Tag Archives: video games

Ian Bogost at CalArts | April 1, 2014

Video game theorist/designer and “speculative realist” philosopher Ian Bogost will be speaking at CalArts’ Interventions Lecture Series. Wish I knew about this earlier! The series has already hosted Lisa Duggan, Renee Gladman, Lydia Davis, Bruce Robbins, giovanni singleton and Fred Moten this year. Ian is appearing as a “BONUS” world.

The Interventions lecture series is a year-long graduate course offered to first-year MA Aesthetics and Politics and MFA Creative Writing students. All lectures are free, open to the public and begin at 7 pm in Butler Building #4 on the CalArts campus except where otherwise noted.

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Among Bogost’s most recent publications is a book-length collaborative study of a single BASIC program that ran on the Commodore 64 titled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. Co-authors included: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas , Mark Sample, Noah Vawter. For faces than your average selfie.

Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. In addition, Bogost is Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on political games and artgames.

Interventions Lecture Series | Master’s Program in Aesthetics and Politics.

UCLA Game Lab

One of my favorite programs at UCLA is the UCLA Game Lab started by game theorist and designer Eddo Stern of UCLA’s Design and Media Art department. They do a fabulous yearly games festival at the Hammer Museum which is not to be missed.

UCLA Game Lab.

“We are an experimental research and development lab that fosters the production of computer games and game-related research. The lab supports exploration of these areas of focus: Game Aesthetics through experimentation in the look, sound, language and tactility of games; Game Context through development of games that involve the body, new interfaces, physical space and performance in new ways; and Game Genres through examination of the socio-historic-political discourse around games and the development of new game genres that challenge the presently accepted boundaries of what games are about.

The UCLA Game Lab differs from more traditional game development contexts through an emphasis on conceptual risk-taking and development of new modes of expression and form through gaming. The lab supports projects that will establish new paradigms for gaming that emphasize the self-reliance and personal expression of the gaming artist.

The UCLA Game Lab’s primary function is as a research and production space for collaborative teams to pursue focused work on gaming projects, while benefiting from the technological infrastructure and expertise provided by the lab staff and faculty. This type of incubation space creates a context of community, interdisciplinary exchange, privacy, focus and continuity that is vitally conducive toward the completion of ambitious game projects.”