02.Oct.2023
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Introduction: Research project "CH LUDENS"
"Confoederatio Ludens", or "CH LUDENS" for short, is a joint project of the two universities of Bern and the universities of Lausanne and Zurich that began in February 2023 and is intended to research Swiss games culture in the period from 1969 to 2000 by 2027.
The name of the project is based on the Latin name of Switzerland, Confoederatio Helvetica, whereby Helvetica has been replaced by the Latvian word for "to play", ludere, or its participle present active form, ludens.
Among other things, the thesis will be explored that new technologies are always met through playful approaches and that there are pretty much more games and game culture around the introduction of digitality than we are aware of and know. However, these have often been dismissed as children's or hobby stuff.
For decades, digital games were programmed in Switzerland in niches, but also with commercial success. They bear witness to many sub-scenes and a society that is changing due to digitalisation.
The Confoederatio Ludens team explores this largely disregarded games industry and takes a step towards the broader preservation of a highly ephemeral and disappearing cultural heritage.
An existing project has already done some preliminary work for this: Swiss Games Garden has taken on the task of listing all computer games originating in Switzerland. As far as the Amiga is concerned, one of the best-known games is certainly Traps'n'Treasures.
Now Adrian Demleitner, a member of the research group, has thought about how to deal with video games on floppy disks as research material, using the Amiga as an example in a blog entry. To this end, as he writes on Mastodon, he had first procured a complete Amiga 500 set, including some common joysticks, a mouse, a Commodore 1084 monitor and dozens of floppy disks. In a sense, this brought Adrian full circle, as he had grown up with an Amiga 500.
In his dossier, he raises, among other things, the question of how to play a game released in the 90s, for example, authentically today. Because not only the game itself, but also the game environment contributes to the overall experience: is it important to play the game with the original joystick? Is it acceptable to run the game on an emulator and display it via a 3.5-inch display in a time- and resource-efficient way? What role did the materiality of the original hardware, including the sounds it produced, play in the gaming experience? (dr)
[News message: 02. Oct. 2023, 09:50] [Comments: 0]
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