The talk brings together two scholars who will unpack how games are influenced by regional practice on several levels: from theory, pedagogy, and industry.
- Time: 16:00 Finnish time (EEST) on Friday October 9th.
- Place: Hybrid format, online via Zoom (https://tuni.zoom.us/j/65641571873) and at Nokia Arena’s Paidia space (Kansikatu 3), Tampere.
After the talk, the Games As Art Festival will begin (see the full festival program). Attendance is free as well.
Swapnesh Samaiya is a designer and games researcher. He teaches in the Game Design Department at the National Institute of Design, India. He works at the intersection of game design, cultural studies, and performance arts. His talk will address two topics. First a showcase of selected work from the Game Design Department at the National Institute of Design, India – games that take the personal and the cultural as their subject: a childhood with no exit, the labor of caring for an ageing grandmother, and games built from ritual practice and commentary. The second part of the talk is an ongoing work on game as performance and players as performers, drawing on Kattaikkuttu, a Tamil all-night folk-dance theatre, and the Nāṭyaśāstra, the classical Indian treatise on performance, toward a culturally situated reading of game aesthetics.
Rafael Albuquerque is a game scholar, educator, and award-winning novelist from Brazil. He holds two PhDs, one in Education from the University of Nottingham (UK) and another in Design from the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC). He has conducted research on games since 2008 and currently teaches at the Santa Catarina Higher Education Complex (UniCesusc) and the National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI). He has experience in game design education and serves as a jury member for BIG Festival, part of Gamescom LATAM. He will discuss Brazil to the World: Challenges for the Brazilian Game Industry. Brazilian game developers have increasingly sought a place in the international games industry, supported by international partnerships and recent developments in the country’s legal and institutional framework. Yet this internationalization brings its own contradictions. Outsourcing and foreign acquisitions can create opportunities for companies and workers while also raising questions about intellectual property, ownership, and the persistence of colonial dynamics within the global games industry. This talk explores these tensions alongside the challenges of representing Brazilian themes, identities, and cultural particularities to international audiences.
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The event is part of the project “Games and… Research Talk Series” supported by the DigiSus Community Impact funding.
Picture: Jenni Toivonen / Tampere University