what and where is an indie game workshop
TRANSCRIPT
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Workshop for Creative Territories Seminar, Utrecht, August 2014
What and Where is an Indie Game?
‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’
George E. P. Box
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Orientations
• Digital Games as entertainment/leisure, as commercial, artistic endeavour, as media/social/sociological phenomenon….
• As object of interest for ‘creative economy’
• And for cultural geography
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Mapping exercises
• Darchen and Tremblay, ‘Policies for Creative Clusters’, European Planning Studies 2014
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‘Creative Cluster’ for Darchen and Tremblay
• Community of creative people• Catalysing place where people, relationships,
ideas and talents can spark each other• Environment offering diversity, stimuli and
freedom of expression DePropis and Hypponen (2008)
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[vs ‘technology’ or industry cluster]
• Codified, not ‘tacit knowledge’• Silos ok, no need for relationships, diversity,
shared knowledge building….• Logistical, infrastructure benefits of colocation
in a particular place (transport hub, tax regime, resource availability)
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‘Creative’ mapping
Gibson, Brennan-Horley & Warren, ‘Geographic Information Technologies for Cultural Research’, Cultural Trends 19:4 (2010),325-48
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‘Cross-flows’ of movements of people to creative work sites
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‘Anything can be mapped, hypothetically…’
but recall Box’s dictum that all models are wrong, but some are useful.
‘Catch and release’ (GPS tracks) of ‘creative workers in Sydney
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Models (and maps) are
• Necessary but faulty• Stiegler: pharmaka: poison and cure. We need
them to navigate, interpret, act in the world.
• Some different models/maps/diagrams of indie games
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Material/Virtual
• Indie games as produced and played forms/objects
• As material and mental:• Stiegler: the who and the what in a co-
inventive dynamic; • Digital materiality: information is not
immaterial but ‘matter in transition’
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Transitions and determinations
• Transition of materials (ecological)• Of artefacts and cultural practices (globality)• Of spatio-temporal ‘structures’ : 24/7,
virtuality, etc
• Cf also Karen Barad: ‘local determinations’ of material fluxes, flows make up ‘reality’ as known, representable, understandable
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Different (maybe ‘useful’) orientations
• On cultural value, significance
• On local, global relations
• On economic, political, ecological dimensions
• On historical and cultural imaginaries/archives
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Step 1: On the material/ecological
• Read p. 1-5 of Sy Taffel, ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Ecology and Material Cost’ Culture Machine 13 (2012), 1-28, at http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/24
• Try to apply to producing an indie game; then playing an indie game.
• Make some lists, situate some technologies and material/energy flows
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Step 2: Mental/cultural places
• Identify sources/inspirations for game virtual spaces
• Try to situate these, geographically, historically:
• Egs?
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• Tank Hero: Laser Wars (Clapfoot 2011, Toronto):: Battlezone Atari (1980) … Silicon Valley
• Arcade games age: 1970s-80s US, Japan, UK Computer entertainment ‘revolution’: Mobile Games and/as Repetition
• Mechanical War + Sci Fi: cold war computer technoscience/gaming and simulation
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Step 3: Mix ingredients together
• Experiment with synthesising the two kinds of modellings of indie game materiality and spatiotemporality
• Discuss useful working out or ‘interesting failure’