Game Seminar Series: Videogame textuality as play of bodies

The Institute of Digital Games is thrilled to have Dr Brendan Keogh speaking as part of our Game Seminar Series.

Join us on the 9th May at 16h00 at the Institute of Digital Games.

The Game Seminar Series: All facets of digital games

The Game Seminar Series (GSS) are special academically oriented lectures that are held approximately once a month at the Institute of Digital Games. They are open to the public, but targeted to give University of Malta students supplementary information and update them on current research in the field.

Game Studies: How Player and Game Incorporate Each Other

Brendan will cover an investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other.

Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames?

Brendan Keogh: Author of A Play of Bodies

Brendan Keogh is an Australian Research Council fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. He researches videogame making cultures across informal, formal, and embedded sectors. He also writes on the phenomenological and textual aspects of videogame play and culture. He is the author of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (MIT Press, 2018) and Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line (Stolen Projects, 2012), and has written extensively about the cultures and development practices of videogames for outlets such as Overland, The Conversation, Polygon, Edge, and Vice.

Stay up to date Digital Humanities research and events

Research and education doesn't happen in silos, especially not in the multi-disciplinary field of game design. The Seminars bring together academics, practitioners and enthusiasts with a common love for games of any type: digital, analog, urban, free-form, and can range from the highly technological to the extremely philosophical. There is sure to be something to interest you. If you'd like to be kept up to date on our GSS and other events we invite you to subscribe to our Newsletter.