| Date | 02/09/2021 |
| Time | 20:00 |
| Location | Page Not Found |
| Researchers | |
| Affiliated research project |
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Page Not Found and the Master Experimental Publishing (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, join forces again with artist Lídia Pereira to publish a Special Issue on how games pervade contemporary culture. To sustain this publishing project, we are happy to invite you to a series of online lectures investigating play, productivity and leisure.
Guests:
– game developer, artist and educator Paolo Pedercini, 09/02/2022
– scholar Shira Chess, 23/02/2022
– media artist Cory Arcandel, 10/03/2022
Under the guidance of Lídia and the XPUB staff, this semester the master students will explore how video games are making us more, not less, productive. Getting Likes and Super Likes, choosing your avatar, unlocking badges and achievements, are but a few examples of the language of games as it is repurposed in data-extractivist software. Life and work are ‘gamified’ through social media, dating apps, and fitness apps designed to increase motivation and productivity. Gamification blurs the lines between play, leisure and labour, to release our collective dopamine for profit. Video games in themselves often perform a reproductive role, presenting capitalism as a system of natural laws, exemplified by in-game predatory monetisation schemes. On the other hand, games provide necessary down time and relaxation, helping people function in a largely dysfunctional economy and society. Yet leisure remains a contested space which is still unequally distributed, between genders, ethnicities and abilities.
The students’ works, gathered in a Special Issue, will be launched at Page Not Found at the end of March.
Event image by: Page Not Found
