We are now less than two days away from the Double Game Philosophy Conference in St. Petersburg!  

As you can see from the programme, we have a big week ahead of us. To create a shared experience for all the participants we have chosen a single-track schedule  with interwoven sessions from both conferences. 

Updates about the conference and the social program will be found on the Facebook event page. It will be used as a common news and talk forum, where everyone can post questions and comments about the conference. Feel free to use it for coordination of any social events during the week.

In order to make the Facebook event page easy to find we have made the web address stpetersburg.gamephilosophy.org which will forward you to the page. When you follow the page click the three dots under the title, click “notification settings” and choose “all notifications”.

Manuscripts for the talks will soon be found under the titles for the respective talks. Video recordings will follow after the conference.

The conference dinner will take place on 23rd October. More information will follow on the Facebook event page and on the conference website.

 We’re looking forward to seeing you all in St. Petersburg.

Digital games present their players with ecologies of objects, properties, processes and events that are defined by their interrelational roles in the game environment. A game ecology is determined by the materiality of the gaming system, its representational functions and gameplay characteristics, and the social and cultural practices that play takes part in.

The notion of an affordance ecology (Gibson 1979) is widely adopted in interface theory and in game studies (Linderoth 2013), but the notion is often expanded with considerations that go beyond visual perception in order to explain the ontological status of the game environment itself. Examples of such approaches can be realists accounts of virtuality (Chalmers 2017; Juul 2019), make-believe psychology for fictionality (Walton 1990), visual ecology (Kolesnikova, Savchuk 2015), the metaphysics of “agential realism” (Barad 2007; Janick 2017) and in externalist theories of embodiment and mind (Clark 2008). 

The aim of this panel is to present a specter of recommendations for theoretical frameworks and to conduct a discussion about the fruitfulness of the presuppositions they rely on. As best possible, the speakers will present a cohesive picture of the current range of theories relating to digital games as ecologies, while outlining the next steps for this emerging subdiscipline of the field.

The panel is a part of the Double Game Philosophy Conference at the St. Petersburg State University. Everybody is welcome to attend.

Program

19.00 Introduction

19.10 Virtual Reality as the Realm of Affordances. Pawel Grabarczyk, ITU Copenhagen

19.40 Stare by Default: Visual Ecology Criteria in Digital Spaces.  Alina Latypova, St. Petersburg State University

20.10  Ludic Similarity Spaces.  John R. Sageng, Game Philosophy Network

20.40  Game Objects in/as ‘Intra-ecologies’.Conor McKeown, Kings College, London

21.10 Common Discussion

The panel will be held in the Experimental Sound Gallery (ESG-21), which is located in the Pushkinskaya 10 Arts Centre. Address: Location: 10, Ulitsa Pushkinskaya (Attention! Entrance from 53, Ligovsky Prospekt). Subway station: Ploshchad Vosstaniya.

About the venue:  Since 1989 Pushkinskaya 10 used to be a core of the underground and non-conformist Russian culture during the perestroyka time, where the most influential avant-garde musicians, artists, intellectuals met and shared their works. Now it is the arts centre gathering under its roof various museums (e.g. Museum of Non-Confor mist Art, John Lennon Temple of Love, Peace and Music, Sound Museum, etc.) and galleries.

The Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp is organizing this interesting conference on pretend play on 19-20 September this year.  From their descriptions of the conference:

“E-Cognition refers to a young field of interdisciplinary research on embodied, embedded, enactive, extensive and ecological cognition. It includes philosophies of enactivism and embodiment, ecological psychology, sensorimotor theory and dynamical systems theory. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments.”

“The conference addresses the ongoing debate between cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches to cognition. Recently, E-Cognition has been gaining popularity, and frameworks such as enactivism have been increasingly used to understand cognitive acts as imagination or remembering (Hutto & Myin, 2014, 2017) and basic forms of pretending (Rucińska, 2016, 2017). Yet, the existing challenge to E-cognition is that it is still difficult to operationalize, as its “emphasis on holism presents problems for empirical investigations” (Gallagher, 2017, p. 21). This conference adds insight into this debate, as it seeks to explore ways of designing an empirical experiment that would include the hypotheses of E-Cognition theories.”

Call for papers

The 13th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Game, organised by the Game Philosophy Network, together with the Centre for Media Philosophy and Laboratory for Computer Games Research, will be held in St Petersburg, Russia, on October 21–24, 2019 as a part of a double game philosophy conference. 

The theme of this year’s conference is ‘The Aesthetics of Computer Games’. Playing games yields particular kinds of playful experiences or perceptions through the senses, which can be studied with an aesthetic focus, emphasising aísthēsis over noêsis. Computer games can be regarded as playful media that organise our perceptions and modify our sensibilities. For this conference, we welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following themes and questions:

1. Aesthetics as aesthesis (aísthēsis). Is there an aesthetics or mode of experience that is specific to computer games? How do their visual, audio, and haptic aspects come together to produce distinctive experiences? How are ‘experience’ and ‘perception’ explored in computer games and shaped by them? Can concepts such as ‘affect’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘rhythm’ be productively applied to computer games? What is the role of game interfaces on player experience?

2. Games as art? What are the conditions of possibility of games being art? How do computer games fit into established categories or conventions of aesthetics, and how do they contribute to new ones? Do games recognised as having a claim to artistic status differ from mainstream games? How do accounts of art based on necessary and sufficient conditions match up against anti-essentialist accounts in terms of gauging the status of computer games?

3. The aesthetics of gaming practices. Are games collaboratively authored? How do different kinds of play, or player-game conjunctions, bring about different kinds of gaming pleasures or aesthetic experiences? How do different bodies encounter computer games and what can be said about the way in which gameplay experience is mediated by our bodies?

Do some kinds of gameplay or extra-gamic player practices have an aesthetic orientation? Are computer games performances?

4. The ethical, political, and social dimensions of game aesthetics. What is the transformative potential of computer games and how does this compare to the transformative capabilities ascribed to artworks? How do aesthetic issues interconnect with ethical, social, and political ones – what is the autonomy or heteronomy of the aesthetic domain? How are taste, sensibility, and habit acquired with respect to gameplay and what are the social implications of this?

In addition to this central theme, the conference also features an open category, for which we invite welcome contributions that do not fit this year’s theme, but that nonetheless offer a valuable contribution to the philosophy of computer games.

Submitted proposals should have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical (including media philosophical) issues in relation to computer games. They should also refer to specific games rather than invoke them in more general terms. Submissions should be made in the form of extended abstracts of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). Please indicate if you intend your paper to fit in the open category. The deadline for submissions is 23:59 GMT, Sunday, 11th August, 2019. Please submit your abstract through review.gamephilosophy.org. All submitted abstracts will be subject to a double-blind peer review process.

Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out in late August 2019. A full paper draft must then be submitted by Monday, 14th October 2019 and will be made available on the conference website.

We also invite proposals for themed panels and workshops that will take place on the 20th and 24^th October, 2019. Please contact the program committee chair if you are interested in organising one.

We cannot provide grants or subsidies for participants. There will, however, be no conference fee.

For more information about the conference please visit http://gameconference.mediaphilosophy.ru/pcg2019.html and gamephilosophy.org.

Program chair: Feng Zhu (King’s College).

Organizing chairs: Alina Latypova (St Petersburg State University) and Konstantin Ocheretyany (St Petersburg State University).

About

The Centre for Media Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University, in collaboration with the Game Philosophy Network, have come together to organize a double conference on philosophical issues raised by computer games.

The 13th International Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, “The Aesthetics of Computer Games” (Oct 21-24), will explore various philosophical issues in thinking about the aesthetics of games and gameplay, whilst “Computer Games as Interfaces to Media Reality” (Oct 21-25) will address issues that spring from considering computer games to be “experience machines” for the modification of sensibility, thought, and imagination. Our aim is to provide a meeting place for scholars of media philosophy and game philosophy in order to inspire future investigations into the commonalities and differences between these approaches.

Program Committee:

Alina Latypova (St Petersburg State University)

Anita Leirfall (University of Bergen)

Darshana Jayemanne (Abertay University)

Feng Zhu (King’s College London) (chair)

Grant Tavinor (Lincoln University)

Hans-Joachim Backe (IT University of Copenhagen)

John R. Sageng (Game Philosophy Network)

Konstantin Ocheretyany (St Petersburg State University)

Marc Bonner (University of Cologne)

Margarita Skomorokh (St Petersburg State University)

Mathias Fuchs (Leuphana University of Lüneburg)

Olli Leino (City University of Hong Kong)

Pawel Grabarczyk (IT University of Copenhagen)

Sebastian Möring (University of Potsdam)

Sonia Fizek (Media Academy Stuttgart)

Veli-Matti Karhulahti (University of Jyväskylä/University of Turku)

William Huber (Abertay University)

Organizing Committee

Alexander Lenkevich (St Petersburg State University)

Alina Latypova (St Petersburg State University)(chair)

Konstantin Ocheretyany (St Petersburg State University)(chair)

Margarita Skomorokh (St Petersburg State University)

It is our pleasure to announce that the next Philosophy of Computer Games Conference will be hosted by the Center for Media Philosophy and the Laboratory for Computer Games Research at the Saint Petersburg State University. It will be a part of a double conference that will serve to explore commonalities and differences between media philosophy and game philosophy.

Alina Latypova and Konstantin Ocheretyany will give an introduction to the Center for Media Philosophy and the Laboratory in a separate post.

The calls for both of the conferences will follow shortly.  

The organizing committee for PCG2019 has the following members:

Alexander Lenkevich

Alina Latypova (chair)

Konstantin Ocheretyany (chair)

Margarita Skomorokh