Co-funded by:
Latvian Ministry of Culture
Agency Pro-Progressione in Hungary
Municipality of Tripolis in Greece
ImGame is an innovative digital environment that interweaves the fields of serious gaming and immersive aesthetics. It will serve as a dissemination tool to interactively demonstrate the research results concerning the phenomenon of immersiveness in contemporary art. Globally, there are almost no playful and educational media that would teach the history of contemporary art, inform about its antecedents, its conceptual background, and the network of related ideas. ImGame invites the user to dive into the immersive stylistics used in new media art and other types of modern culture. It will help build a new and currently underrepresented category of serious games that explains the rich intertextual context of digital artefacts today. The objective of the project is to develop a new genre of gaming in the crosscut of serious and art games that documents the cultural capital of contemporary aesthetics, especially focusing on the young artists’ work in the three partner states – Latvia, Hungary, and Greece. As well as, the objective is to transfer knowledge about contemporary artistic thought to the public not just to the connoisseurs of art. The project will develop new technological knowledge (node-based shader creation workflow for A-Frame) and thus offer the possibility to create multi-platform interactive experiences without the need to have programming skills. The main expected result is an increased knowledge transfer between the sector of artistic research and serious gaming. The planned activities are research into the phenomenon of immersiveness, the creation of the prototype and its dissemination. There are eight persons working in the project including artists, researchers, and managers. The project continues to develop the prototype of game designed through a post-doctoral project of Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. Next to the prototype of ImGame, a scientific article will be published to represent the results of the project.
Team
Lead partner: Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Latvia
Lead researcher, PhD Ieva Gintere
New media artist: mag.art. Alvis Misjuns (ViA, Latvian Academy of Art)
Creative engineer: Rogier Jupijn (Netherlands), RISEBA
Pro Progressione, Hungary
Researcher: PhD Ágnes Bakk, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME)
Assistant of the digital artist: Kristóf Szabó
Municipality of Tripolis, Greece
Researcher: PhD Emmanouel Rovithis, Ionian University
Sound artist: Vasilis Georgakopoulos
Project results
Research papers
Q1 article (open access e-journal): Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame Project: a Comprehensive Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Gaming. International Journal of Game-Based Learning, W. H. Tan, ed., vol. 14(1), available here.
Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, May 2nd-4th, 2024, Angers (France).
Article representing a synergy of ImGame and CineGame, the MSCA4Ukraine project No. 1233058:
Kovalenko, Y., Gintere, I., Misjuns, A. (2025). Using Serious Art Games to promote the Circulation of Ideas Embodied in Contemporary Aesthetics. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference of Computer Supported Education. Porto, 1st-3rd April 2025.
Reports in international scientific conferences and seminars
1. Gintere, I., Rovithis, E., Bakk, Á. K., Misjuns, A. (2024). ImGame: An Immersive Educational Environment to Teach Contemporary Art. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, May 2nd-4th, 2024, Angers (France). Presentation available here.
2. Gintere, I. (2024). Projects of Serious Art Gaming: New Concepts and Trends. International Scientific Conference «Society. Technologies. Solutions» (STS), Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, April 12th, 2024.
3. Gintere, I. (2023). Insights of the ImGame project in the European Science Night at the Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, Valmiera, September 29th, 2022.
4. Gintere, I., Misjuns, A. (2022). The ImGame project: Refinements to the Theory of Immersive Aesthetics and Innovation in Serious Art Gaming, UNLOCK conference November 28th-29th, 2022. Abstracts available here.
5. Misjuns, A., Cīrulis, A. (2024). Creation of virtual reality experiences for the web: shader programming for artists. The 11th IEEE Workshop on Advances in Information, Electronic and Electrical Engineering (AIEEE), Valmiera, June 14th.
6. Gintere, I. (2024). ImGame results presented at the doctoral school of Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Paris, October 22nd, 2024.
7. Final seminar at Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, May 6th, 2025. Presentations available here and here.
ImGame prototype in progress: https://imgame.va.lv/
Image from the ImGame VR environment, credit: Alvis Misjuns
