ minds at particular phases of their lives, in relation to the space and time they inhabit, and in the context of specific subjective experiences. However, these transformative experiences cannot be standardized; they do not happen to everyone through the same game or at the same time and place. The question arises, how we can trace these highly subjective experiences. What methods are appropriate for researching, how players put meaning into their games and how their biographies reflect these experiences?

In this talk the methodology of playographies – a visualization of playful experiences as part of qualitative biographic interviews – is introduced. Insights from Mitgutsch’s research on transformative playful experiences are provided and the development of this mixed-method research tool will be outlined. Besides demonstrating the methods and presenting recent results, the theoretical framework guiding this study are outlined. It will be reflected why and how games foster transformative experiences of players. On this basis the limits and potentials of this research method will be debated and future research challenges will be discussed. This talk is accompanied with a small self-exploration exercise…

Konstantin Mitgutsch is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focuses on learning processes in computer games, empirical research on players’ experience, educational game design, and transformative learning in games. He worked in the fields of learning, media studies, computer games and age rating systems at the University of Vienna for several years. In 2010 he was Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Education Arcade at CMS. In his recent research project he investigates learning patterns in games and different methodologies of game evaluation.

Tracing Playographies: Methods and Approaches to Research Transformative Experiences in Video Games

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