On Monday 23 May at 19:00, Prof. Dr Stephan Günzel will be delivering a public lecture at the Institute of Digital Games.

Prof. Dr Günzel is Professor of Visual and Spatial Studies at BTK University, Berlin. His work is positioned within the tradition of continental philosophy, and deals with issues of spatiality, embodiment, visuality and media, with a special interest in digital game studies and theory. He is the author of Push Start: The Art of Video Games (2014), a historical study of the visual evolution of the digital game medium, and has also written on the phenomenology of the first-person shooter game genre, the concept of work in Merleau-Ponty and the geophilosophy of Nietzsche.

Prof. Dr Günzel shall be delivering a lecture entitled 'Beyond Representation - Spatiality in Game Studies and Game Design.' Looking at the debates about the 'spatial turn' in cultural studies, the talk responds to the main antinomies in the present discourse and shows how Game Studies have contributed to it as well as how they rely on the respective paradoxes. With the dynamic understanding of space in the writings of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, the presentation will then show how concepts of space cannot be considered to be true outside a certain context in which they represent a structural kind of knowledge. This can highlight on the one hand how the problem of space could be dealt with in Game Studies and on the other hand how the Design of Video Games can benefit from the reflection of concepts of space.