Panel Statement

Panel: Games Betwixt and Between

It is high-time that the news that games are the post-cin­e­matic cul­tural form was no longer news.  The ques­tion whether games are art is not the right ques­tion partly be­cause, in the era of pow­er­ful ac­ces­si­ble tools and in­ter­net en­abled dis­tri­b­u­tion, there are much broader ques­tions about what and why (high?) art is. What is clear is that the in­creas­ingly broad field of games al­ready in­cludes every­thing from block­buster en­ter­tain­ment through se­ri­ous games to “games d’au­teur” and art-and-other-games. What is the re­la­tion be­tween ex­pres­siv­ity and rules? Whose ex­pres­siv­ity? What, for ex­am­ple, does/could it mean to au­thor playable media for ap­pro­pri­a­tion? This pre­sen­ta­tion con­sid­ers ex­am­ples of some of the most provoca­tive, ir­rev­er­ent cur­rent ap­proaches to the game form –from Ian Bo­gost’s “A Slow Year” to the de­lib­er­ate cul­ti­va­tion of rad­i­cally mixed modes- in­clud­ing hy­brids be­tween the dig­i­tal and non-dig­i­tal such as Cock­fight Arena or B.U.T.T.O.N.  The pre­sen­ta­tion con­cludes by look­ing at two, very dif­fer­ent, games being de­vel­oped in Mon­treal with sup­port from TAG, the Tech­no­cul­ture Art and Games Cen­tre at Con­cor­dia and the re­lated, Mon­treal Games In­cu­ba­tor.

• 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.

Full text (PDF) p. 1244-1246 [Title somewhat different]