[-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions

[Felan Parker]

Hello world!
Thanks to Sandra for the invitation to join in this discussion, and to empyre for hosting.
My interest in these questions is on the socio-cultural side of things, and how the concept of experimental games (or artgames, or weird games, or honest games)  is mobilized in different empirical contexts to different ends. What does it mean for something to be experimental in a given time, place, community, etc.? For me, this is not just about game-making practices, although certainly production is important. I also want to look at how these practices are taken up by players and critics, and how they help constitute what exactly is experimental (or artistic, or weird, or honest) about them. As Sandra's intro suggests, critics and scholars in particular play a crucial role in discursively framing and sustaining what might be called the taste publics for various kinds of experimental games, but we might also consider the social-material networks of distribution through which these games circulate, and the wider cultural frameworks outside of gaming culture specifically that constitute ideas of experimentalism and weirdness ("paracinematic" communities of reception for B-movies and trash cinema, for example, form the basis for the appreciation of amateurish, broken, or otherwise "bad" games as exemplified by Glorious Trainwrecks http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/). Collectively, these all constitute what I call in my own research an art world assemblage, a contingent and always-shifting system of interactions between diverse elements that produces aesthetic experiences, cultural and/or material capital, and social legitimacy for those involved. I'll leave it there for now, but I hope as the discussion proceeds we can start discussion specific experimental game assemblages in greater depth.
Felan


From: s.danilovic at mail.utoronto.ca
To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2014 04:30:54 +0000
Subject: [-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions

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Week 1 (March 3-9): Bart Simon, mrghosty, Felan Parker.

I would like to introduce the first three guests of this discussion, Bart Simon, mrghosty and Felan Parker.


Questions of the week: Experimental games - tensions

1.     Is the conceptual category of 'experimental games' a productive category of analysis? What are some inherent assumptions, biases, challenges?

2.     What are some fruitful ways to think about experimental games in the context of problematic and already problematized institutional understandings of experimental and avant-garde art/practice?

3.     How are experimental digital games troubling mainstream games culture and/or game studies scholarship?

4.     What are some intersections between experimental digital games, indie games and art/digital media art?


Bart Simon (CA) is the current director of the Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies research crosses a variety of genres, platforms and modalities looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. Some of his work is represented in journals such as Games and Culture, Game Studies and Loading. His current research on social imagination and gameplay and cultural economies of the indie game scene are funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada and the Canadian network on New Media, Animation and Games (GRAND NCE).

mrghosty (aka skot deeming) (CA) is an artist, curator, researcher and doctoral student in Concordia University's Individualized Program in the Humanities. As a key figure in the Canadian video game art scene, and a researcher at Concordia's Amplab, andTAGlab, skot draws upon a wealth of practical experience and theoretical knowledge while investigating the intersections between gamer cultures, hacker cultures and new media art practices.

Felan Parker (CA) is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Communication & Culture at York University in Toronto, specializing in digital game studies and cinema and media studies. He holds an MA and BA Hon. in Film Studies from Carleton University. His dissertation examines the cultural legitimation of digital games as art in a variety of different contexts, and other research interests include transmedia franchises, genre, authorship, paratexts, and canon formation.




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Week 1 (March 3-9): Bart Simon, mrghosty, Felan Parker. 




I would like to introduce the first three guests of this discussion, Bart Simon, mrghosty and Felan Parker. 







Questions of the week: Experimental games - tensions





1.     Is the conceptual category of 'experimental games' a productive category of analysis? What are some inherent assumptions, biases, challenges? 



2.     What are some fruitful ways to think about experimental games in the context of problematic and already problematized institutional understandings of experimental and avant-garde art/practice?



3.     How are experimental digital games troubling mainstream games culture and/or game studies scholarship?



4.     What are some intersections between experimental digital games, indie games and art/digital media art?






Bart Simon (CA) is the current director of the Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. His areas of expertise include game studies, science
 and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies research crosses a variety of genres, platforms and modalities looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. Some of his work is represented in journals such as
 Games and Culture, Game Studies and Loading. His current research on social imagination and gameplay and cultural economies of the indie game scene are funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada and the Canadian network on New Media, Animation
 and Games (GRAND NCE).



mrghosty (aka skot deeming) (CA) is an artist, curator, researcher and doctoral student in Concordia University's Individualized Program in the Humanities. As a key figure in the Canadian video game art scene, and a researcher at Concordia's Amplab, andTAGlab,
 skot draws upon a wealth of practical experience and theoretical knowledge while investigating the intersections between gamer cultures, hacker cultures and new media art practices.



Felan Parker (CA) is a PhD candidate (ABD) in Communication & Culture at York University in Toronto, specializing in digital game studies and cinema and media studies. He holds an MA and BA Hon. in Film Studies from Carleton University. His dissertation
 examines the cultural legitimation of digital games as art in a variety of different contexts, and other research interests include transmedia franchises, genre, authorship, paratexts, and canon formation.








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