Background

Dr Olli Tapio Leino is a philosophy of computer games and new media art scholar. His recent publications include an article on the technological specificity of single-player computer games in Game Studies (2011), a chapter on ontology of gameplay in Springer anthology Philosophy of Computer Games (2012), and a chapter on romantic attraction in the Game Love anthology (2015), an article on the neoliberalist underpinnings of computer games in Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds (2016), and an article on the technological specificity and playful practice in Mahjong in Games & Culture (2017).

Leino's current two-year Hong Kong GRF-funded research project 'Ideas and Realities of Gamification' (2017) investigates the phenomenon of gamification from a critical humanities perspective. His previous GRF project 'Existential Hermeneutics for Playable Media' (2014) focused on how technological materialities of computer games affect the conditions of experience, emotion, and interpretation in computer game play.

Leino has given invited speeches and keynotes internationally and is working on a book addressing questions of interpretation and experience at the overlap of computer games and playable art and media. He has written also about human/technology relations in new media art, and curated the 'New Playable Art' exhibition for IFVA'14 at Hong Kong Arts Centre. Leino and Dr Sebastian Möring (University of Potsdam) are exploring the avenue of 'existential ludology', focusing on the methodological implications of the world-likeness of computer games.

Leino has carried out contracted research on eSports together with Dr. Yong Ming Kow and Mr. Chun Pang Yim from School of Creative Media.

Leino earned his PhD from the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen in 2010. Prior to appointment at CityU he collaborated with Nokia and Ubisoft and was a visiting scholar at the Play Research Group of the University of the West of England. At SCM he teaches courses and advises both theoretical and practice-based student projects in undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programmes.

Currently, Leino is advising the following doctoral students:

• Jonathan Harrington
• Ariel Huang
• Wilhelm Klein
• Nicolás Mendoza
• Peter Nelson
• Carloalberto Treccani

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