EVENT: BARTEC, HOUSING: AMÉNAGER, HABITER LES ESPACES VIRTUELS (APRIL 9 2024, PARIS)
Tuesday, April 9th from 6pm to 8pm
Lucien Paye Foundation
45b Blvd Jourdan
75014 Paris
France
Featured speakers
- Bolly Coco, Second Life influencer
- The artist duo fleuryfontaine (Antoine Fontaine and Galdric Fleury)
- Paul Sztulman (teacher of history and theory of art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs)
- Léo Hoffsaes & Elliot Dadat (artists and video game developers)
Co-organized by: Nicolas Bailleul, Hortense Boulais-Ifrène, and Lorena Lisembard.
With the support of Eur-ArTec.
press release
Will Wright, the creator of the video game The Sims (Electronic Arts, 2000-2018), recounts that it was the disappearance of his own house during the Oakland fire in 1991 that inspired him to create a game that would involve maintaining a "dollhouse". Twenty-four years after the advent of this franchise, which undeniably popularized the genre, interest in "life simulation" games continues to demonstrate, according to Guillaume Grandjean, the "euphoric" and "emotional attachment of players to these new virtual environments, especially when our relationship to non-game space is most in crisis", which appears far from, according to him, the "definitions of video games as an 'art of contested spaces'" (Jenkins and Squire, 2002) (Grandjean, 2023).
In recent years, the term "housing" seems to be gaining prominence in players' discourse, sometimes referring to a game mechanic of arranging any space, sometimes to a game system allowing players to own and customize a dwelling, or even to a distinct subgenre of video game. Therefore, questioning the boundaries and possibilities covered by this denomination amounts to questioning our contemporary relationships to a range of experiences ranging from arrangement to inhabitation, constituting themselves in intra- and extra-ludic, virtual and non-virtual spaces.