April 17, 2012 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Patrick Jagoda, Mellon postdoctoral fellow of new media and soon to be Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago
Since the 1980s, digital games have started to blossom into a significant cultural form. Alongside the proliferation of mainstream gaming genres such as First-Person Shooter, Real-Time Strategy, and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, a more experimental form has emerged over the last decade: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Many of these games, including Microsoft's The Beast and 42 Entertainment's I Love Bees, function as collaborative experiences that use the real world as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, such games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types, including laptops and cell phones. In ARGs, players interact directly with characters, solve plot-based puzzles to advance the narrative, and build a collaborative community to coordinate real-life and online activities. While considerable research has focused on mainstream video games and virtual worlds, transmedia design suggests another major innovative direction that collective storytelling and digital gaming promise to take in the coming years. In this presentation, I explore the facets of this cultural form and discuss several ARG projects that I have directed.
Patrick Jagoda is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow of new media and soon to be Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is also a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. In recent years, he has worked on projects in the fields of new media learning, digital storytelling, and transmedia game design.
UPDATE: Check out the trailer for Prof. Jagoda's upcoming transmedia game.