My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
I am giving a lecture at the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen on Friday February 17th at 13:00.
The talk (in Danish) will be about what video games can do: It’s about the half-reality of video games, and about the video game as a new medium for the creation of worlds and the expression of ideas.
Kgs. Nytorv 1, Opgang E, 2. Sal (Den Italienske Trappe),1054 K?benhavn K
Like mainstream media is beginning to cover games in more detail, some of the gaming press is becoming almost academic. Who would have thought – Gamespot has a piece on mirror neurons.
The article is a bit surprising in that it covers mirror neurons as a question of whether games lead to violence. As I understand it, mirror neurons aren’t really about being “copycat” of the actions you see, but about being able to simulate the actions of others in your head.
Incidentally, I was working on a panel paper proposal for CGDC in 2002 called “Mirror Neurons and Monkeys in Balls”, focusing on the kind of vertigo you experience when a monkey in Super Money Ball is balancing on the edge of a platform. Which is a clear example of mirror neurons at work. I just didn’t finish it.
P.S. For much more about mirror neurons, read V.S. Ramachandran’s article at Edge.org.
At Game Studies, we now have competition: The Games & Culture journal:
Games & Culture is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due March 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.
My first reaction was that this might as well be an introduction on the Game Studies web site. So how are they going to position the new journal? Reading further, Games & Culture seems to be positioned as belonging to the American cultural/critical studies tradition.
This leads to the problem is also that it is currently not very clear how we are positioning Game Studies: In 2001, it was brand new to do an academic peer-reviewed journal on video games, but now that everybody and their aunt are doing game studies, I think we lack a more specific profile.
If Games & Culture take on the “political” things, are we then doing “aesthetics, ontology, and design”, is this a ridiculous distinction, or are we / shouldn’t we / should we be doing both, or something else entirely?
Do we need a stronger profile for Game Studies?
The ITU (and more specifically Lisbeth Klastrup & Susana Tosca) is hosting the Digital Arts & Culture 2005 conference on December 1st-3rd.
www.itu.dk/DAC2005
(Note that for various reasons, the DAC in the URL must be in CAPITALS.)
Jill has already written a nostalgic piece on the history of the conference, so I will just say that DAC 1998 was the first real academic conference for me (speaking and all), and for that I will always have a soft spot for it.
DAC also embodied a shift between DAC 2000 and DAC 2003 where video games began as a sideshow to hypertext, virtual reality, convergence and other things we knew to be the future, and in a few years time became the dominant thing that people discussed. For good reason.
Not to get all political on you, but really: The speed with which the US lost global goodwill and sympathy from 9/11 to the present day may be unparalleled in human history. Nobody has lost that much goodwill so quickly before.
At the same time, Europe is awash in blind anti-Americanism. Go to a dinner party, and for light consensus-building conversation, people discuss either the weather or how much they hate the US and how all Americans are fat and stupid. Nobody lifts an eyebrow. And the US is blamed for everything now. It borders on a mass psychosis.
Story at BBC News. Le Monde (more fitting).
I am not sure what to say about that – he was a mythological figure when I began my university studies and I suppose I always thought he was interesting and provocative while being unintelligible and plain old wrong half of the time. And clever me always thought that while arguing against logocentrism, he was the biggest logocentrist of them all. And so on.
Perhaps the BBC piece doesn’t quite get what it was all about. When I watched the Derrida movie in Boston, the presenter explained that Derrida had always fought for the oppressed people of the Earth – which is a really far-fetched interpretation. I mean, he was an esoteric intellectual arguably working from a Christian/Jewish tradition of seeing everything as beginning with the word. (I read an article making this connection somewhere – makes sense.)
But I think the perception of Derrida-as-activist is going to stick nevertheless.
(Update: The New York Times obituary is much better and captures the whole range of responses to deconstruction from the accusation of defending Nazism to its contemporary association with progressive causes.)
If you’re in Copenhagen Saturday afternoon, Renegades of the Gameboxen are performing a really short live set of their music played on Nintendo Gameboys.
It’s at The Lab, Vesterbrogade 107b.
17.00-17.16: The Renegades of the Game Boxen – live
Things may be behaving erratically the next few days.
(This, by the way, is the new server.)