The fact that games draw inspiration from the culture they were designed in, or that the ideological orientation of game designers inform design choices in games, are things that have been - and continue to be - explored in game studies all over the globe. The relationship between games and society is dynamic and has the potential to change cultural norms and reshape individual attitudes and beliefs.
Stefano Gualeni, Associate Professor at the University of Malta’s Institute of Digital Games, will tackle these very ideas in a six-lecture public course that he has been invited to deliver at the FMK Belgrade University in May. Game studies (the academic study of games, players, play, video games, virtual worlds, and game technology) is not yet among the offered courses in Serbian universities, and so Prof. Gualeni's visit is an opportunity to help Serbian academia recognise games and playfulness as worthy of serious academic attention.
His much-anticipated course will be interactive and interdisciplinary, and open to both FMK students and the general public between 13 and 23 May 2024.
The goal of the module is to empower the audience to become thoughtful creators and consumers of games and videogames, and to equip them with analytics tools to understand the potential of game design as an expressive form.
Drawing from fields such as game studies, media studies and the philosophy of fiction, the students will be invited to critically examine games and their meanings, and to develop a nuanced understanding of how player experience both relies upon and transforms the world around us.
Stefano Gualeni is a member of the Digital Humanities Research Group at the University of Malta, which tackles topics at the intersection of digital technologies and subjects in the humanities, such as philosophy and literature. This crossroads is the natural home of digital games, as they are – by their very nature – multidisciplinary, combining art, music, writing and design with cutting-edge digital technology, and engaging with philosophical, literary and aesthetic concepts in the language of computation.
