Dmitry Frolov

As the video game industry grows and the number of players increases, people spend an ever greater share of their time in virtual worlds. These spaces have borders and laws of their own. An interesting aspect of gaming in order to make artistic and historical sense of these territories is machinima (“machine” and “cinema”): films shot inside video games or created with game engines. The programme “Ludic Cartographies” guides us through the politics and poetics of such spaces. The films touch upon different issues of alternative history and media archaeology, or military conflicts and territorial disputes, but all of them are united by the particular tension between a lived experience of the world and the way it appears to us in video games.