We moved the #Amiga set, that @thgie acquired last week (https://post.lurk.org/@thgie/110899430295139256), to the informal game lab at the University of Bern today.

Everything was still running fine, and @addrich and @thgie started with digging through the floppy haul. So far, nothing extraordinary. We'll see what is working and try to create a catalogue.

Among the generally popular, mostly copied games, we also found some slightly underground-ish releases from a group called Helioth Productions. They distributed collections with demos, cracked games, and tools.

There was also a hacked variant of "Amiga Tetris", called "Tetris Sex Special" by Sky Devils/BillyJohn, where they replaced all the backgrounds with softporn 🫣

#CHLudens #VideoGameResearch #VideoGameHistory

Der grossartige Podcast zu Designforschung “design. macht. gesellschaft.” hat eine Folge zu unserem Forschungsprojekt #CHLudens gemacht. Mit Eliane Gerber, @pachuki und, als Gast, @eugen_pfister.

https://podcast337600.podigee.io/2-games

The podcast episode is in German, hence the choice of language for this post.

#VideoGameResearch #VideoGameHistory #DesignResearch

Next up is Johan Cuda's portrait:
Member of: University of Lausanne
Role: Assistant

Johan grew up in the village, where Charles Ferdinand Ramus - a Swiss writer and poet - lived and died. Maybe this influenced his studies as he went on to study french literature? He also studied computer sciences for the humanities at the Université de Lausanne and has a particular interest in applying algorithms and computational methods to work on french literature and big corporas.

His goal for the @chludens project is to have a first experience with real academic research and to deepen his knowledge of the swiss video game scene. As an assistant, Johan is helping the researchers with their work and projects!
He is looking forward to playing anything on the Smaky!

#CHLudens #VideoGameStudies

The last day of the @DLAMarbach Games & Literature conference @eugen_pfister and @thgie reported on "Why we thought it was a good idea to build a DACH games database". Starting collecting towards a specific corpus is always fraught with friction, and the two speakers went into their intentions and insights.

The slides for the presentation are available at https://zenodo.org/record/8103375

#VideoGameStudies #Database #RetroVideoGames #CHLudens

This morning, René Bauer and Beat Suter gave a keynote about “Considerations for Archiving Games. From the Perspective of Game Design”. There are so many things one could archive… 🫣

#CHLudens #VideoGameStudies #ConferenceLife

Part of our team (@eugen_pfister, @thgie, René Bauer and Beat Suter) are at the @DLAMarbach for the „Games & Literature“ conference.

Whereas René Bauer and Beat Suter will talk about archiving video games from a the perspective of game design, @eugen_pfister and @thgie will report on the work on a video games database focusing on the German-speaking countries.

#CHLudens #ConferenceLife #VideoGameStudies

Our delegation in Seville for DiGRA 2023

A project like Confoederatio Ludens requires that we regularly attend conferences in order to present our results, gather constructive feedback, and keep an eye on what our international colleagues are discovering. This year, the annual conference of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) – the main research community in game studies – happened in Seville, Spain. We sent 6 delegates to the conference: @SoBemel (UNIL), @pyhurel (UNIL), Mela Kocher (ZHdK), @eugen_pfister (HKB), @yrochat (UNIL) and Larissa Wild (ZHdK). Here is an overview of their week.

https://chludens.hypotheses.org/366

#VideoGameStudies #CHLudens #ConferenceLife

Since yesterday evening, the @chludens delegation in Sevilla at the DiGRA 2023 is complete!

From left to right: @SoBemel, Mela Kocher, @pyhurel, Larissa Wild, @yrochat, and @eugen_pfister

#Digra2023 #CHLudens

First half of the @chludens delegation at the DiGRA 2023
on the vélo: Mela Kocher, @eugen_pfister and Larissa Wild. Go mingling and have a great time 💖

#Digra2023 #CHLudens

Well arrived in Sevilla :-) #DiGRA2023 #CHLudens

Our second portrait is dedicated to @addrich Member of: Universität Bern
Role: PostDoc

Growing up in the “deer valley”, situated between “moo” and “sheepland”, Addrich found his way to the UniBern where he studied Musicology (BA), World Arts (MA) and finished his PhD in Musicology. He’s particularly interested in soundscapes and heterotopias in video games and tries to look at gameworlds and game spaces from a cultural anthropological viewpoint. Another interest of his are the functional and sonic interactive intertwinement between players, gameworlds and interfaces.

In the @chludens project he aims to deepen his understanding of game sounds and soundscapes by learning about their earliest developments, as well as finding out whether there is a distinctive swiss-sound!

#CHLudens #SwissVideoGames #VideoGameSounds

Throughout the following weeks, we would like to present to you all of our project members, starting with Eugen Pfister:

Member of: Hochschule der Künste Bern | Bern Academy of the Arts

Role: Lead of the Project

Eugen brings knowledge and insights from diverse fields, one of them being History of Political Communication & Sciences - his main research interest is History of Ideas and Political History in and of Digital Games. We asked him, how he would summarize his goals and main interests in the @chludens project: He wishes to understand what role digital games, as a cultural technique, have played in the Digitalization of Swiss society.

He’s currently playing 'FAR: Lone Sails' as well as 'Ballraider', and is looking forward to having a go at 'Der Schatz im Silbersee'. If you would like to know more about Eugen and his work, you’re welcome to have a look at his profile @eugen_pfister or his publications: https://spielkult.hypotheses.org/ and https://hgp.hypotheses.org/tag/eugen-pfister

#CHLudens #VideoGames

To celebrate the start of #ChLudens I got myself a copy of Linels „Unendliche Geschichte II“ for the „aura“ I suppose 😅. The game then will be part of a public collection on one of our universities.

Succes! Thanks to @thgie -s guidance, I managed to get #BallRaider working on my MacBook Air. It doesn't look like much, but I'm thrilled that our project is off to such a good start! #CHLudens #GameStudies

I'm having a blast from the past 🎮 For the recently started research project on Swiss video games #CHLudens I'm looking into Amiga games from the Golden Gate Crew and Linel.

Currently, the topic of emulation is of special interest to me. Not only from a functional perspective, but also how it changes access to the games.

I love to have a go at these old games with my colleagues @hekabeohnename, @addrich, @eugen_pfister and @pachuki. We're actually having a kind of informal game lab going on 😅

Mit meinen Kolleg*innen @thgie, @hekabeohnename, @addrich und @pachuki schauen wir uns für #CHLudens als erstes Spiel „Ball Raider“ (Golden Gate Crew 1987) aus unseren jeweiligen Forschungsperspektiven an. 1/#gamestudies

@CorentinLamy De pouvoir consacrer un maximum de temps à notre projet de recherche sur l'histoire du jeu vidéo en Suisse #CHLudens. Bonus : trouver du temps pour programmer un jeu cette année.

@r2gf @duffadash @damianogerli The only public statements yet (the project starts officially in February 2023) are :

1. https://www.hkb.bfh.ch/de/aktuell/news/snf-bewilligt-das-sinergia-projekt-confederatio-ludens/
2. https://www.zhdk.ch/meldung/neue-snf-projektfoerderung-der-fachrichtungen-game-design-und-visual-communication-5368

How can we help? cc @eugen_pfister #GameStudies #CHLudens

Hello! #Introduction

I am an assistant professor in #GameStudies at the Faculty of Arts #LettresUNIL of University of Lausanne #UNIL, Switzerland.

A mathematician interested in #DigitalHumanities and History, my research topics are:
- Video game preservation
- Platform studies
- Video game historiography
- Research creation

With colleagues from HKB, ZHdK and UNIBE, we start in February 2023 a big project on Swiss video games in the 20th Century #SNSF #CHLudens

🖥️ https://yro.ch