Gameology 2.0

Call for Papers and Artworks: University of Florida's "Futures of Digital Studies" Conference

Stephanie Boluk — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:11:14 +0000

Type:

Conference

Submission Deadline:

Sun, 12/20/2009

URL:

http://www.english.ufl.edu/da/2010conference.html

Contact:

Patrick LeMieux

patrick.lemieux@ufl.edu

Contact:

Mauro Carassai

mcarassai@ufl.edu

As a disciplinary field still in search of its own institutional role and its specific methodologies, new media studies cannot but proceed by means of constantly updating its scholarly agenda. Rather than being concerned with issues of reconnection, however, this process seems to be characterized by a tendency to (re)articulate the field in a series of "refreshes" of its cultural page.

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A Zombie Anthology

Stephanie Boluk — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:01:35 +0000

Type:

Edited Collection

Submission Deadline:

Thu, 10/15/2009

URL:

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/33856

http://www.stephanieboluk.com/

Contact:

Wylie Lenz

cwlenz@ufl.edu

Textual examples of the zombie genre have increased exponentially during the last four decades.We now see the zombie not only in film, but video games, books, television shows, music, playing cards, comics, and various forms of new media. Noting the polysemic nature of the figure of the zombie, filmmaker Joe Dante has remarked, "The zombie genre has been politicized ever since George Romero made Night of the Living Dead. The whole idea of zombie as metaphors became very powerful." Indeed, we deploy the metaphor in a staggering variety of contexts and to (seemingly) unrelated concepts.

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Hey, something seems different around here ...

zach — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:29:39 +0000

Hello. Welcome to Gameology 2.0 (beta).

The site you see before you represents a major upgrade to Gameology.org. We're still running things with Drupal, but it's a much more advanced Drupal (6.x) than the ancient (4.6) software we were running (unpatched) at the old site. This new site should be much more stable, and much easier to use.

One major difference is that non-users can now become users simply by creating an account. This account will let you post comments (though you can still post comments anonymously) and submit CFPs, Events and Links for moderation.

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CFP Eludamos Perspectives: Next Gen

Darshana Jayemanne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:05:02 +0000

Type:

Journal Issue

Submission Deadline:

Sat, 08/01/2009

URL:

http://www.eludamos.org

Contact:

Darshana Jayemanne

escapismvelocity@gmail.com

We are opening the call for a special issue of Eludamos, titled: "Next Gen."
Guest editors are Thomas H. Apperley, Darshana Jayemanne and Christian McCrea.

Console gaming has already had more than one ‘Next Generation’. PC gamers feverishly upgrade their rigs with each new state of the art FPS. Periodisation is often a major preoccupation for critics and publics interested in other media, but in the case of videogames the rapid pace of technical development seems to set the agenda of generational change. Games are caught up, culturally as well as aesthetically and technically, in their own futurism: each generation claims to be both anticipation and fulfillment of an imagined horizon of experience. Simultaneously, older technologies find new uses and contexts within the very conditions of their supposed obsolescence. Gaming is constantly speculating on its own future and recalling its past in order to coordinate a restless present. Just how coherent are gaming’s generations, and is the adoption of such classifications from the wider culture useful or counter-productive for academic game studies?

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The Kohen Gadol has Horns: the Fates of the Giants in Dominions 3

Tof — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:30:06 +0000

Abstract:

This essay presents an analysis of the deeply layered mythological, apocryphal and midrashic references in a faction of pseudo-/crypto-Jewish Giants (Nephilim and Rephaim) in the PBEM strategy game Dominions 3.

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Erik Loyer's Stories as Instruments or Why Isn't Bigger Always Better?

Tanner — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:31:25 +0000

Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.”

Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of plot-centric progression and character focused instrumentality (his recent innovative iPhone game Ruben and Lullaby is a particularly illustrative example of this trajectory). Loyer points to the genre of the musical as an important influence and model for new forms of storytelling in games. Musical arias feature characters that step just outside the world in moments of intense expression. Loyer analogized this as a blend of first and third person perspective. The singing character in the musical is locked into the narrative space contextually yet elaborating that context. The best games, according to Loyer, allow the player to assume this role: doing things as they should be done logically in the world but also knowing what one is doing.

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National Center for the History of Electronic Games

Tanner — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:02:15 +0000

The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY houses the Center for the History of Electronic Games. According to their website the museum "collects, studies, and interprets electronic games and related material and the ways in which electronic games are changing how people play, learn, and connect with each other."

They have a collection of 15,000 items and, according to Kotaku, every console ever made on display.

Without question, this is game geek heaven and a productive development for game studies. I have heard similar rumblings from other academic game research centers about developing collections of materials for the study of games, but funding, especially right now, seems to be difficult to acquire for this incredibly necessary effort in the development of game studies. Developing these kinds of collections would be an immense help to those of us interested in historical approaches to game studies specifically in light of the hardware-centric scholarship being done in MIT's platform studies.

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Art Games by Patrick LeMieux

Stephanie Boluk — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:20:14 +0000

Art Games is a solo exhibition by Patrick LeMieux, an MFA Candidate in Digital Media Arts in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. The exhibition features custom video games which explore concepts of mark-making, viewer agency, subjectivity, and gameplay as critical entryways into the history and production of art. Each video game locates the figure of a seminal artist within the landscape of their own artwork. Modeled after the juxtaposition of Ad Reinhardt's stark, black monochromes and wry, pedagogical comics, the video games stage imaginary confrontations between the artists and their minimal works--interaction signifying interpretation.

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Becoming Dragon: Race and the War Machine in Battle for Wesnoth's “Flight to Freedom”

Tof — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:58:06 +0000

Well, its been months, rather than the “week” I projected after my last post, but that's life in Graduate school. This post also wound up needing to be much longer (three times as long) despite having a much narrower focus. Also, I haven't added anchors to make the footnotes work. Oh well - I'll try to make time to do so tomorrow. As this post involves a critique of the conventions of Fantasy as a genre, including J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings (LotR), I hope to to draw at least as many hostile posts as I did with “Muslim Massacre, Roach Toaster and Iji.” We'll see.

Before I can get into Battle for Wesnoth (Wesnoth) specifically, I need to establish a baseline for racial and postcolonial issues in fantasy fiction, including games. This is the part that would be least controversial in a purely academic setting, but that I expect will be most controversial on-line.

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Muslim Massacre, Roach Toaster and Iji: Prejudice, Offense, Violence and Hope

Tof — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:12:30 +0000

One of the things that is too often lacking in Games Studies, and almost completely in popular writing about games, is comparison of work by different creators across the mosty obvious lines of "genre." In less than a month, Play this Thing has reviewed Tr00jg's turn-based strategy/puzzle game Roach Toaster, Remar's multiplot platformer Iji and Sigvatr's condemnation garnering Robotron-like Muslim Massacre as if these highly contemporary games were completely irrelevant to each other. (nota bene: in addition to being contemporary, these games are all single-programmer freeware)

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