2023.12.28 Thursday 19:00
Location
Unit 302, Building No.5, 8 Hengshan Road, Xuhui, Shanghai
Speaker: Yang Chen
This talk will discuss video game interactivity and its politics from the perspective of the interface, analyzing why the interface is the key to the change from game to video game, and revealing how the interface both exposes the interactivity of the game as a heterochronic interaction between the game and the player in two worlds, and transforms the autotelic space of the game into the semi-autotelic space of the video game. Based on these two effects of the interface, this talk will ultimately show how video games can generate new game-player experiences through the metaphorical "drama" of the interface through the recursion of heterochronic interaction, while at the same time exposing the politics of the interface as harboring the potential for a kind of game-player realism.
Yang Chen, Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature, Department of Chinese language and literature, Peking University, and Lecturer, Department of Chinese language and literature, East China Normal University. His main research interests include science fiction literature, Chinese literature of the 1980s, theories of posthumanism, cinema and media studies, and game and animation studies. He has published many academic papers in journals such as Literature& Art Studies, Modern Chinese Literature Studies, Theory and Criticism of Literature and Art, and dozens of commentaries in media such as People's Daily, Wen Wei Po, Art Forum, and The Paper Marketplace of Ideas.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
