[DIGRA Spain] seeking advice for project in mexico

[Aarti Sunder]

Hello Everyone

I am an artist-researcher and I write to this mailing list seeking advice.
I will be working on a year long project within Mexico (I will be based in
Mexico City) where I will be looking to meet gamers, thinkers interested in
gaming and gaming scholars. And I write here to seek guidance on people I
can contact, or spaces where I can enter.

I am currently expanding on my field of interest in computational and
non-computational labor, systematic fatigue, and storytelling. I am in the
very nascent stages of looking at the space of gaming, incidental labor
(gamers performing on twitch/discord), semi-organised labor (low paid
programmers), and storytelling. This is a research that looks at expanded
virtuals, or many-headed virtuals.

A recent open call from South Korea’s Bluehole video game company in the
context of their game PUBG (or Player Unknown’s Battle-Grounds) drew my
attention. Specific to the Latin America region, PUBG thought it would be a
good idea for young players to attempt to tell stories via recording the
game. Though this is not a new phenomenon (gamers have always used the
in-gaming console to tell their stories). To my knowledge it is the first
time a conglomerate has set up a competition like this. How do we begin to
distinguish the images that arise from capital and the ones that are a
counter to it? Gamers stream themselves playing for hours at end, looking
to accumulate followers in the hope that they ‘go viral’. Though there is
no such thing as one virtuality, how regulated are the many virtualities?
Keeping in mind that politicians are now storming Twitch and Discord, can
we rethink the potentiality for a virtual public as a site of radical
storytelling? Is gaming then a public space, and are these public actors?

Since I work as an artist, so my approach is not entire academic. I am also
interested in conducting open-ended interviews with other very enthusiastic
gamers, thinkers and scholars on ideas regarding the virtual, digital and
the terrestrial. The goal would be to work with individuals in constructing
a story, a potential, an open-ended outlandish possibility of what a
virtual ‘play’ could be.

I look forward to hearing from you. Any advice will be wholeheartedly
welcome!

Warmly
aarti
------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: http://mail.digra.org/pipermail/spain/attachments/20211018/4801827a/attachment.html