Name Stefano Gualeni | Role Game designer | |
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Occupation Video game designer, Philosopher, Lecturer Books Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer Education Utrecht School of the Arts, Polytechnic University of Milan | ||
Casual biometric design a tale of lie detectors and paper beasts stefano gualeni
Stefano Gualeni is an Italian philosopher, architect, and game designer who created videogames such as Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths and Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade.
Contents
- Casual biometric design a tale of lie detectors and paper beasts stefano gualeni
- Design biometrico per casual games tra macchine della verit e bestie di carta by stefano gualeni
- Background
- Academic work
- Monographic books
- Book chapters
- Playable academic works
- Commercial titles released as game designer
- Other game industry credits
- References
In 2011, Together with the Italian videogame development company Double Jungle S.a.s. and the support of NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, Gualeni developed Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade, which used biometric experiments.
Gualeni lectures in Game Design at the Institute of Digital Games of the University of Malta, where he also performs academic research in the fields of philosophy of technology, game design, and existentialism. He is also a columnist and an independent videogame developer.
Design biometrico per casual games tra macchine della verit e bestie di carta by stefano gualeni
Background
Born in Lovere , Italy, in 1978, Gualeni graduated in 2004 in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. His final thesis was developed in Mexico supported by ITESM (Tec de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de Mexico). He spent a year of his undergraduate career at the QUT in Brisbane, Australia.
Gualeni was awarded his Master of Arts in 2008 at the Utrecht School of the Arts. In his thesis, he proposed a hermeneutic model for digital aesthetics inspired by Martin Heidegger's existential phenomenology.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy (postphenomenology, philosophy of technology) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2014. His dissertation, titled Augmented Ontologies, analyse virtual worlds in their role as mediators: as interactive, artificial environments where philosophical ideas, world-views, and thought-experiments can be materialized, explored, and manipulated.
Academic work
Gualeni's work takes place in the intersection between continental philosophy and the design of virtual worlds. Given the practical and interdisciplinary focus of his research - and depending on the topics and the resources at hand - his output takes the form of academic texts and/or of interactive digital experiences. In his articles and essays, he presents computers as instruments to (re)design ourselves and our worlds, as gateways to experience alternative possibilities of being.
In 2015, Gualeni released the book Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer with Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by postphenomenology and by Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the book attempts to answer questions such as: will experiencing worlds that are not 'actual' change our ways of structuring thought? Can virtual worlds open up new possibilities to philosophize? What does it mean to 'be' in virtual worlds?
Gualeni's argument is that the history of philosophy has, until recently, merely been the history of written thought, and digital media can complement and enrich the limited and almost exclusively linguistic approach to philosophical thought. He considers virtual worlds to be philosophically viable and advantageous in contexts like those of thought experiments, when the recipients of a certain philosophical notion or perspective are expected to objectively test and evaluate different possible courses of action, or in cases where they are confronted with interrogatives concerning non-actual or non-human phenomenologies.
Monographic books:
Gualeni, S. (2015). Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer. Basinstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Book chapters:
Gualeni, S. (2017). "VIRTUAL WELTSCHMERZ - things to keep in mind while building experience machines and other tragic technologies". In Silcox, M. (ed.), Experience Machines: The Philosophy of Virtual Worlds. London (UK): Rowman and Littlefield International.
Gualeni, S. (2015). "Playing with Puzzling Philosophical Problems". In Zagalo, N. and Branco, P. (eds.). Creativity in the Digital Age. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. XIV. 59-74. London (UK): Springer-Verlag.
Playable academic works
Stefano is a philosopher who designs videogames and a game designer who is passionate about philosophy. Although his academic work largely takes the form of texts, he designs virtual experiences that have the specific objective of disclosing thought experiments and philosophical ideas in ways that are interactive and negotiable (and perhaps even playful). The following are examples of ‘playable philosophy’ designed by Stefano: