Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Game Night, Thursday, February 23: Familiar Games, Unorthodox Controls

LUIGI's game nights are social events designed to provide an opportunity for undergraduates, grad students, and faculty to come together, play, and discuss games.  Game nights consist of hands-on demonstrations of games, accompanied sometimes with formal presentations, and always with discussion.  They provide outlets for scholars in the U Chicago community to present ideas concerning the socio-cultural, aesthetic, political, and technological dimensions of games, opportunities for designers and players to get together and discuss the medium, and spaces for both seasoned gamers and the uninitiated to come together and play games both beloved and overlooked.


Please join us for the final LUIGI game night of the quarter, held this Thursday, February 23, from 7-9 pm in Cobb 115. A multi-screen event, we will be playing a number of games with control schemes and on platforms for which they were not originally designed.

With half of the space, we will be using both traditional controls and DDR Dance Pads to play games such as SoulCalibur II, Street Fighter II Turbo, and Super Mario Kart, highlighting issues of virtuosity, physicality, and performance in video game culture. The rest of the space will be devoted to playing Nintendo 64 games such as Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Starfox 64, and Banjo-Kazooie on multiple platforms - including the original N64, the Nintendo DS, and the MacBook. This will allow us to consider the instability of the video game text resulting from industry repackaging, video game preservation, and emulation.

Come to experience these games for the first time, to challenge your friends to old favorites with a twist, or watch people dance their way through a racing game!

Suggestions for topics and/or games to be covered in future game nights can be made on this thread of LUIGI's forums (login required).

Hope to see you this Thursday!

- Chris