The “Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Thery and Experimental Humanities” is setting up the game they developed in Innovathens, coming Thursday (28/11, 15:30-19:00).
It’s a three-fold serious game dealing with digital realities, power and identity. Heavy concepts into play, and a good opportunity to play someone else’s game, research and discuss. It was apparently nominated as one of the best learning games in the EU of the year.
I asked them if they have some time to talk to us afterwards, so they are expecting me and whoever else’s interested.
Here’s the fb link, and the fb text right beneath, for non-fb users.
We are excited to announce that PSL 2019 “Why so serious? A game” has been selected as one of the best digital games for learning in Europe! (Seriously!!)
So come join us for a re-play – which will of course be a re-imagining-- of the public experiment staged at this summer’s Pelion Summer Lab on Data & Power.
From Makrinitsa… to the heart of Athens and this year’s European Serious Games Competition, organized by the Games and Learning Alliance (https://conf.seriousgamessociety.org/)
PSL 2019 will present a triptych of games – Databoo, Youmanji and Soundchain – that provoke critical understanding of the relation between data and power (platform capitalism, dataveillance, algorithmic regulation), as well as emergent conceptions of self and sociality in our dataified contemporary.
The hybrid game-performances invite reflexive critique of gamification by emphasizing the disruptive potential of “non-serious”, non-linear play and cultivating collaborative (not atomized, competitive) gameplay.
The games were produced by participants of the 3rd Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities, an initiative of the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology and the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly.
SO IF YOU ARE AROUND, COME PLAY WITH US!!!
#1 DATABOO is a game about how we perceive, use and share our data in the digital environment. The goal is to create a simulation of the web experience, thereby raising questions about how we act as web users, data producers and data consumers and how (if even) we perceive ourselves as such. An important dimension of this experience is to explore how aware we are of the fact that the data we share constitute the bits and pieces which make up our user profiles and thus produce a version of ourselves that, while often indiscernible to us, defines, classifies, affects and, ultimately, produces us.
#2 YOUMANJI is an interactive, gamified performance about contemporary social media platforms in the form of an open-ended board game. Inspired by the famous fantasy adventure film Jumanji, the game places its “jungle” in the social media world and asks its players if they dare to get lost in it! Borrowing the typical structure of a board game, with the use of dice, cards and pawns, the players navigate the various platforms within Youmanji’s social media “datajungle”, executing simple quests. With the help of their smartphones or on spot imagination and creativity, they have to bodily or verbally perform the specific social media’s interface algorithm. In each round, all the players are actively part of the quest either by taking the leading role or commenting, evaluating and interacting, thus forming the close network of users/friends/players of Youmanji.
#3 SOUNDCHAIN is an interactive sound game based on a sci-fi story. Players are invited to imagine themselves as residents of a future space and time, sent to Earth to perform a vital mission: re-discover and collectively re-construct a soundscape whose memory had been preserved in dreams that have begun to disappear. The game is based on co-creation rather than on competition. The challenge is to seek out and record a unique sonic element to add to a collectively built chain of recordings. Soundchain loops indefinitely. Players must first listen carefully to the existing sequence, the soundchain constructed by their co-players so far, in the attempt to capture the specified sonic environment. The loop evolves in a dynamic user-generated soundscape. In its seemingly random form, particular snippets of engagement with the immediate environment and fellow players emerge. Individual players act as part of an abstract, yet intimate, collective that interacts with the physical/digital world through a process of careful listening and sound recording.