Co-funded by Latvian Ministry of Culture

ImGame is an innovative digital environment that interweaves the fields of serious gaming and immersive aesthetics. It will serve as a dissemination tool to interactively demonstrate the research results concerning the phenomenon of immersiveness in contemporary art. Globally, there are almost no playful and educational media that would teach the history of contemporary art, inform about its antecedents, its conceptual background, and the network of related ideas. ImGame invites the user to dive into the immersive stylistics used in new media art and other types of modern culture. It will help build a new and currently underrepresented category of serious games that explains the rich intertextual context of digital artefacts today. The objective of the project is to develop a new genre of gaming in the crosscut of serious and art games that documents the cultural capital of contemporary aesthetics, especially focusing on the young artists’ work in the three partner states – Latvia, Hungary, and Greece. As well as, the objective is to transfer knowledge about contemporary artistic thought to the public not just to the connoisseurs of art. The project will develop new technological knowledge (node-based shader creation workflow for A-Frame) and thus offer the possibility to create multi-platform interactive experiences without the need to have programming skills. The main expected result is an increased knowledge transfer between the sector of artistic research and serious gaming. The planned activities are research into the phenomenon of immersiveness, the creation of the prototype and its dissemination. There are eight persons working in the project including artists, researchers, and managers. The project continues to develop the prototype of game designed through a post-doctoral project of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. Next to the prototype of ImGame, a scientific article will be published to represent the results of the project.

Team

Lead partner: Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Latvia

Head of the team: lead researcher, PhD Ieva Gintere (HESPI)

Lead artist: mag.art. Alvis Misjuns (HESPI, Latvian Academy of Art)

Associate partners:
Pro Progressione, Hungary

Researcher: PhD Ágnes Bakk, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME)

Assistant of the digital artist: Kristóf Szabó

Municipality of Tripolis, Greece

Researcher: PhD Emmanouel Rovithis, Ionian University

Sound artist: Vasilis Georgakopoulos

Project results

Q1 article (Open access e-journal)

Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame Project: a Comprehensive Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Gaming. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, W. H. Tan, ed., vol. 14(1), available here.

Reports in international scientific conferences and seminars

1. Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU), May 2nd-4th, 2024, Angers (France).

2. Gintere, I. (2024). Projects of Serious Art Gaming: New Concepts and Trends. International Scientific Conference «Society. Technologies. Solutions» (STS), Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, April 12th, 2024.

3. Gintere, I. (2023). Insights of the ImGame project in the European Science Night at the Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, September 29th, 2022.

4. Gintere, I., Misjuns, A. (2022). The ImGame project: Refinements to the Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Art Gaming, UNLOCK conference November 28th-29th, 2022. Extended abstracts in the UNLOCK proceedings.

ImGame prototype in progress: https://imgame.va.lv/