Lisa Brown Jaloza

Base

Country

United States

Institutional affiliation

Laguna College of Art + Design

Title

Adjunct Faculty

Research interests relevant to game philosophy

While interactive narratives designed for mobile devices, tablets, and laptops—what _Paradoxa_ has termed “small screen fictions”—may appear to resist translation to other media forms, the very slippages they enact between visual art, music, narrative, and more in true Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk fashion presage the blurring of “video game” itself as a discrete artistic category. Simogo’s _Device 6_ serves as a salient case study, particularly in light of the studio’s attempts to break down the digital/IRL divide via-à-vis it’s IGF Test Kiosk as well as the game’s inclusion in _Beauty: Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial_. Ultimately, while Simogo’s attempts to render its narrative and puzzle-based mobile game as a haptic experience located concretely in both time and space are entertaining as well as admirable, of far more pressing concern appears to be its ability to obfuscate the line between “game” and “interactive fiction.” And if, as Lisa Gitelman argues, all media is always already new, are such distinctions ultimately productive and useful?

Publications and presentations relevant to game philosophy

“Cheat Code Criticism: Unlocking Easter Eggs in Ludonarratological Debates.” PAMLA 2014, Riverside, 24 October 2014.

Keywords

haptic media, interactive narrative, posthumanism, actor-network theory, play, object-oriented ontology

Name

Lisa Brown Jaloza

Background

literary studies, media studies, cultural criticism, critical theory