IDG at the Copenhagen Triple Game Conference

Earlier this month, the IT University of Copenhagen brought together three long-running humanities-focused game studies conferences - the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, the Games and Literary Theory Conference, and the History of Games conference - for a week-long Triple Game Conference event. Of course, the IDG was there! Dr. Daniel Vella gave a paper entitled "Play and Ecstase" in the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, making an argument that the understanding of play developed in the idealist aesthetics of Kant and Schiller continued to underpin the twentieth-century philosophies of play of Sartre and Fink, and is implicitly still present in some of the ways in which contemporary digital game studies understands play. In the Games and Literary Theory Conference, Daniel also presented a paper, co-written with Dr. Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, with the title "Square and Marketplace: Single-player Fantasy RPG Cities as Contested Spaces," which takes a critical-theoretical look to representations of urban space in fantasy role-playing games.

IDG alumnus Johnathan Harrington, who is now studying for a PhD in Hong Kong, also presented two papers at the event. The first, "On Buddhist Frogs and Flower Arrangements: Actionability as Spatial Production in Friendship Games," was presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, and dealt with theories of space and action relating to the genre of friendship games such as Animal Crossing. The second, "Close-Playing as Iterative Design: OuLiPo’s Iteration as Method," was presented at the Games and Literary Theory Conference, and considered the practice of replaying in the context of the avant-garde literary experiments with repetition by the writers of he OuLiPo.

Want to stay up to date with Institute research and events? Subscribe to our Newsletter below.