Panel Statement
Chair Person: Olli Leino
Presenters: Olli Leino, Lindsay Grace & Graeme Kirkpatrick
This panel pulls together insights from game studies, game design, aesthetics and new media theory to examine the elusive concept of “play”. We assume common baseline in the distinction between playfulness and playability, and trace the significance of these concepts to the relationship between the player and the game. We look at the opportunities for self-discovery, existential reflection and political and cultural critique within this relationship. This panel, involving examples from the fringe territory between commercial entertainment and artistic endeavors, contributes to a re-positioning of computer games in relation to electronic art, and furthers the development of critical strategies for charting the aesthetic territory between art, technology and entertainment.
- Olli Tapio Leino is a new media scholar focusing on computer games, interactive art and contemporary media culture from the perspectives of critical ludology, philosophy of technology and existential phenomenology. He earned his PhD from the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD dissertation Emotions in Play: On the constitution of emotion in solitary computer game play is a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between a computer game’s materiality and the player’s emotional experience. Olli has published in the fields of game studies, new media art and philosophy of computer games. He has been involved in consultancy and applied research projects on computer game player’s experience, game design for emotions, and pervasive and mobile media. In his current research Olli seeks to combine game studies with critical aesthetics and media archaeology in order to assess the role of playability at the overlaps of interactive art and computer games and to rethink the sedimented assumptions underlying the paradigm of game studies.