The Trevi Fountain in red -- Economics students, La Sapienza
On Tuesday this week I went down to Rome for half a day to attend a EU FP7 research program orientation meeting organized by the Italian National Agency for EU Research, APRE, and hosted by the School of Economics at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, on the Social Sciences, Economics and Humanities track of the FP7 Cooperation Program. I found the event quite useful, and made a few new contacts there, but I am holding to a fairly long term strategy in this particular connection, as I want to find the right context which our nascent international game philosophy research network could profitably be inserted into before eventually putting together a funding proposal.
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
On Wednesday I went in to the main seat of our university at Modena to vote for researcher members of the various commissions responsible for the selection of candidates for five for new tenured postions as researchers in my own disciplinary area M-FIL/05 Theory and Philosophy of Languages.
There are in all five universities involved in this process on this particular occasion: Calabria, San Raffaele (Milan), IULM (Milan), Palermo and Tor Vergata (Rome). As usual I received from the colleagues who are coordinating the selection process on this occasion a list of recommended members to vote for, one for each commission.
Of course, I was free to vote for other members if I wished, but in general one normally just has to trust the judgement of the colleagues who have made these recommendations.
It is positive that there are now being opened up five new tenured positions for university researchers (and in addition, five new positions for associate professors, in which process I, as a researcher, do not take part in) in our disciplinary area, since there have been some very lean years lately here in Italy with very few new positions for researchers or associate professors having been created.
Let us take this as a positive sign for the future, since there really is a crying need for some young blood to be injected into a rapidly ageing academic community here in Italy.
Dieter Mersch on the impressive University of Potsdam Campus
From Wednesday October 10th to Friday October 12th I was in Potsdam, Germany, at the University of Potsdam Institute for Art and Media (Institut für Kunste und Medien), where I had been kindly invited by Dieter Mersch to take part in an International Fall School in Semiotics, organised in cooperation with the German Semiotic Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik), for which the main theme was "Visualisation: Ecphrasis" ("Visualisierung: Ekphrasis").
There I gave a presentation linking ecphrasis and game experience at an intimate and interesting session on (amongst other things) game space and experience, together with Stephan Günzel and Michel Weber, who were both present at the international conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games that we organised at the end of January this year at Reggio Emilia in Italy, where Stephan also presented a paper.
Here's a link to Stephan's paper that formed the basis for his presentation at the Potsdam seminar: [http://game.unimore.it/Potsdam/Guenzel_Geopolitics_VideoGames.pdf]
While in Potsdam I was also introduced to a couple of board members of the German Semiotic Association, Dirk and Gisela Röller and I was pleased to have made their acquaintance.
Panoramic view of the Greater Potsdam area
The Institute for Art and Media at the University of Potsdam will be starting up a new Computer Game Research Center in early 2008.
Michael Weber has been recruited to help get it off the ground, and he will be working to realise this project together with Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch, who will be hosting the next international Philosophy of Computer Games conference, 8-10 May 2008 (see below).
The Center will be built up round a collection of about 2000 computer games they received some time ago as a donation from a journalist game-collector colleague of Michael.
Interestingly, in Berlin there is also a national computer game museum and database/archive, and part of the work of the research center will be to work on developing a system of categorisation (an "ontology", if you like) for computer game genres, in collaboration with the national database/archive.
Potdsam, incidentally, is well known as the largest and most active film production center in Germany...
John Richard Sageng and Anita Leirfall
While in Potsdam, Dieter, Stephan and Michael and I also had a fruitful meeting on Thursday afternoon with our two Norwegian colleagues, John Richard Sageng and Anita Leirfall, who came down to Potsdam specially in order to discuss organizational and other matters regarding the next international Philosophy of Computer Games conference to be held in Potsdam from May 8-10, 2008.
The Program Committee for the conference is at present in the process of putting together a Call for Papers to appear in due course on a new gamephilosophy.org website [http://gamephilosophy.org] (at present under construction)
