Stefano Gualeni
Born (1978-04-30) April 30, 1978
Lovere, Italy
Occupation(s)Philosopher, Video game designer, Professor at the University of Malta, Visiting Professor at the Laguna College of Art and Design
Websitehttps://gua-le-ni.com

Stefano Gualeni is an Italian philosopher, associate professor, and game designer who has created interactable websites and video games such as Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade, and Something Something Soup Something.[1][2][3][4]

Gualeni is an associate professor at the Institute of Digital Games of the University of Malta, where he pursues academic research in the fields of philosophy of technology, game design, virtual worlds research, science fiction, and existentialism.[5][6][7][8][9]

Since 2015, he is a visiting professor in game design at the Laguna College of Art and Design of Laguna Beach, California,[5][10][11] and he is also currently a visiting researcher at the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (RCGS) at the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto, Japan.[5][11]

For a few months in 2019, he was a visiting researcher at Centre of the Digital Humanities of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.[5][11][12]

Background

Stefano Gualeni was born in Lovere, Italy in 1978, Gualeni graduated in 2004 in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. His final thesis was developed in Mexico and is supported by ITESM (Tec de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México).[11]

Gualeni was awarded his Master of Arts in 2008 at the Utrecht School of the Arts. In his thesis, he proposed a model for digital aesthetics inspired by Martin Heidegger's existential phenomenology.

He obtained his PhD in Philosophy (existentialism and philosophy of technology) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2014. His dissertation, titled Augmented Ontologies, focuses on virtual worlds in their role as mediators: as interactive, artificial environments where philosophical ideas, world-views, and thought-experiments can be experienced, manipulated, and communicated experientially.[13]

Academic work

Gualeni's work takes place in the intersection between continental philosophy and the design of virtual worlds.[14] Given the practical and interdisciplinary focus of his research - and depending on the topics and the resources at hand - his output takes the form of academic texts and/or of interactive digital experiences.[15] In his articles and essays, he presents computers as instruments to prefigure and design ourselves and our worlds, and as gateways to experience alternative possibilities of being.[8][9][16]

In 2015, Gualeni released the book Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer with Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by post-phenomenology and by Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the book attempts to answer questions such as: will experiencing worlds that are not 'actual' change our ways of structuring thought? Can virtual worlds open up new possibilities to philosophize?[8]

His 2020 book with Daniel Vella, Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds, engages with the question of what it means to exist in virtual worlds. Drawing from the tradition of existentialism, it introduces the notion of 'virtual subjectivity' and discusses the experiential and existential mechanisms by which can move into, and out of, virtual subjectivities. It also includes chapters that specifically leverage the work of Helmuth Plessner, Peter W. Zapffe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugen Fink to think through the existential significance of the virtual.[9]

His contributions to the edited volumes Experience Machines: Philosophy in Virtual Worlds,[17] Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media,[16] and Perspectives on the European Videogame[18] similarly focus on the experiential and existential effects and possibilities disclosed by virtual technologies.

One of the central themes of Gualeni's work revolves around the fact that the history of philosophy has, until recently, merely been the history of written thought. He argues that we are, however, witnessing a technological shift in how philosophy is pursued, valued, and communicated. In that respect, Gualeni advances the claim that digital media can constitute an alternative and a complement to our almost-exclusively linguistic approach to developing and communicating thought.[8][19] He considers virtual worlds to be philosophically viable and advantageous in contexts like thought experiments (where we can objectively test and evaluate possible courses of action and corresponding consequences), in the case of philosophical inquiries concerning non-actual state of affairs, and for research into non-human phenomenologies.[8][16]

Books

Monographic books

  • Gualeni, S. 2023. The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction. New York (NY): Routledge.[20]
  • Gualeni, S. & Fassone, R. 2022. Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play. London (UK): Bloomsbury.[21]
  • Gualeni, S. & Vella, D. 2020. Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave.[9]
  • Gualeni, S. 2015. Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave MacMillan.[8]

Book chapters

Playable academic works

Stefano is a philosopher who designs games videogames and a game designer who is passionate about philosophy.[26] Although his academic work largely takes the form of texts, he also designs virtual experiences that have the specific objective of disclosing thought experiments and ideas in ways that are interactive and negotiable (and perhaps even playful).[27][28]

The following are part of his ongoing 'playable philosophy' project:

Other playable academic works:

  • Construction BOOM! (2020): a strategic two-player tile-laying game meant as a satirical take on the unrestrained residential construction in Malta.[31][32][33] The game was a finalist for SaltCON's 2021 Ion Award in the Strategy Category.[34]
  • CURIO (2021): a free, playful toolkit for primary school students to be used in class, part of a 3-year research project funded by the Erasmus+ program[35]

Commercial titles released as game designer

Other game industry credits

Footnotes

  1. ↑ MobyGames Developer's Bio
  2. ↑ Stefano Gualeni at IMDb
  3. ↑ Stefano Gualeni's Adventuretreff Interview (18-06-2006)
  4. 1 2 "Something Something Soup Something". soup.gua-le-ni.com. Retrieved 2017-11-10.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Stefano Gualeni's ORCiD profile".
  6. ↑ University of Malta, Dr. Stefano Gualeni profile at the University of Malta
  7. ↑ Dr. Stefano Gualeni profile on the website of the Institute of Digital Games
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gualeni, Stefano (2015). Virtual worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-137-52178-1. OCLC 911495163.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Gualeni, Stefano (2020). Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave. ISBN 978-3-030-38477-7. OCLC 1153071742.
  10. ↑ "Prof. Stefano Gualeni - Laguna College of Art and Design". LCAD official Website. June 19, 2018. Retrieved June 19, 2018.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Stefano Gualeni's CV
  12. ↑ Game Philosophy in Gothenburg
  13. ↑ RePub, Erasmus University Academic Repository (17-04-2012)
  14. ↑ Stefano Gualeni - Google Scholar Citations
  15. ↑ NECESSARY EVIL - a critical, self-reflexive videogame (29-10-2013)
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 Romele, Alberto (2018). Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media. Terrone, Enrico. [S.l.]: Springer International PU. ISBN 9783319757599. OCLC 1036765359.
  17. 1 2 Experience machines : the philosophy of virtual worlds. Silcox, Mark. London. 2017. ISBN 9781786600677. OCLC 967202186.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  18. 1 2 Perspectives on the European Videogame. Amsterdam (The Netherlands): Amsterdam University Press. 2021. pp. 175–192. ISBN 978-94-6372-622-1. OCLC 1267585440.
  19. ↑ Gualeni, Stefano (2016). "Self-reflexive videogames: observations and corollaries on virtual worlds as philosophical artifacts". G a M e - the Italian Journal of Game Studies. 1, 5.
  20. ↑ "The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  21. ↑ Gualeni, Stefano (2022). Fictional games : a philosophy of worldbuilding and imaginary play (First ed.). London [England]. ISBN 9781350277106.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  22. ↑ Martín Núñez, Marta (2023). Jugar el malestar: Ludonarrativas más allá de la diversión (in Spanish) (1st ed.). Santander (Spain): Shangrila. pp. 14–21. ISBN 9788412681406.
  23. ↑ Gottwald, Dave; Turner-Rahman, Gregory; Vahdat, Vahid (2022). Virtual Interiorities (Vol. 3) (1st ed.). Pittsburgh (PA): ETC Press. pp. 21–44. ISBN 978-13-8750-497-8.
  24. ↑ Gerber, Andri; Götz, Ulrich (2020). Architectonics of Game Spaces, The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real. transcript Verlag. pp. 153–165. ISBN 9783839448021.
  25. ↑ Creativity in the Digital Age. Zagalo, Nelson,, Branco, Pedro. London. 2015-04-02. pp. 59–74. ISBN 9781447166818. OCLC 906575151.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  26. ↑ Dr Stefano Gualeni's Profile at the University of Malta
  27. ↑ Why designing a videogame about soup?
  28. 1 2 Self-reflexive videogames: observations and corollaries on virtual worlds as philosophical artifacts
  29. ↑ "Doors (the game)".
  30. ↑ "HERE - The Video Game".
  31. ↑ "Construction BOOM!". BoardGameGeek. Retrieved 2020-08-01.
  32. ↑ Carabott, Sarah (May 28, 2020). "Malta-based game takes on the 'unrestrained, booming construction'". Times of Malta.
  33. ↑ Schellekens, Jasper (2020). "Satirical Game Design: The Case of the Boardgame Construction BOOM!". International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. pp. 1–12. doi:10.1145/3402942.3403008. ISBN 9781450388078. S2CID 221492447 – via ACM Digital Library.
  34. ↑ "Ion Award Finalists 2021". University of Malta Newspoint. Retrieved 2022-05-17.
  35. ↑ Stephanie, Buttigieg (11 Jan 2021). "Free educational toolkit for teachers to encourage learning through playful discovery". University of Malta Newspoint.
  36. ↑ ATUM credits list
  37. ↑ ATUM - Applying Multi-layer Game Design and Environmental Storytelling
  38. ↑ Gamasutra.com featured blogpost 'Self-reflexive Video Games as Playable Critical Thought' by Stefano Gualeni (29-10-2013)
  39. ↑ The Unfinished Swan complete credits list on MobyGames
  40. ↑ Fairytale Fights complete credits list on MobyGames
  41. ↑ EXP-game official website
  42. ↑ The 13th Annual Independent Games Festival Finalists
  43. ↑ Full credits for the game on the official webpage for Chewy!
  44. ↑ 2011 Independent Propeller Award winners announced Archived 2011-03-20 at the Wayback Machine
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