Utrecht Game Lab receives subsidy from the K.F. Hein Fonds
The Utrecht Game Lab, initiated by assistant professor of New Media & Game Studies Dr Stefan Werning (Media and Culture Studies) in 2014, has received a subsidy by the K.F. Hein Fonds in order to foster practice-based research on games and play.
Making games as research practice
In recent years, making digital as well as analogue games has become continually faster, easier and more cost-effective. This has allowed for both design collectives such as the Experimental Gameplay Project and academic game labs like the MIT Game Lab to playfully expand functions and aesthetics of games as an expressive medium. In December 2015, the K.F. Hein Fonds supported the consolidation of the Utrecht Game Lab through a grant intended to foster practice-based game research from a humanities perspective.
The Utrecht Game Lab
In contrast to similar institutions, the Utrecht Game Lab focuses on developing, archiving and remixing actual experiments rather than producing fully fledged games, taking methodological cues from the montage experiments of Kuleshov and Pudovkin as well as other analytical design practices from fields such as literature and music. Moreover, the experiments are based on scholarly findings and feed back into ongoing research initiatives such as the NWO-funded project Persuasive Gaming in Context.
Current and planned activities
Together with Media and Culture students from BA to PhD level, the lab is currently developing an exhibition with remixes of the seminal arcade game Asteroids by Atari for March/April 2016. Other experiments are intended for use in game studies courses at Utrecht University as well as to prototype potential applications for public partners such as libraries and museums. Finally, the lab will be organizing a workshop in collaboration with Dutch Game Garden and publish the experiments themselves as well as a series of white papers online.
For further information concerning lab activities, opportunities for participation and suggestions for joint projects, please contact Dr Stefan Werning: s.werning@uu.nl