The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are vital to the vitality of our culture and its dissemination. Visual arts, heritage, music, performing arts, cinema, publishing or video games (to name but a few), the CCI sector represents a significant number of assets and a sizeable market (49.2 billion euros in 2019). In this article, we explore the idea of combining art and video games to enrich the research process.
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A video game combining artistic and ethnographic approaches
What are the possible links between anthropology, art and video games? Cédric Parizot, political anthropologist and CNRS research fellow, has been deputy director of the Institut d’études et de recherche sur le monde arabe et musulman (IREMAM, CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université) since 2018. In spring 2013, he embarked on the creation of a video game with Douglas Edric Stanley, artist-teacher at the École supérieure d'art d'Aix-en-Provence, and his students from the Hypermedia workshop. The aim was, on the one hand, to use a different form of writing to reflect the proliferation of borders in Israeli-Palestinian spaces at the start of the 21st century. On the other, they aimed to test the capabilities of video game technology to articulate an ethnographic approach, motivated by scientific issues, in addition to an artistic approach driven by its own aesthetic and poetic issues. In 2017, this project led to the creation of a playable prototype.
Research at the crossroads of art and anthropology
For Cédric Parizot, this experiment demonstrated the epistemological and methodological interest of research at the crossroads of art and anthropology. The development of the game functioned as a practical experiment, inviting him to reflect critically on the limits and potentials of his own writing devices and those offered by video games. The creation of an interactive interface allowed him to experiment with original ways of modeling the relationship with space. So, rather than offering another medium for reporting and communicating a completed scientific research project, this experimentation enriched and redeployed his research process in unexpected directions. Finally, the playable prototype they produced with Douglas Stanley and Robin Moretti in 2017, offered a particularly effective pedagogical device for training students. Cedric Parizot now uses it every year in ethnographic fieldwork training courses, to put students in a survey situation and make them aware of the challenges of such a practice. It also enables them to develop an epistemological and practical reflection on the nature of the information gathered in the field.
Article originally published in Lettre d'AMU, April 2022.
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