Event: PLAYLAB (Madrid, January 21-24 and February 4-7, 2010)

"PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. Call for the presentation of proposals to be carried out within the collaborative production workshop that will take place in Madrid on January (21 to 24) and February (4 to 7), 2010. With the collaboration of Arsgames.

PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. It also aims to create an environment that leads to collaborative work in which different disciplines come together.

PlayLab's activities are proposed as an open and participatory research process from which one can approach video games, a phenomenon that is becoming more extensive and influent in Contemporary Society, and explore its critical potential, its learning possibilities and its capacity to create social spaces that go beyond the purely commercial and standardized.

PlayLab is also interested in the history of Games and video games as it examines its possible genealogies and studies its social, cognitive and psychological effects characteristic of video games today.

Core themes

• The Game beyond the screen: the city as a game arena, geolocated games, board games, applied to scenic arts, robotics, augmented reality games, etc.
• The Game as a generator of social spaces whether in the collaborative processes of production or in the collective forms of playing (social gaming).
• Game and video game Application in other areas: education, science, engineering, economy, systems for social organization, etc.
• The users take things in hand: remixing, reusing, intervening and using existent video games in an unexpected way (machinima, game hacktivismo); or actively participating in the production  (experimentation with hardware and software with Game, video game and Free Software platforms) and in the creation and redefinition of the rules of the game without altering the code.
• Artistic and/ or critical video games, new interactive and/or fictional narratives, activism, gender, new forms of representation.
• Intervention in Multiuser Persistent Worlds, projects for intervention and performative situationism in video games, Role-playing video games.
• Video games for New Players: Video games 2.0, casual games and minis games, as well as proposals that bring and promote a greater presence of women in the video game production and use." (PlayLab)

Link: PLAYLAB (list of selected games)