Emotional
Gaming
Workshop + Sympoisium
26.-28. Juni 2008
Hosts:
university of
applied sciences Augsburg
Ludwig Maximilians Universität München
responsible organizer:
Horst Konietzny
Partners:
Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien
Kulturreferat München
26.+27. Juni 2008
Hochschule Augsburg
workshops mit max. 40 Teilnehmern
Die Entwicklung der Computerspiele hat, vor allem durch die exponentiell wachsenden Mächtigkeiten ihrer Engines, im Bereich visueller Möglichkeiten enormes Potential entwickelt. Doch nach dem steilen Anstieg der technischen Innovationskurve auf Seiten der Spiele ist es nun an der Zeit, sich stärker um die Spieler zu kümmern. Ihre affektive Bindung an Spielgeschehen und Mitspieler ist der Schlüssel zum Erfolg eines Spieles.
Die emotionale Beteiligung der Spieler ist weit facettenreicher, als es die mediendominierenden Shooter Games vermuten lassen. Wie sieht es zum Beispiel mit nicht aggressionsbasierten Konzepten, die liebevolle Zuwendung fordern statt schnelles Töten zu trainieren, aus? In der Erforschung der narrativen und emotionalen Intelligenz von Spielkonzepten liegen brachliegende Entwicklungschancen. Hier Wege aufzuzeigen, ist Ziel des Symposiums.
Es sollen Strategien zur emotionalen Involvierung von Spielern in unterschiedliche Spielgenres, von klassischen PC Games über Mobile Games und Pervasive Gaming Konzepte, kritisch reflektiert, beispielhaft vorgeführt und praktisch erprobt werden. Eigene Beachtung finden Projekte, die in Kunstkontexten entsanden sind und medienpädagogische Fragestellungen. Die Verbindung von Theorie und gestalterischer Praxis ist dabei entscheidendes Kriterium für das Design der Veranstaltung.
28. June 2008
Symposium
LMU München
Bayerische Landszentral für Neue Medien
The Munich symposium which will follow the two days workshop in Augsburg on Saturday 28th is supposed to give a broader theoretical and philosophical view on the specific aspect of gaming and emotionality.
The multiple ways in which virtual space and real world can be connected to and interfere with each other draw attention to the fact that highly affective and emotional links can be established between human realm, virtual topography and technical devices.
The gaming process itself is determined by non-traditional spaciotemporal forms of communication between pragmatic behaviour and theatrical ‘acting’, by alterable collective networks of players superimposing each other and differing within themselves, as well as by the specific infrastructures made up by the interplay of reality and virtuality. Thus, game culture – taken as a specific form of ‘distributed aethetics’, as aisthesia of postmodern life – is marked by dynamic configurations and feedback loops, which lead to stable changes, mutual adaptations, and preliminary transformations not only on a merely technical, but on an aesthetic and social level as well.
Moreover, the dynamic distribution of ‘gaming power’ to complex de-centralized networks of disparate individuals, apparatuses, and media authorities is able to dissolve the rigid borders between production and consumption, as well as those between technical effectiveness, economic efficiency, and affective-performative dispositions. This becomes evident by the interweaving of functional action – which is constitutive not only for the game design process but also for the gaming process – performative testing and playful maneuvering as an aspect of a comprehensive distributed game aesthetic.
The immersiveness of this aesthetic might even constitute an open energetic plateau where the boundaries between humans and machines, between biology and technology, between ‘inner feelings’ and mere technical impulses get blurred, or at least undergo profound shiftings. Not only might this have a striking effect on our social and moral terms but on our future understanding of humanity as well, including the human body as basic ‘instrument’ for gaining knowlegde, experience and for encountering the surrounding world.
The lectures held at the symposium will centre around the questions raised by the interweaving of formal and informal, disciplined and undisciplined processes of playful experience and of ludic communication modes. The meaning of ‘implicit knowledge’ as well as of sensual-affective creativity (this goes, above all, for the exploration of physical design knowledge) as conditional criteria of gaming action will be discussed as possibility of a playfully practical and quite individually different acquisition of ‘post-human’ lifestyles, in which the demarcations between technology, economy, and game, but also between virtuality and reality undergo profound shifts and penetrations.
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Dr. Jörg von Brincken
Game Culture-Project of the LMU-Ideenfonds-Project :
Networking: On the Performance of Distributed Aethetics
Institute for Theatre and Performance Studies
LMU Munich
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