Torill Elvira Mortensen Guest Lecture

Play all over the place! Games, social media and transmediality

Date: Monday 18 September
Time: 5.30 pm
Location: Bld 80, Level 1, Room 2

Play is one of the main interaction modalities we learn, and it is an emotional experience as much as an intellectual exercise. But play also tends to break down formal boundaries and push the limits for the traditional media modalities. We end up with a messy play space, where we play not only in the neatly defined arena, but in every communicative space we have. This gives us affective, emotional experiences in surprising contexts, challenging what we can handle, creating uncomfortable, even transgressive experiences. Examples are social media shitstorms, trolling, harassment, lovestorms and flame wars, a mixture of unmanageable conversations in an unmanageable media ecology.

Bio:
Torill Elvira Mortensen is an associate professor at the department of Digital Design, IT University of Copenhagen. Torill was a member of the board for Norsk Tipping 2011-2015, she served on the board of DiGRA, Digital Games Researchers Association from 2006 – 2010, and she was a founding member of the journal Gamestudies. She is active in several of the internet research communities, was program chair for Association of Internet Research’s conference IR 11.0 in Stockholm 2010, DiGRA 2018 in Torino. She wrote Perceiving Play: the Art and Study of Computer Games, a book on games research and the development of the field, published in 2009, and was main editor of the anthology The Dark Side of Gameplay: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments published in 2015. Transgressive, provocative and controversial aesthetics and uses of games is her current research focus.

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