Announcement: Seminar "Serious Gaming between work and entertainment, technology and knowledge".
In the summer semester 2021, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Beate Ochsner, Prof. Dr. Anne Kwaschik and Dr. phil. Judith Willkomm, the seminar "Serious Gaming between Work and Entertainment, Technology and Knowledge" will take place with the following content:
While serious gaming in the sense of serio ludere as a courtly power technique has existed in theory and practice for a long time, the focus in the bourgeois context shifted to individual educational opportunities and in the 19th century emphasized an increasingly technology-supported idea of exercise and training for mind and body. Since the 20th century at the latest, researchers from various disciplines – from the social sciences and humanities to mathematics, computer science, economics, psychology, sports science, or medicine – have been concerned with the phenomenon of games or serious gaming. When serious game pioneer Clark C. Abt introduced the term serious games into the discourse in 1970, he had a very precise idea in mind regarding the purpose of this type of gaming: "We are concerned with serious games in the sense that these games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement." (Abt 1970).
This definition – as its extension by Ben Sawyer and David Rejeski 2002 shows – does precisely not exclude the factor of entertainment, but rather employs it purposefully: Precisely because the instrumentalization of games seems to repeatedly reveal a structural contradiction between free playful action and functional learning (Deterding 2011), we want to start at the distinction between games and seriousness or work itself. In five interdisciplinary conversations with selected experts, we want to illuminate these distinctions in relation to different thematic and operational areas (military games, corporate games, health games), disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches (Taylorization, adaptivity and inclusion), as well as socio-historical and economic constellations (ludification of markets, social and symbolic orders of power, game cultures of the Middle Ages), etc. We will form student groups, each of which will be responsible for a round of talks. This means that the participants of the talks will be introduced and the question and discussion session following the 10-15 minute statements will be prepared and moderated. The discussions will take place every 14 days, and in between we will work with the students on possible topics for their term paper based on relevant texts and the discussions.