

A program of evening lectures, workshops, colloquia and international conferences during the semester is part of the institute's public activities. students and post-docs to research the phenomena of computer simulation from a media-cultural scientific perspective. The institute is a place for transdisciplinary academic exchange which provides experienced scholars from the media, cultural, natural and technical sciences the opportunity to come together with Ph.D. students), as well as their cooperation with the researchers at Leuphana. A further area of emphasis are the research projects by the directors and associates (2 junior directors, 3 post-docs and 3 Ph.D. To achieve this, research grants will be awarded every semester to senior, junior and research fellows for a period of up to six months, as well as invitations for shorter stays and for lectures. One of MECS's chief tasks is the establishment of an international fellow network. With a budget of over four million euros for the first four-year period, MECS is one of only eight Institutes for Advanced Study funded by the German Research Foundation in Germany and the only one in Lower Saxony. Envisaged for a period of eight years, MECS began work in April, 2013. MECS is an Institute for Advanced Study on 'Media Cultures of Computer Simulation' funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Leuphana University Lüneburg. The author concludes by suggesting that future propagation of playful and gameful practices in political communications implores the employment of additional research framework from cultural studies and humanities to supplement traditional tool of communications. Such forms are dependent on actions more than words, evoking and harnessing impulsive bursts of productivity that serves certain issues, utilizing technological interfaces and social connectedness of users. The author dubs these new forms of engagement “casual politicking”, as it prioritizes non-committing and mundane actions facilitated through the amalgamation of digital devices and social practices arising from ICT and games culture. Consequently, this work implements play and games studies theoretical framework in order to explain how political engagement is shifting from the ideological to the casual, how politicians use game-like mechanics in their campaigns to influence and engage audiences and how the gaming skills of the younger generation are applied also to navigating public battlefields rather than only virtual ones. Following the process of mediatization, in which the dominant media exerts “moulding forces” over the socio-cultural spheres in which it resides, the author suggests that digital games are a growing component in mediatization, as part of the overall development of the ludification of culture.

This thesis brings together the fields of political communications and games studies, in order to facilitate novel analysis methods for post-broadcast democracies and the digital citizens that inhabit them. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 7.

Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 6. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 5. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 4. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 3. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 2. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.
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As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies.
