Högskolan i Skövde

How is game research constructed and enacted as a discipline, or anti-discipline, in contemporary culture and academia? In a field often heralded for and defined by interdisciplinarity, how is identity developed? Who gets to say what counts as games scholarship, and who can participate? In this article we offer a counter-reading of game research's oft-deployed concept of interdisciplinarity, highlighting how interdisciplinary commitments can serve to support neoliberal formations of the university and undermine political scholarship as much as they can serve as a liberatory framework. As the field of game research continues to institutionalize, with undergraduate programs and new graduate programs growing in size and number, and as new junior scholars enter the academic workforce, conversation is needed about the character of the field’s interdisciplinarity. How game research can structure itself to act as a supportive and protective force for junior, marginalized and precarious scholars is not just a question of university administration, but of the epistemic underpinnings of the field itself.

What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.

Rebecca Rouse’s contribution presents a media archaeological point of view on how the concept of theatre as a laboratory for interdisciplinary practices evolved. The theatre transformed from a nascent workshop-like laboratory to an environment of explicit research, and this was further enhanced by the rise of the artistic research movement. The author describes how she and her colleagues created a virtual reality (VR) production based on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and her aim as a director to underscore the complexity of Wilder’s story. Rouse concludes that VR can make use of the laboratory of theatre as a fertile space of creativity to advance as a medium of its own.

In this paper faculty members from the Game Writing undergraduate program at the University of Skövde offer a new lens for understanding the act of game writing as weaving, and game story as tapestry. We share recent curricular innovations from our Game Writing program that reflect this perspective, which is inspired by core concepts from feminist narratology. We approach the concept of the weaver through reflection on narratological traditions and practices of collaborative authorship, and invite all game education disciplines to consider the weaving way of thinking, in contrast with design thinking.