Videogames and knowledge production in a post-historical era: a search for new codes in the fields of science, design and epistemology

• Grant number: 13/19188-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: January 01, 2014
• End date: December 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Maria Lucia Santaella Braga
• Grantee: Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri
• Supervisor: Mathias Fuchs
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e Tecnologia. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/00793-0 - Videogames and knowledge production in a post-historic era: Problematizations in the fields of science, design and epistemology, BP.PD

Abstract

This project arises from the work "Does writing have a future?" by Vilém Flusser. The work questions whether the alphabetic mode of western linear writing is still an efficient code for the production of knowledge in a reality where culture is increasingly fragmented and mediated by computational apparatuses, such as videogames. Flusser's wager is that our era, named by him as post-historical, is endowed with more efficient codes than writing for the production of scientific, poetic and philosophical knowledge. This implies a shift whose implications encompass, mainly, the areas of communication, design and the models that we use for knowledge production. In this manner our questions and hypotheses intend to verify if the kind of post-writing carried out by apparatuses is in actual fact a model that can be consistently adopted for the fields of communication and the production of current knowledge. The context of the videogame was chosen as the field in which to verify our hypotheses because it is an apparatus that embodies the features listed by Flusser as being vital to what he termed overcoming writing. The project contemplates as a strategy for the empirical verification and dissemination of the research results, the design and development of a serious game. (AU)