Workshop @ PCG2018: Computer Games as Laboratories of Digital Rationality

itu215 August – 2018. 13.30 – 17.00

Location: Design Lab, ITU.

Throughout the human history games served as an “explorer” of the culture. In game interactions the patterns of the main social, communicative, interpretative, gender practices were formed and transmitted. Nowadays computer games largely incur this function. They accumulate the technical capacity of culture and convert it into the mythological and ideological forms. Computer games are at the same time media (=guides) and laboratories where the new experience valuable for the contemporary époque is created by the assemblage of the technical, social and playful activities, which overpasses just the sum of the narrative and ludic elements of the game.

The aim of the workshop is to demonstrate how various sets of cultural values emerge within the computer games as the hybrids of technological, social, corporeal experience, how games become the media which transmit the cultural experience in its entity, how they produce and reproduce practices which are necessary not only in games but also in our everyday life. It is worth talking about the technical (medial) component of the value formation not only on the level of the content, but (and even more important) on the level of the form. The computer game is not considered as an object, but as a medial form that influences not only the practices, attitudes or skills, but the rationality (the reason) of the contemporary digital culture.

 

Program

13.30 – 13.50 – Introduction

Alina Latypova and Konstantin Ocheretyany

13.50 – 14.10 – Apparatuses of Apperception: Hermeneutical Functions of Computer Games

Konstantin Ocheretyany

14.10 – 14.30 – Visual Ecology of Computer Game

Daria Kolesnikova

14.30 – 15.00 – Coffee Break

15.00 – 15.20 – Computer Game as a Media Archive: Chronicles of (Game) Experience

Irina Busurkina

15.20 – 15.40 – Breaks and Loops of Social Practices in Computer Games

Alina Latypova

15.40 – 17.00 – Discussion

 

List participants

Konstantin Ocheretyany, PhD junior grade, senior lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology at the Institute of Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, scientific secretary of the Centre for Media Philosophy (the Institute of Philosophy, SPBU) and collaborator of the Laboratory for Computer Games Research;

Daria Kolesnikova, PhD junior grade, scientific researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University and the Centre for Media Philosophy (the Institute of Philosophy, SPBU), master student at the faculty of media at Bauhaus University Weimar;

Alina Latypova, master of sociology and philosophy, junior scientific researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, collaborator of the Centre for Media Philosophy (the Institute of Philosophy, SPBU) and the Laboratory for Computer Games Research, secretary of the scientific seminar “Visual practices”;

Irina Busurkina, master of cultural studies at Saint Petersburg University, associate researcher in The Research Centre for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones of Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RCCEFZ SI RAS).

 

The Laboratory for Computer Games Research (or CGRL) was created in 2013 in Saint-Petersburg (Russia) within the Centre for Media Philosophy (the Institute of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University) – one of the leading scientific schools in Russia. The Centre conducts annual conferences, edits book and holds seminars on media. The Laboratory for Computer Games Research has also conducted two international conferences (2013, 2014) on computer games and participated in the conferences of the Centre with the panels / round tables / workshops concerning the problematic of CG research. Among the main topics of the laboratory: corporeality, interfaces, identity, subjectivity in CG, computer game as a medium, language of CG, research of marginal practices as glitch art, masocore, etc. In addition, the Laboratory holds regular scientific seminar of the CGRL (organized by Alexandre Lenkevich) since 2013. In 2014 the CGRL published collective monography “Computer Games: Strategies of the Research”, in 2016 the book “Game or Reality: the Game Studies Experience”.

The Laboratory for Computer Games Research on Facebook: https://facebook.com/lab.liki/