Logics of technologically (un)mediated production in electronic music and video games

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Education/Media (Papers)

Presentation Title:
  • Logics of technologically (un)mediated production in electronic music and video games

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Abstract:

  • This research addresses the impact of technological mediations on the contemporary creative practices of production in video games. More specifically, our research focuses on game engines, a creative toolkit that offers a set of functionalities to handle graphics, sound, artificial intelligence processes during the production of video games. Current researches on video game engines consist of case studies of game engines used by non‑market game developers to modify the mechanics of existing commercial video games ‑ modding (Nieborg et al., 2008). Some researchers are studying the internal design of game engines as a software (Anderson et al., 2008; Evans et al., 2008). The originality of our approach, at the crossing of interface criticism (Andersen, et al., 2011), media ecology (Fuller, 2005) and critical theory of media (Galloway et al., 2013) is to address the question of the specificity of video games as a medium through the study of their technological conditions of possibility (game engines) rather than through the study of video game as an end product. Our research assesses the set of assumptions embedded in video game engines in relation to the notions of creation and interactivity. The set of possibilities embedded in video game engines are linked to certain situated practices and programming paradigms. This presentation is specifically interested in comparing different paradigms in creative coding.

    We will in a first time present the logic of live coding (Magnusson, 2011) compared to the logic of Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in electronic music production, and examine to which extend live coding environments enable a new type of experimentation as means without ends (Cox, 2011). We will then present the live coding platform Fluxus, which is a video game engine with live coding capabilities to criticize some dominant paradigms in video game engines that don’t offer live coding possibilities.

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