Serious Game (Petros Petridis, George Mantzios, Manolis Patiniotis & Penelope Papailias)

  

Still from 'Oil God' (source: Persuasive Games)

Over the course of the lab, participants will participate in a methodologically focused, experimental workshop dedicated to making and multi-place staging of a serious game related to this year's theme. This workshop will culminate in the staging of the experiment in a public event on the final day of the lab (August 30, 2019). 

Drawing inspiration from open source movement, user listservs, music and video file sharing, social networking, and especially online and offline gaming subcultures, the workshop aims to be user-driven and part-user-designed. Considered as an experiment in problem-based research, the workshop aspires to involve players as gamers whose embodied interactions within a gamespace generate real-time feedback that actively shapes the parameters of that space as a domain of collaborative knowledge production.

This workshop will explore the implications of moving from content orientation to problem orientation in research design and knowledge production. Along these lines, the working hypothesis of this workshop is that collaborative laboratory-oriented research, centered around an open-ended and re-enactable public experiment, can interface theory and practice in and as the development of an interactive game space.

Among the topics we will consider are: Anthropology of games and gaming,  Procedural Rhetoric,  Gamification,  Gamespace.

 

Readings:

  • Bogost, Ian. 2008. "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Katie Salen, ed. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 117-140. 
  • Fuchs, Mathias et al., Eds. 2014. "Introduction." Rethinking Gamification. meson press. Pp. 7-20. 
  • Scharpe, Niklas. 2014. "Gamification and Governmentality." Rethinking Gamification. Mathias Fuchs et al., Eds. meson press. Pp. 21-46. 
  • Sicart, Miguel. 2011. Against Procedurality.The International Journal of Computer Game Reserach. 11 (3). http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap/ 

Supplemental Reading:

  • Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge; London:  Harvard University Press.