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.