IMS: Still Talking About Games
A highlight during the international workshop on the study of computer games was the keynote by Espen Aarseth: "Why Are We Still Talking About Games? – Some Reflections on the Role of Playware in the Age of Multimetamedia."
The two/day workshop 19-21 May 2025 titled Gaming Intermediality: New Methods for Studying Digital Games," was organised at the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies in collaboration with Lund University and Kazimirerz Wielki University. It was visited by scholars seeking to devise new intermedial and multimodal frameworks for game studies, focusing on the challenges that the agency, interactivity and the perforative nature of the computer game medium poses to traditional methods of conduction intermedial research.
About Espen Aarseeth
Aarseth is the founder and editor-in-chief of what has been described as the ”flagship journal” of Game Studies, namely Game Studies.
The relationship between fiction, reality, narrative, and gameplay has been a recurring theme in his research, examined in influential articles like "A Narrative Theory of Games" (2012) and the more recent "Game or Supernovel? Playing and Reading Massive Game Novels" (2023). In his 2019 edited volume Ludotopia: Spaces, Places and Territories in Computer Games, these very questions are further explored within the spatial dimension of ludic worlds.
Currently, Aarseth is a chair professor of game studies and dean of the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Previously a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Aarseth is one of the founders of game studies as an academic field, with significant publications dating back to the seminal 1997 book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Interested in the work at the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS)? Read more here