"Video Game Languages: Codes, Speech, and Images at Stake"
The University of Lausanne (UNIL) Gamelab, with the support of the EPFL College of Humanities, will hold an international symposium on video game langugages from October 24-26.
Video games – whether considered as a material artifact, a generator of experiences, or a field of cultural and social practices – are based on a diversity of languages that shape their intelligibility. As an audiovisual and digital medium, video games mobilize different semiotic systems, while frequently renewing generic, cultural and media codes and conventions.
The international symposium "Video Game Languages: Codes, Speech, and Images at Stake" will explore the epistemological scope as well as the operative value of the notion of "language" (and associated notions of "text", "rhetoric", etc.) in the context of video game research.
This conference aims to bring together work that endeavours to think about the diversity of languages involved in (video)gaming activity, in order to "decode" the discursive stratifications that determine the player's experience.