Thursday, November 8, 2007
Defining Play While Surmising Wildly
This has been a great week for a currency of ideas. Tonight we went to go see two WSU-V DTC sponsored artists and scholars speak at North Bank Artist's Gallery.
Samantha Blackmon, a professor at Purdue University loves computer games. She loves to analyze them, look at how race and gender are being defined and impacting the players. Her experts are often those who play games. I had opportunity to see Samantha's presentations twice this week. Her enthusiasm for her topic is infectious. A discussion of games in her world has rqpid fire reference genre, platform, evolutionary moment, type, year, and publisher. Multiplayer, roleplaying and so forth. Samantha talks about one's relation with a game entering the world of the designer, their values and their visions. I've wondered why I don't find a seduction in gaming that I have in watching films or listening to music. Maybe it is indeed this concept of world. Is losing myself in a solo, like the one I listening to John Handy play now as I write this or in an incredibly well executed shot or sequence by a master of cinema anything like losing or extending yourself in one of these game characters. I'm not sure if I'll ever know.
British writer and scholar Sue Thomas is redefining what our concept of cyberspace. She doesn't think about it in the same terms as William Gibson. To her it is wildness and landscape. Her latest work in progress is called The Wild Surmise and it explores natural metaphor as our descriptor for cyberspace.
It was nice evening of engaging presentation and lecture, as good as you would find at a major conference. And who would have thought it likely to happen in a little art gallery next to the Kiggins Theater on Main Street in "America's Vancouver," as our mayor is fond of calling it.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:23 PM
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