Abstract

Heather Kelley is an award-winning game designer, media artist, curator and researcher. Her experimental game work focuses on unique sensory effects, integrating perceptions of touch, smell, movement, sound, and nervous system response. Since 2015 she has taught at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University, where she holds the title Associate Teaching Professor. She serves as the Sensory Director at the LIKELIKE gallery for independent games and playful arts. Ms. Kelley was named by Fast Company magazine as one of 2011’s thirty most influential women in technology, the same year that her innovative mobile app OhMiBod Remote won Best Application from Vienna Austria’s annual Content Awards. In 2012, she co-curated Joue le jeu, a groundbreaking 5000 m 2 exhibition of video games and commissioned play installations in Paris, France. In 2013, Microsoft Women In Gaming awarded her their Innovator Award. Ms. Kelley is a founder of the experimental game collective Kokoromi, with whom she produced and curated the renowned GAMMA events from 2006 to 2010, promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. In 2016 Kokoromi released the retrofuturistic VR puzzle game SUPERHYPERCUBE on the Sony Playstation 4. Ms. Kelley’s extensive career in game development has included design and production of touchscreen vibrator controllers, AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, mobile and handheld games, research games, installation games, and web communities for girls. She holds a Master of Arts in Communication from the University of Texas at Austin.

About the Speaker

Behind the Eyes: The physical future of digital games For over fifty years, digital games have worked to perfect the relationship between players’ eyes and hands, with some attention to their ears. Sight and sound, the “wave-based” senses, are the easiest to digitize, store, codify, transmit, and reproduce. They are also the easiest to sell. In the last decade, however, there is a growing interest in how games can engage with our other senses, such as motion and smell. Some of this interest is certainly commercial–novelty and attention sells. But, there are many creators who are deeply interested in how these modalities can evoke emotions and responses that are difficult to achieve by other means. At the same time, medicine and science (particularly psychology) have begun to validate the deep importance of emotions and felt (somatic) sensations that are experienced first through our bodies, rather than our minds. These physical/neurological reactions are in direct contrast with the dissociated, body-removed state through which most entertainment is currently delivered. Societies are becoming increasingly aware of the negative social, psychological, and physiological effects of over-reliance on this kind of digital interaction. With our minds, bodies, and our natural world in peril, it seems ever-more pressing that we look up from our screens, breathe the air of the world, and teach young people a different set of values, no longer based on the disassociation that the first half century of entertainment technology have delivered to them.

As game designers, how can the tools at our disposal place our players more in tune with themselves and the world around them, rather than more removed? What is our responsibility as we work in a medium that can be deeply distracting and dissociative? This talk will be an examination of my sensory game design research, exploring how an expansion of gameplay into projects that engage with the senses, the body, and the environment might point a way forward for playful planetary survival.