kennedy and crogan 'identity and interdisciplinarity in games and play research' utrecht...
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Identity and Interdisciplinarity in Games
and Play ResearchUtrecht University 2014
The Creative Territories Project Exploring Cultural Values of Indie Games Collaboration
Introductions
CroganDigital Cultures Research Centre
Helen KennedyUniversity of Brighton
Project partners: The Bristol Games Hub
Debbie Rawlings, Co-director; Principal of Auroch Digital
Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Josh JarrettPh D ResearcherDigital Cultures Research Centre
Network members Seth Giddings, Digital Cultures Research Centre
Daniel Ashton, Bath Spa University
Brian MacDonald, Scottish Game Jams, and Glasgow Caledonian University
Alex Darby, Arch Creatives, Leamington Spa, Co-founder
‘Creative Economy’
• Major focus of research today including for AHRC
• First funding stream dedicated to video games research had this emphasis from the Nesta ‘Next Gen’ report (2011) recommendation to:
support better research-oriented university/industry collaborations with a view to accelerating innovation and maintaining competitive advantage in the video games industry
Creativity ?• Often assumed, or missing in creative economy models
• Emphasis on economic, legal and infrastructural conditions
• Economy as quantitatively imagined: export revenue, job growth, UK’s ‘immaterial’ economy ‘brand’
• Cf Brighton Fuse Report: success = ‘fused’ companies with ICT /programming + Arts / Design trained members
• Cf NESTA Creative Clusters and Innovation (2010) report: … ‘value chain linkages and shared infrastructures’ , ‘digitisation’ and ‘digital revolution’ in internal R&D as major innovation driver
Creative Territories: To explore creativity in context
• Creativity as collectively enabled
• As cultural (as well as) economic value
• Multiple motivations: questions of value, ‘investment’, community identity, sustainable (not boom/bust)
Another way in….
‘Games and Technicity’ (2009)
• Games in context of wider technocultural dynamics
• As industrial technical forms
• New aesthetics, new possibilities + older questions, challenges of culture, society, politics
Bernard StieglerPhilosopher, cultural activist
Technicity: Human is ‘technical being’ co-evolved in dynamic with technical evolution
Eg. ‘Reading brain’ thesis (Maryanne Wolf); neural plasticity
Vital scientific, but also philosophical, political, economic, ethical etc insight
‘Programme Industries’
• central role of industrial media in globalisation, contemporary technocultural, economic developments
• Revised Adorno-Horkheimer cultural critique: homogenisation of experience, programming of desires, management of attention;
• ‘Proletarianisation’ of consumer (after the worker): our dependence on the messages, and the devices, on their default modes
Jonathan Crary:Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Today: Always on, 24/7 media
‘not only incites in the individual subject and exclusive focus on getting, having, winning, gawking, squandering, and deriding, but is fully interwoven with mechanisms of control that maintain the superfluousness and powerlessness of the subject of its demands (32).’
Stiegler• But industrial technologies, media, are only
means of improving situation, locally and globally
• Means of empowerment, de-proletarianization, • Eg. pc vs tablet; • or more substantially, the • Raspberry PI, Fablabs, etc
Indie games potentials
• small scale, independent model has potential to transform industrial production of mediated experience
• Diversify expression, ‘symbol-making’• New experiences, engagements• Critical, cultural shifters
Papers Please (Lucas Pope, 2013 )
Narcoguerra (Auroch, 2013)
Hubert Robert, Plan for the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, 1796
Copy-paste
Flappy Bird (Dong Nguyen, 2013)
‘Mindie’ trajectory:
Replication / Absorption
Cf Alistair Doulin, ‘Bridging the Gap Between Mainstream and Indie’ , http://www.doolwind.com/blog/mindie-bridging-the-gap-between-mainstream-and-indie/
Rovio Entertainment 2009 -
Game cultures issues• Eg. the Anita Saarkesian phenomenon
• Production context continuities with industrial/technology sectors, neoliberal workplaces, social media abuses, with mainstream patriarchal audiovisual media
Our interests
• co-location, creativity, collectivity and/vs global, immaterial notion of ‘the industry’
• Cultures of making and their transformative potential
• Technical, material, economic-political connections of indie game making
Contacts/comms
• Website creativeterritories.dcrc.org.uk
• Tweet to @CreativTurf ; #creativeterritories
Network (not only School)• Local research still wanted; you are part of the
network now
• You will be contributing today!
• Final Workshop in November at DCRC:• Includes Jen Jenson, Celia Pearse, Joost, and lots
more…
• Somefunding available…