The Media School

Where is the game?

Graeme Kirkpatrick visits the Media School at Bournemouth University to present his lecture, ‘Where is the game? Dance and the sensational basis of gameplay’.

Graeme Kirkpatrick, a published expert on the sociology of computer gaming, visits Bournemouth University on Thursday 23 September.

Graeme will present his lecture ‘Where is the game? Dance and the sensational basis of gameplay’, which will examine the Video Game as a unique aesthetic practice that resembles dance.

Bournemouth University’s Dr Cheryl Martens is coordinating the lecture in conjunction with the Emerging Consumer Cultures Group. She explains: “Graeme argues that the video game can be understood as resembling dance because it works, not through immersion in a fictional world, but as a restrained series of movements that hold us apart from on-screen illusions, even as we are captivated by and interact with them.”

Graeme’s talk will be highly relevant to those interested in aesthetic theory, video games and computer animation, as well as students and researchers of consumer culture.

Graeme is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester University. This lecture will draw on themes from his latest book, Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game, which discusses the importance computer games have played in re-configuring contemporary culture.

Where: The Casterbridge Room, Talbot Campus
When: Thursday, 23 September 2010, 13:00-14:30
To register: email Cheryl Martens.

Recent publications

(Forthcoming 2010) Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game - Manchester University Press

2008 Technology and Social Power - Palgrave-Macmillan

2004 Critical Technology: A Social Theory of Personal Computing - Ashgate
(Winner of the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2005 from the British Sociological Association)

2010 ‘Feminism and technical capital: The case of the computer game’, in Information Communication & Society 13 (6).

2009 ‘Controller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic Form in the Computer Game’ in Games and Culture 4 (2).

2007 ‘Meritums, Spectrums and Narrative Memories of ‘Pre-Personal’ Computing in Cold War Europe’, in Sociological Review, 55 (2).

2007 ‘Between art and gameness: critical theory and computer game aesthetics’, in Thesis Eleven 89.