Vadim Nickel

In the liner notes for his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Brian Eno stated that ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting. He identified ambient music as a genre that can be engaged over various levels of intensity, from being merely a calm auditive layer at an otherwise busy airport to holding the full attention of the listener, encompassed in its spherical sounds.  When applying this idea to digital games, a new kind of game emerges: the ambient game. Adapted from Eno’s concept, the ambient game can be experienced on different layers of engagement, which vary in intensity: It may serve as a screensaver when devoid of player input, as a walking simulator for mere spatial exploration, and subsequently as an interactive ludic experience, the nature of the interactivity depending on the game genre.  This paper aims to present ambient games as playable atmospheres by iterating through the aforementioned layers of engagement in a reversed order: As layers of interaction are removed, atmosphere emerges as the underlying structure.  The removal of interaction layers in games is not a new practice and has been performed in the context of artistic game modifications. One such example is Cory Arcangel’s 2002 work Super Mario Clouds. In the context of ambient games, however, one shall differentiate between a voluntary removal of interaction layers, dependent of the player’s decision not to engage, and embedded or integrated removal, which is static and may not be simply reversed, such as in Arcangel’s work.

20-30 min for each paper. Group A: Björn, Vadim, Felipe, Miruna, Su-Jin Group B: Katja, Jonathan, Anh-Thu, Magdalena, Felix, Jimena