New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Vanity post: 

Here is an article about me published on the Wits School of Arts website in the news section of March 2011.

Written by Christo Doherty.

Photo Christo Doherty. 
Related post also on www.atjoburg.net
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New Game Design Lecturer appointed in Digital Arts

Hanli Geyser has  been appointed as  the first Game Design Lecturer in Digital Arts.  As both an avid gamer and an academic researcher into popular cultural production, Hanli has the background necessary to develop the exciting new Games Design courses which will be launched by Digital Arts, in collaboration with the Wits School of Electrical Engineering,  in 2012.

Hanli’s research and teaching interests are diverse, spanning many areas of popular cultural production. She is primarily fascinated by the conjunction between visual arts and narrative texts found in video games, hypertext fiction, comic books and film.  She graduated with an MA in History of Art from Wits in 2008 with a dissertation entitled Surface Tension - Examining the implications of intentional disruption of the Photographic Surface.  . Extending her interest in disruptions to the surface into the digital realm her PhD, provisionally titled An Investigation of the Hyperlink as both Mark and Rupture on the Imagined Hypertextual Surface, focuses on the use of the hyperlink in visual arts. Areas of research in which she is actively involved include Interactive Narrative as well as Adaptation Studies.  Interactive narrative covers a vast range of practices that involve some degree of user participation to drive the narrative structure.  Her interest here is in both literary and visual story telling forms, and extends from ‘text adventures’ through hypertext fiction to video games.  In adaptation studies, the study of transition between media in narrative texts, she is primarily interested in the impact of medium on the narrative structure and the effect it generates.  Her investigation in this area has centered on transitions between comic, film, and video game formats.

Hanli has always been an avid gamer, actively playing a wide range of games.  Her enjoyment of games stems both from narrative satisfaction as well as a keen interest in ludology and game mechanics. She is currently writing a paper on the post-colonial representation of the African landscape in the popular commercial title Far cry 2 (2008).

While she plays many commercial titles (her current favourites include The Witcher, Fall Out, Machinarium, and Braid) she has a keen interest in games as a form of artistic expression.  She therefore actively engages with independent, experimental, and art games.

Hanli is an energetic researcher but she is also equally committed to her students and to teaching.  She is passionate about education as an ideal and there is nothing she enjoys more than being able to teach and engage with students. "