Rencontre GRIPIC avec Aphra Kerr : Digital Games as Media and Cultural experiences

Le jeudi 9 juin 2011 de 10 heures à 12h, Aphra Kerr, Ph.D. en Communication Studies, enseignante à la National University of Ireland (Maynooth), actuellement Visting Scholar à l'Annenberg School for Communication (Université de Pennsylvanie, Philadelphie), spécialiste du numérique et en particulier des jeux vidéo, présentera une communication au Gripic sur le thème Digital Games as Media and Cultural experiences.

Content : 

Despite a historical lineage of forty years digital games are still understudied in the academy, and in particular from cultural and critical perspectives.  We tend to know little about who produces the games we get, where they get produced and why. Much discourse, public and academic, is driven by speculation or by the public relations machine of the industry itself. This talk will firstly introduce international games research as it has developed over the past decade. We will then explore the social, technical, economic and political determinants of how and where games get produced, the development of new types of games (MMOGs, social and kinesthetic games), and how producer/players relations and gameplaying experiences are changing as a result. 

Bio :

Aphra Kerr is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth  and from Jan-June 2011 was a visiting scholar at the Culture and Communication programme of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  She has been researching the production, consumption and regulation of digital/new media on European and nationally funded projects for the past ten years. Current projects include governance and co-production in online games and transnational cultural production in games and animation. Her publications include The Business and Culture of Digital Games: gamework/gameplay (Sage 2006).  Aphra is a founding member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and a committee member of Women in Games (Europe) and Euro-CPR.   She runs the community websitewww.gamedevelopers.ie. Further information can be found at http://sociology.nuim.ie/people/dr-aphra-kerr including a link to online publications.