[ISEA2011] Panel: Lynn Hughes & Heather Kel­ley (chairs) – Games Betwixt and Between

Panel Statement

Chair Per­sons: Lynn Hughes & Heather Kel­ley
Pre­sen­ters: Cindy Poremba & Emma West­e­cott

This panel fo­cuses on some of the most in­ter­est­ing de­vel­op­ments in games and playable media. More specif­i­cally it will look at the re­cent surge in mak­ing in­de­pen­dent games or game-like media art and ar­ti­facts. How does the indie mo­ment in the games in­dus­try in­ter­sect with the rise of in­ter­est in playable media out­side the in­dus­try (art games, game art, games as re­search, em­bod­ied play, new ar­cade games, lo-fi and retro games, diy….)?  Pan­elists will pro­vide a broad overview of cur­rent “gami­ness” but will also be draw­ing on ex­am­ples of their own art/de­sign work. Pa­pers will ad­dress the fol­low­ing types of ques­tions:

  1. The re­la­tion be­tween goal-based and free play mod­els of games/playable media, as well ex­am­ples of de­sign­ing for ap­pro­pri­a­tion. What is the re­la­tion be­tween ex­pres­siv­ity and rules? Whose ex­pres­siv­ity? What does/could it mean to au­thor playable media for ap­pro­pri­a­tion? (Lynn Hughes)
  2. The rise of lo-fi games in the light of V.W Turner’s no­tions of the lim­i­nal & lim­i­noid. Con­tem­po­rary indie prac­tice in the spaces be­tween diy & artgames. (Emma West­e­cott)
  3. How new ar­cade pro­jects draw the play ex­pe­ri­ence out into the ex­hi­bi­tion en­vi­ron­ment. What are artists doing to re-imag­ine games for al­ter­na­tive so­cial con­texts? How can cu­ra­tors en­gage with the de­sign of play -par­tic­u­larly in non-gallery spaces? (Cindy Poremba).
  4. What kind of soft and hard ware con­tributes to a plea­sure ex­pe­ri­ence.? How can we make sure game goals and sen­sual “goals” are mu­tu­ally re­in­forc­ing? How might sex games be a fore­run­ner of other “gam­i­fi­ca­tion” ef­forts where the goal is more than self-ref­er­en­tial en­ter­tain­ment? (Heather Kel­ley)
  • Lynn Hughes is As­so­ci­ate Dean for Re­search, Fine Arts, at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity in Mon­treal, CA. She was in­stru­men­tal in the struc­tur­ing and fund­ing of the Hexa­gram, In­sti­tute for Media Arts and Tech­nol­ogy, the largest and most pro­duc­tive New Media hub in Canada. More re­cently she co-founded the Tech­no­cul­ture Art and Games Re­search Cen­tre at Con­cor­dia in order to pro­mote col­lab­o­ra­tive, in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary games re­search. Her cur­rent pro­ject is the de­sign and pro­duc­tion of a ges­ture based full body game.
  • Heather Kel­ley, also known as moboid, is a media artist, cu­ra­tor, and game de­signer.  Cur­rently Ms. Kel­ley heads her in­ter­ac­tion an­d­ ex­pe­ri­ence de­sign stu­dio Per­fect Plum.  She is co-founder of Koko­romi,an ex­per­i­men­tal game col­lec­tive, with whom she has pro­duced and cu­rat­ed the renowned GAMMA event pro­mot­ing ex­per­i­men­tal games as cre­ative ex­pres­sion in a so­cial con­text.