2024.10.19 Saturday 15:00
Location
xiangsunstudioF4 ,117 Pingwu Road, Changning District, Shanghai
Speaker: Zhang Cheng
While narratives in video games have always been a topic of controversy, it is undoubtedly an indispensable part of this medium. We will explore those video games with rich storylines that make you feel like the protagonist—"This is your story! This is your adventure!". These games make you experience an unprecedented hero’s aura, as if everything revolves around you. However, the freedom of choice in these games is actually an illusion of agency meticulously crafted by invisible "authors". In the world of games, are players truly free, or are they unknowingly controlled? We will unveil the truth behind this "illusion" and see how these narrative designs subtly manipulate our psychology and emotions.
Cheng Zhang holds a Ph.D. from the Shanghai Film Academy of Shanghai University, and she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University, and at the School of Journalism and Communication of Shanghai University. Her primary research interests include game narratives and interactive films. She has published a series of less-than-noteworthy papers and commentary articles in academic journals such as Contemporary Cinema and the Journal of Shanghai University, as well as media outlets like The Paper: Game Theory and the Henan Daily.
A hardcore fan of RPGs and action games, her favorite studio is BioWare, and she prays daily that Dragon Age 4 won't be a flop. Despite her complaints, she continues to buy games from Capcom and Koei Tecmo but will forever curse Konami (forgiving Konami for the Silent Hill 2 remake only until her excitement wanes).
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.
