Instead of writing a post for Inspiring Science this week, I decided to share my first published feature article with you! It appeared in Issue 6 of Think magazine, which was published on Monday. I wrote about the research of Gordon Calleja, director of the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, and also reviewed Will Love Tear Us Apart, a game he designed based on Joy Division’s song Love Will Tear Us Apart. You can read my feature below and also check out the other articles in the issue (it’s free!) and visit the magazine on Facebook!

Gordon Calleja has a dream job: he studies video games. It may sound like frivolous fun, but his work is serious research. He examines how people perceive the world around them and interact with it. His research blends aspects of philosophy, neuropsychology, and literary theory with futuristic concepts like cybernetics and post-humanism; his papers are peppered with references to Wittgenstein and Borges alongside quotes from avid gamers. In his book In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation, published last year by MIT Press, Professor Calleja tackles the question of how we experience games – how the barrier created by the screen and the controls dissolves into a sense of really being there. ‘Ultimately,’ he says, ‘studying presence in games is asking how we are conscious here in the physical world.’

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