Trigger Warning to Gamers:  This lecture is not mainly focused on video games, but on the longer history of the spaces in which games are played, including landscape design, battlefields, and the “Great Game” of empire and colonialism.

GAMESCAPES explores the historical genealogy of game “sites” and “sights,” the role of spectacle and spatial structures, and add to them a third concept, the notion of “situation”, looking at what Shoshana Magnet has called gamescapes: the synthesis of space and place in the design, appearance, and play of both video and non-video games. 

Mitchell raises the question of whether there are good reasons to escape or rescue us from certain games, whether games are escapist, and whether we could stop playing some very toxic real-world games (war, caste, racism, poverty, de-regulated capital and media) and the contemporary “gamification” of human realities.  

A public reception will be held prior the lecture at 6:00pm in the Jonsson Performance Hall Mezzanine. 

A Meet and Greet event with Prof. Mitchell will be held for UTD faculty and students on Friday, March 28 at 2:00 p.m. in the ATC Conference Room (ATC 1.201).

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Donnelley Distinguished Professor of English, Art History, and Cinema Studies at the University of Chicago, and the Senior Editor of Critical Inquiry.  He is known for his many books on the theory of images across the media, including Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1994), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), and Image Science (2012).  Other major publications include The Last Dinosaur Book (1998), Cloning Terror: The War of Images 9-11 to the Present (2011), and Seeing through Race ( 2012).  Books about his work include The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis (2010) and W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory, ed. Kresimir Purgar (2016).  He is best known for his foundational work in the field of visual culture, with special emphasis on political spectacle, surveillance, and iconic historical moments like September 11, 2002, January 6, 2021, and October 7, 2023.  His forty year editorship at Critical Inquiry was marked by special issues on race, gender and sexuality, comics and media, the politics of interpretation, and historic debates about the stakes of critical theory in the humanities and social sciences.  His latest book is Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (2020), and he is currently finishing a book entitled Seeing Through Madness: Essays in Crazy Times.  In 2024, he received the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing about Art, and the Modern Language Association’s Lifetime Award for Writing about Literature. 

Parking: Please utilize levels 3-5 in Parking Structure 3