New Game+
In collaboration with Fu Shanchao
As an increasingly important part of popular culture, video games seem to be more formalistic if compared with literature and cinema: the rules of gameplay are usually taken as more abstract and/or arbitrary and thus “magic-circled” from the outside world. On the other hand, the romantic conceptualization of “game” still underlies our understanding: we are inclined to consider games as “free and non-utilitarian”. Yet, video games, as both technological product and cultural commodity, are bound by industrial modernity and market of capitalism. This work tries to capture the moments in which the “mainstream value” plays a role in the production of video games. Gathering materials from the work agenda of developers, the advertising strategies of publishers, and the discourses of game media, we hope to demonstrate the significance of “topicality” as an imaginary mediator: within the mechanism of it, “mainstream” is both the prerequisite and an effect of communication.
二周目
合作者：傅善超
随着游戏产业的蓬勃发展和对设计语言的不断探索，电子游戏如今越来越成为流行文化的重要组成部分。电子游戏的玩法本身具有很强的独立性与抽象性，常常与现实世界并无明确关涉。同时，关于“游戏”概念的浪漫主义理解也一直挥之不去：我们仍会认为游戏应当是“自由无功利”的。不过，作为高度工业化的文化商品，电子游戏不可避免地要受到工业体系的现代性和资本主义市场的双重约束。本作品将从电子游戏的生产机制切入——从制作方的工作议程、发行方的宣发策略、媒体的分析表述中，去捕捉电子游戏与主流价值发生互动的时刻。并希望最终展现“话题性”作为想象性中介的重要作用：在其作用机制中，“主流”既是传播的前提，也是传播的效果。