Simon Huber completed his studies in History and Educational Science at the University of Vienna, followed by Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His doctoral thesis was honored with the Award of Excellence 2022 by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research. He contributed to the exploration of historical aspects of game cultures and has also initiated a venture centered around coffee culture, titled Second Sunrise (www.secondsunrise.at).
He is instructing “Game Design as a cultural technique” and “The Anatomy of Games”, thus fostering a creative and analytical perspective among students. He organizes the “Ludological Symposium”, a transdisciplinary and also playful format in which Game Designers and Scholars are trying to lay the theoretical groundwork for a coherent Ludology.
From Pandora’s Box to the Book with Seven Seals. Apocalyptic Thinking in Pursuit of Ludology
FROG 2024 – Talk
The apocalypse (literally “revelation”) is commonly understood as the end of the world. However, it also represents a religious interpretation of the course of history. This contribution examines how this eschatological reading of the Bible is presented to readers through a ludological lens, interpreting the Book of Revelation as a game in its form. Thus, the text is not seen as a message that needs to be delivered to the faithful but as a text that cross-references the holy scripture, prompting readers to navigate back and forth within it. This method reveals meanings beyond the literal sense and helps the Christian community find hope in times of distress through (re-)reading.
Hope, notably, is also the last thing that escapes Pandora’s box after all the other curses of mankind. If we think of Zeus as a game designer, he implemented an important feature for replayability.
I propose comparing the apocalypse with mythology rooted in oral traditions. Hans Blumenberg (1981) suggested that the stars falling from the sky can be seen as an analogy for letters disappearing when the scroll with the sacred text is wrapped up—this signifies “Game Over,” the end of the actual world that emerged from the text. Gaming the apocalypse, therefore, means exploring the boundaries of a primitive cultural technique (Siegert 2015) like opening and closing a container, which is remediated (Bolter/Grusin 2001) in the use of books as containers of texts, such as the book with seven seals.
I would like to offer the FROG24 audience insights into the wide cultural history of apocalyptic thinking. It can be understood as a fundamental design practice that is conceived as tinkering with the medium of communication, embedding rules that allow the reader to produce meaning by navigating its contents in a haptic manner that appear playful to us.
Literature:
Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt am Main 1981.
Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge 2001.
Siegert, Bernhard: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. New York 2015.
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