Bart Simon | Concordia University (Canada) (original) (raw)

Papers by Bart Simon

This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the co... more This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the context of game studies' growing interest in, and implication with, the cultures of independent game development and the 'indie scene' in general. 'Indie' is the question not the answer for the authors of this issue. Together the articles herald a long term collaborative program of research that implicates concerns with the discrete and varied cultural contexts of game production, a recognition of the nuances and diversity in the tastes and values of players, and the place of digital games and game discourses in shaping and reshaping the public sphere. After this issue, we may argue about whether game studies has finally found its object but we can all agree that our engagement with the question of 'indie' has intriguing implications for the future of our work as games researchers, designers and cultural political actors. This Indie Thing What is this Indie thin...

Independent Videogames, 2020

Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006.... more Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006. Il s’agit d’un épisode célèbre où des funérailles ont été organisées à l’intérieur du jeu dans une zone joueur contre joueur (player versus player, PVP) de Winterspring après la mort réelle d’un joueur dont l’avatar s’appelait Fayejin. L’annonce préalable des funérailles dans les forums en ligne a mené à l’organisation d’un « massacre en ligne » par une guilde faisant partie d’une Allianc..

2017 9th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games), 2017

Commercial sea routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interacti... more Commercial sea routes joining Europe with other cultures are vivid examples of cultural interaction. In this work, we present a serious game which aims to provide better insight and understanding of seaborne trade mechanisms and seafaring practices in the eastern Mediterranean during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The game incorporates probabilistic geospatial analysis of possible ship routes through the re-use and spatial analysis from open GIS maritime, ocean, and weather data. These routes, along with naval engineering and sailing techniques from the period, are used as underlying information for the seafaring game. This work is part of the EU-funded project iMareCulture whose purpose is in raising the European identity awareness using maritime and underwater cultural interaction and exchange in the Mediterranean sea.

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2020

Media Industries Journal, 2019

Based on empirical research, this article addresses the role of cultural intermediaries in the pr... more Based on empirical research, this article addresses the role of cultural intermediaries in the production, distribution, and reception of independent or "indie" digital games. Festival and showcase curators, local community organizers, co-working space managers, promoters, critics, funders, granting agencies, and other support actors are central to sustaining indie game cultures, but are often overlooked. Our research makes visible the diverse taskscapes of cultural intermediaries; the wide variety of brokering, translating, value-ascribing, connection-making, and care work involved; and the attendant tensions and challenges. We contend that cultural intermediary work in the game industry is characterized by precarity, extensive and largely invisible behind-the-scenes work, complex networks of interdependence and support, blurred boundaries between the personal and the professional, and a delicate balance between autonomy and integration.

Cultural Politics, 2018

This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all ti... more This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the very conditions of its production. Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Svetlana Boym, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Chandra Mukerji, we consider the block-, grid-, and code-level cultural techniques associated with playing the game as allegories for our increasingly complex relationship to digital culture. Minecraft is not the apotheosis of cultural domination by code as much as it is a playable parable about its complications.

Surveillance & Society, 2014

While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared mili... more While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules. Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines.In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant ...

New Media & Society, 2017

This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders ... more This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the socio-material possibility of indie game making itself. In its highly publicized outward-facing role, the Megabooth ascribes legitimacy and value to specific games and developers, but its behind-the-scenes logistical and brokerage activities are of equal if not greater importance. The Megabooth mediates between a diverse set of actors and stakeholders with multiple (often conflicting) needs and goals and in doing so helps constitute the field of production, distribution, reception and consumption for indie games. ‘Indie-ness’ and independence are actively performed in and through intermediaries such as the Megabooth.

Games and Culture, 2016

This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserio... more This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance of the idea of unseriousness for the theorization of gameplay as a sociocultural activity of last resort in a contemporary world defined by the grave seriousness of life.

Public Understanding of Science, Oct 1, 2001

This paper considers the role of the news media as a mode of inter-specialist communication in th... more This paper considers the role of the news media as a mode of inter-specialist communication in the controversy over cold fusion in 1989. Drawing on the work of Lewenstein, Gieryn and Bucchi, media representations in the early weeks of the controversy are seen as epistemologically significant for facilitating closure by configuring "cold fusion" in terms of recognizable technical and cultural discourses of nuclear fusion. These representations work as resources for stabilizing a conception of the experimental phenomenon thereby providing scientists engaged in replication with a means of breaking the "experimenter's regress" and bringing the controversy to a relatively swift closure. 1. Introduction The role of the mass media in the process of doing science has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years as scholars work to bring the insights of media studies and science studies together. Much of this work has focused on revising our understanding of the public communication of science as being about more than successful or unsuccessful diffusion of expert knowledge to a lay public. 1 This "standard" or "canonical" model of science communication has been refined to more closely consider the reciprocal or feedback effects of lay publics on the making of scientific knowledge. 2 As a result, mass media communication comes to figure importantly in the transmission of facts and as a mediator of fact production accomplished across a broad set of social relations that complicate the distinction between experts and their publics. 3 Following from the work of Joske Bunders and Richard Whitley, Bruce Lewenstein and Massimiano Bucchi, I develop an analysis of the role of mass media in science by considering scientists as public audiences for media representations of their own research. 4 My intention is to push post-standard models of science communication further by looking at inter-specialist communication via a medium usually considered in terms of expert-lay communication. In this way, I want to expand on Bucchi's call for a more "multilevel, multivariate model of science communication" by looking at the impact of mass media popularization on inter-specialist communication and practice, especially in the context of scientific controversies. 5 Mass media do not just mediate the relationship between experts and lay publics; they also mediate the relationships among experts with the strong epistemological force of effecting what goes on in the laboratory. The specific argument of this paper takes its cue from two sources. One is the sociosemiotic method developed by actor-network theorists in science studies, a method that treats

Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities

Conference of the Digital Games Research Association, 2005

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

Sociological Inquiry, 1998

Games and Culture, 2009

This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP... more This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture.

Games and Culture, 2006

This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical locati... more This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical location for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating the everyday social interaction and organization of subjects in the early 21st century. Digital games are considered as exemplary objects of analysis in terms of shifts in leisure culture, the increasing prevalence of computer-mediated interaction, the proliferation and intensification of visual culture, and the form and structure of posthuman information societies. The future of game studies lies in the willingness to grapple with the specificities of the medium without losing sight of and making a case for its broader cultural significance.

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2002

... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerj... more ... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present. ...