Paolo Ruffino

Curriculum

Paolo Ruffino was born in Rome, Italy, and currently lives in London, UK. He has been studying media and communications, digital media and semiotics in Rome, Copenhagen, Bologna and London. His interests include video game theory and culture, digital media, fakes and 'new media' art.

Academy

Paolo Ruffino is a Ph.D. and Visiting Tutor at the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research project is a cultural analysis of video game consumers and, particularly, of the emergence of the prosumer in the video game industry. It involves a study of the concepts of consumer and producer, the history of the medium of the video game and phenomena such as 'modding', independent gaming, open engines and game art. While analysing discourses surrounding the 'Playstation hacking', the Independent Games Festival, Minecraft, gamification and game development kits, he proposes a new perspective to the linear and hierarchic division between producers and consumers.

The idea for this research project comes from a long experience in video game journalism. He has published several papers on these topics, worked as a translator, as a guest lecturer in higher education and presented at international conferences in Europe and the USA. From 2010, he is also studying for the PGCert (Management of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education).

In 2012 he joined the Gamification Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg, Germany. As a Research Fellow he will be investigating recent developments in the video game industry, particularly the ethical and political implications of new forms of consumer engagement.

Since 2011 he is a Lecturer at London South Bank University. He teaches about video game culture (Game Contexts module) and supervise students' final dissertations at the Game Cultures programme.

Art

Paolo Ruffino is a member of the artist group IOCOSE. Their mission is to subvert ideologies, processes and practices of identification and production of meanings. They work with camouflage, mimicry, fakes and pranks, mostly based in news, social and mass media. Among their works, they have hijacked an exhibition at Tate Modern, invented a spam campaign for the Italian Democratic Party, designed a religious hi-tech product based on electric shock, crafted an IKEA guillottine, experimented a drug made out of floppy discs, and organized an international contest for the most valueless video on YouTube. They have exhibited, among many, at the Venice Biennale (2011, 2013), Tate Modern (London, UK, 2011), Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland, 2012) Jeu de Paume (Paris, France, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, UK, 2012), Shift festival (Basel, Switzerland, 2010), The Influencers (Spain, 2010).