Game Lecture Series - Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture - Dr. Paolo Ruffino

29th May @18h00 at the Institute of Digital Games - University of Malta

Game Lectures are held approximately once a month at the IDG and are public, open, free events on weekday evenings which bring together academics, practitioners and enthusiasts with a common love for games of any type: digital, analog, urban, free-form, etc.

About the talk:

In this talk, Paolo will introduce his new monograph ‘Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture’. The book outlines a ‘creative’ approach to game studies, an 'intuitive, timely, performative, ethical, anti-authoritarian, and anxious' way of reading and intervening within video game culture. The presentation will offer a critical reading of the excavation of Atari's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial burial site, GamerGate, the rise of gamification and self-tracking technologies, independent games, and the hacking of PlayStation Network. The talk will highlight some of the ways in which the past, present, and future of games are narrated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and how differently those same stories could be told.

Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, he will aim to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars.

About Paolo:

Paolo Ruffino is Lecturer in Media Studies in College of Arts.

Paolo has been researching and publishing in the areas of video game culture, media arts and media studies. His interests include independent forms of video game development, archaeologies of games, hacking, modding and practices of modification of video game software, gamification and the Quantified Self.

Paolo is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (Goldsmiths Press), and has been the co-editor of the volume Rethinking Gamification (meson Press), an issue of journal GAME on video game subcultures and a special issue of Games and Culture (SAGE) on the early work of Roger Caillois. He co-curated the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference in 2015, and numerous events of the Italian and British DiGRA groups.

He was previously at University of York (Associate Lecturer in Digital Culture); London South Bank University (Lecturer at the Game Cultures and Digital Media BAs); Goldsmiths, University of London (Associate Lecturer at the Media and Communications BA). He has been working as Research Associate from 2012 until 2015 at the Gamification Lab, Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University.

Paolo’s PhD dissertation at the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths investigates contemporary events of video game culture surrounding the relation between gamers and games. The research project looks at game archaeologies, the hacking of PlayStation Network, independent games, gamification, game art and the GamerGate controversy. It outlines a creative approach to the study of games and digital media, one that reconsiders the involvement of the scholar in the performative act of creating narratives in order to make sense of the events of video game culture.

Paolo is also one of the four members of the art collective IOCOSE (http://iocose.org). The group has been exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, FACT in Liverpool, Science Gallery in Dublin, Taj and SKE gallery in Bangalore, MACRO in Rome, Transmediale in Berlin and Jeu de Paume in Paris. Their work featured in publications such as Wired magazine, The Creators Project, Flash Art, Liberation, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Adbusters, Neural and Vanity Fair, and on TV channels such as RAI and France4.