Students get in the game

Published: Fri Apr 24, 2009 (updated Mon Apr 27, 2009) in Press

Student group sees video games as art works in digital media

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With a speaker event and discussion on April 22, and an ongoing series of video-game related films, the TFT student group LUDUS seeks to explore video gaming as an explosively evolving digital media art form for the 21st century.

According to The Daily Bruin:

LUDUS, a video game-theorizing organization created by graduate students in the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA, seeks to explore the fun side of gaming and also looks at it from an academic perspective.

"Ludus," a Latin-based term associated with "game" or "play," refers to a series of academic conversations about video game theory, including ones pertaining to the close ties it has with the older but just as popular medium of film.

Kristy Norindr is a first-year graduate student in the film, television and digital media department and co-president of LUDUS.

"Studying film and television, there are a lot of people who also play video games and there are a lot of new console games that are really dependent on film-based elements," she said. "It just seemed like a natural crossover for a lot of the people in my department to talk about (video games) and start studying (them) on our own, but also in combination with some of the classes that are offered by the film department."
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The group is featuring a speaker and film series that will bring games and films to UCLA.

The series [began on April 22] with A Tag-Team Game Industry Talk featuring Dooma Wendschuh from Sekretagent Productions and John Ballantyne from Electronic Arts, two industry leaders in the video game business…

LUDUS will also be screening several game-related films in the weeks to come, which are particularly relevant as more video games are being adapted to the big screen. The film screenings shown at Melnitz Hall will encompass mainstream films like "Resident Evil: Degeneration" as well as more obscure ones such as Lars von Trier's "The Boss of it All."

The game-to-movie crossover is not something new, but audiences have different opinions on how to approach it.

"I think that independent films might be a more interesting space or venue to see (this) happen," Norindr said. "(Whereas) the big video games and big films ride on money and special effects, I don't think that they're intrinsically meshed to go together. I feel like it would be interesting to have a little bit more abstraction because games can be really abstract, and independent films are more likely to be abstract and accepted."