Title: How Games Mean: Structure, Sign and Play in Ludic Discourse
Time: March 13, 2025, 19:00-21:00
Venue: Room 310, East Building, Gulou Campus, Nanjing University
Speaker: Espen Aarseth, Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Moderator: He Chengzhou, Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at the School of Arts, Nanjing University.
Content Summary:
This lecture will introduce and examine a model for understanding games, analyzing the characteristics that set them apart. As a dominant media phenomenon, games pose new challenges for the humanities. Do games fall within the traditional category of texts, generating meaning through conventional interpretive frameworks? Or do they exhibit fundamental particularities in how meaning is produced? Should we advocate for a "game exceptionalism," or can established analytical paradigms be directly applied? Despite often being overlooked, a crucial first step in any game analysis is to clearly define what is meant by the term "game" and to justify how specific objects of study are classified within this category. While digital games are frequently regarded as novel forms of novels or narrative media, they are seldom approached as a new genre of games—a critical perspective this lecture seeks to redress.
