ИСТИНА

• Члены программного комитета: Салин А.С., Ветушинский А.С.
• Охват: Международная
• Даты проведения: 11-13 мая 2018
• Место проведения: РГГУ, Russia
• Организаторы:
  Институт бизнеса и дизайна (B&D)
  Российский Государственный Гуманитарный Университет
• Число иностранных участников: 9
• Число участников из МГУ: 1
• Число докладчиков: 18
• Веб-сайт: http://moscowgamecenter.tilda.ws/damag
• Описание конференции:

  This year Russian State University for the Humanities hosts its third game studies conference, this time entitled "Death and Macabre Aesthetics in Games". The conference is organized by Division of Socio-Cultural Studies of RSUH and Moscow Game Center (an informal game studies community of researchers from RSUH and MSU). It will take place in Moscow on May 11-13. It is generally known that death is abundant in games as they explore not only the processes of sheer killing and dying, but also resurrecting, being an undead, living in the afterlife, or fighting those who refuse to stay there. The act of dying and death in general can become so commonplace and trivialized in games that developers resort to more violent, gorier, and grotesque depictions of death – sometimes, perhaps, not even to emphasize death, but simply to make it more visible and noticeable. The mere ubiquity of death in games is not on its own unique to the medium, as narratives and aesthetics, gothic or otherwise macabre imageries are abundant in comics, literature and film as well. What makes games – particularly videogames – special is that the absolute majority of them can be described as evading some symbolic "death", be it a demise of an FPS-character or a collapse of a nation state in an RTS. If we pick a videogame at random, more often than not the gameplay will largely consist of being destroyed and gradually learning how not to be destroyed. Consequently, there are also games which ironize or subvert these design conventions, such as Undertale, or embrace it on every level, such as Dark Souls. All that seems even more noteworthy if put into the larger context of the modern-day Western culture: for centuries death and related topics had been appropriated by the religious discourse, and subsequent secularization (even within such odious anti-religious projects as that of Soviet Union) failed to expropriate them and develop a new language to speak about such matters. Instead, they resorted to being mostly silent about them. Thus, ceding this topic to the entertainment industry can be interpreted as an escapist gesture, a part of a larger project of displacement death from the "real-life" discourse, or even as an attempt to "domesticate" death, turn it into a mere plaything not worth being afraid of. On the other hand, games can also be considered the future birthplace of the secular way of speaking about death or, perhaps, even the way itself.

• Добавил в систему: Ветушинский Александр Сергеевич

Доклады:

• 2018 The origins of horror genre in video games (Устный)
• Автор: Ветушинский А.С.