CoDE Anglia Ruskin 2012

The purpose of this post is to provide a review of the pieces from the CoDE Anglia Ruskin Conference 2012 that were of relevence to the Ludography community. While there wasn't a huge amount, there was a fantastic closing speech from Astrid Ensslin that made much of the rest of the conference (from a ludogology perspective) comparatively worth while.

The first observation is that Ludography is still not as wide spread as it seems to a ludologist. That may seem a rather banal observation but the point is still valid. Even in an interdisciplinary environment such as CoDE 2012 conference where many speakers engaged in ideas of digital identities etc. there was a looming sense of videogames being nothing more than curios, perhaps worthy of some abstract academic interest but not of any real merit. Beneath the surface of this, in Astrid Ensslin's closing speech, there was the sense that, even where Ludology has penetrated the UK, there is a prolonged sense that new ideas of methodologies distancing ourselves from Film and Visual Studies are fine from a theoretical standpoint but ultimately stand in the way of good analysis.