Professor Nukem

Abstract

The experience economy, that is, the creative and communicative turn in today’s social, cultural and economic structures, implies, as explained by Pine and Gilmore (1999), that consumption is embedded in a communicative format that conveys some kind of experience to the consumer. The consumer in turn becomes more than just a passive user - he or she becomes an active participant in the experiential/communicative design. As such, the mode of consumption in the experience economy is an interactive and play-centric one. And the computer game embodies the very core logic of this experience economy. In the experience economy, the focus is not on consumption of commodities and services, but on the consumer’s engagement in an experience that uses products, services and information as props and creative tools. Taking the user-centred mode of consumption as our point of departure, the present paper examines how the computer game format may be used as a new tool for communicating academic research to a broader audience. By applying some findings from a recent project, we will focus on the ways in which academic research can be communicated in a format that causes the recipient to take part in the process of communication and acquiring knowledge. This opens up new opportunities as well as challenges. On the one hand, communication of academic research is provided with new types of involvement, as the focus is not only on knowledge as content, but also on knowledge as activity. On the other hand, questions are raised here concerning what kind of knowledge is actually communicated/created in the process of active participation.

Keywords

• computer games
• experience economy
• knowledge
• research communication
• play like learning