"The Poetics of Games: Art, Poetry and Storytelling in Modern Game Design," Maria C. R. Harrington, Ph.D., Art Institute of Pittsburgh 2008. (I gave a similar one to the ETC CMU crowd, at the invitation of Drew Davidson).
This was a guest lecture I gave to art students in game design at the Art Institute. I wanted to challenge students to think about game engines as a new artistic and aesthetic medium. One that could be used to create beauty, open to new perceptual dimensions and analysis of reality. Not only consistent with traditional linear stories in text, games also allow branching and exploration of multiple stories, futures, and paths, thus creating a new artist medium for the artist intellectual. My aim was to inspire new forms of visual expression and to fully embrace the emotional power of these high fidelity, multi-media, electronic paints, fluid temporal canvases, and digital printing presses, to leave cultural records of meaning for future generations.