IDG & DiGRA ITALIA OPEN TALKS (Monday the 27th of February)

IDG's Prof. Stefano Gualeni and Prof. Riccardo Fassone will inaugurate the new series of open lectures on Interactive Digital Narrative and Game Studies. The event is organised by Ilaria Mariani and Mariana Ciancia (Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano), with DiGRA Italia.

The talks are free to be enjoyed online by everyone in our scholarly community, starting with Stefano and Riccardo presenting their newest monographic book Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play

DiGRA ITALIA is honoured to welcome seminal scholars from around the world in four dedicated lectures:

• Stefano Gualeni & Riccardo Fassone “On Fictional Games” > link to event
  27 FEB, 3.15 - 4.15 pm CET

• Eric Zimmerman “On The Rules We Break” > link to event
  6 MAR, 2.30 - 3.30 pm CET

• Joleen Blom “On Transmedia Characters” > link to event
  13 MAR, 9.15 - 10.15 am CET

• Chris Crawford “On Interactive Narrative” > link to event
  3 APR, 5.00 - 6.15 pm CEST (Attention daylight saving time in action!)

And here is a little focus on this first lecture!

In this first lecture:

Stefano Gualeni & Riccardo Fassone “On Fictional Games” > 27 FEB, 3.15 - 4.15 pm CET

Fictional games are games that exclusively exist as elements of fictional worlds. They are meant to trigger the imagination of the appreciator of a work of fiction and cannot actually be – or at least were not originally meant to be – played. Our 2023 book for Bloomsbury titled Fictional Games: a Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play is an initial exploration of that uncharted scholarly theme in our community. It is also an occasion for rethinking the idea of games as artefacts that are not necessarily meant to be played. In our talk we will introduce some theoretical lenses to look at fictional games and present a few salient philosophical and expressive uses of these imaginary, unplayable devices.

More info on the book here.

Tags: #fictionalgames #fiction #imaginarygames #worldbuilding #sciencefiction #gamestudies

Stefano Gualeni is Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta), Visiting Professor at LCAD (Laguna Beach, California), and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Game Studies at the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto (Japan).

Riccardo Fassone is a game designer and Associate Professor of digital media history and game studies at the University of Torino.