Title:The Game of the Game Studies PhD Game

Artist: Barry Atkins

Medium: Digital Game

Developed specifically for the Blank Arcade The Game of the Game Studies PhD Game is intended as a ludic experience that speaks directly to the professional and institutional experiences of the DiGRA community, filling the blank of games about us -- a hitherto underserved constituency among games audiences, whose most obvious representative to date (academic as game hero) might be Half Life's Gordon Freeman. While it is far from a serious game -- and seeks recognition as neither art nor radical intervention in debate -- its deliberate awkwardness and play with dissonance is intended to generate a play experience that would make no sense in a commercial project, and it is composed of a sequence of experiments with the possibilities of conventional 2D platformer game space.