Call for projects - PlayLab: Laboratory of experimentation with video games

 

Coordinated by: Flavio Escribano

Deadline for proposals: November 25, 2009

Resolution: December 11, 2009

Call for collaborators: December 14, 2009 through January 20, 2010

Presentation of selected proposals: January 21, 2010

Teachers: Mar Canet, Antonin Fourneau, and Abelardo Gil-Fournier

With the collaboration of PlayStation®

What is PlayLab

PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. It also aims to create an environment that leads to collaborative work in which different disciplines come together.

PlayLab's activities are proposed as an open and participatory research process from which one can approach video games, a phenomenon that is becoming more extensive and influent in Contemporary Society, and explore its critical potential, its learning possibilities and its capacity to create social spaces that go beyond the purely commercial and standardized.

PlayLab is also interested in the history of Games and video games as it examines its possible genealogies and studies its social, cognitive and psychological effects characteristic of video games today.

Core themes

• The Game beyond the screen: the city as a game arena, geolocated games, board games, applied to scenic arts, robotics, augmented reality games, etc.
• The Game as a generator of social spaces whether in the collaborative processes of production or in the collective forms of playing (social gaming).
• Game and video game Application in other areas: education, science, engineering, economy, systems for social organization, etc.
• The users take things in hand: remixing, reusing, intervening and using existent video games in an unexpected way (machinima, game hacktivismo); or actively participating in the production  (experimentation with hardware and software with Game, video game and Free Software platforms) and in the creation and redefinition of the rules of the game without altering the code.
• Artistic and/ or critical video games, new interactive and/or fictional narratives, activism, gender, new forms of representation.
• Intervention in Multiuser Persistent Worlds, projects for intervention and performative situationism in video games, Role-playing video games.
• Video games for New Players: Video games 2.0, casual games and minis games, as well as proposals that bring and promote a greater presence of women in the video game production and use.

Some references

The game beyond the screen:

http://ljudmila.org/~julian/levelhead/
http://www.canyouseemenow.co.uk/
http://mylene.benoit.free.fr/
http://www.oterp.com/

The game as a generator of social spaces:

www.svmres.org
www.lalalab.org

Game and video game application in other fields:

www.fold.it
http://www.newsgaming.com/

Users take control:

http://redvsblue.com/home.php
http://www.antiwargame.org/

Artistic and/or critic video games, new interactive and/or fictional narratives, activism, genre, and new ways of representation:

http://www.molleindustria.org/en/queer-power

Multiusers, intervention projects, and roleplaying games:

http://zenfighters.blogspot.com/

 

More information: playlab(at)medialab-prado.es

 

You can find the full call guidelines in the Spanish version of this website (top right corner). Please note that this call is mainly aimed at the local community. Therefore Medialab-Prado will not cover lodging and travel expenses for participants living outside Madrid.