Lecture Title: How Video Games Think: Concepts for Twenty-First-Century Culture

Speaker: Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)

Lecture Time: June 8, 21:00-23:00

ZOOM: 2573998249 (Password: D##U55)

Organizer: School of Foreign Studies

Introduction to the Speaker: Patrick Jagoda is a professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, Executive Editor of the academic journal Critical Inquiry, faculty director of Weston Game Lab, and co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is also the author of Network Aesthetics, The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. As a designer, he has participated in the development of many interactive virtual reality games, video games, and board games on issues such as climate change and public health.

Lecture Description: Since the mid-twentieth century, video games have evolved from the early days of computer hacking in university labs to become the most profitable form of art and culture in the world today. As the medium matured in the early twenty-first century, video games introduced a new language, a new aesthetic field, and a new mode of thinking. These new developments distinguish it from twentieth-century visual media, including film and television. Professor Patrick Jagoda will explore how games can help us think about politics and economics by looking at them from two perspectives: as a technological medium or art form, or as a machine for constructing new concepts in the twenty-first century.