JCJC SHS 1 - JCJC - SHS 1 - Sociétés, espaces, organisations et marchés

VIdeo game spaces in France – LUDESPACE

Submission summary

Video games have become an important cultural practice in France, concerning broader and broader and more and more diversified publics. Whereas digital tools have take an essential place in our social and spatial practices and video games are the subject of a growing investment on behalf of private and public actors (“serious games” for education, video game industry support funds), we still don’t know well the uses and stakes of video games practices.
The research project LUDESPACE proposes a panoramic view and cartography of the practices of video games in France. It is based on an approach of video games as a spatial system, in order to analyse the multiscale interactions between the space inside the video game, the space of the player and the space around the video game. The project is organised on four axes: the publics of players (who is playing?), the habits of players (where and in what space configurations are the players playing?), the activity of playing (how are they playing?) and the micro-interactions between players and players/machines in the time and space of the game.
The project is part of the continuous efforts of the multidisciplinary team of the junior lab "Video games: practices, contents, discourse" aiming at developing the research field on video games in France. Since 2008, its works have shown the importance of delimitating from the Video Games Studies in order to refocus the analysis on the players and their practices.
This project requires the conduct of a quantitative survey on a representative sample of the French population in order to circumscribe precisely the population of video game players (age, gender, socio-professional category, place of residence, etc.). This survey is an indispensable foundation in order to consolidate the research on video games in France and to go beyond the shallow debates on violence and addiction.
The choice of a spatial framework aims at putting video game practices in their particular context raising the hypothesis that their multi-level spatiality contributes to the reticularisation of space and to the networking of territories and individuals.
In order to analyze further the stakes of the production of video game practice and the interaction between the spatial representations and practices of players in the game, with those of their everyday life, the national quantitative survey will be enhanced by quantitative studies, in-depth interviews, cognitive maps and multimodal recording of actual game situations.

Project coordination

Hovig Ter Minassian (UNIVERSITE DE TOURS [FRANCOIS RABELAIS]) – hovig.terminassian@univ-tours.fr

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

CITERES UNIVERSITE DE TOURS [FRANCOIS RABELAIS]

Help of the ANR 179,649 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: September 2011 - 36 Months

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