Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture screening + panel discussion with Fred Ritchin (moderator), Roger Stahl, Wafaa Bilal, Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner :: October 21, 2011; (screening) 6:00 pm (panel) 8:00 pm :: Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, Room 006 :: Free but RSVP required.

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture (Media Education Foundation, 2011, 45 min.), written and directed by Roger Stahl, examines the culture of war-themed video games through work of three pioneering artists and activists: Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and Wafaa Bilal.

Returning Fire documents how the three artists moved dissent from the streets to our screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic spell of “militainment,” and thereby forcing us to think critically about what it means when the clinical tools of real-world killing become forms of consumer play.

Film director Roger Stahl is associate professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Georgia. In 2010, he published a book Militainment, Inc and produced a documentary of the same title in 2007.

Joseph Delappe is a professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Game designer, writer and artist Anne-Marie Schleiner teaches game design in the Communication and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore.

Wafaa Bilal is assistant arts professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Co-sponsored by The Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in collaboration with the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film, TV and New Media and the NYU Game Center along with the Department of Art and Public Policy and NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

The Department of Photography & Imaging is an intensive four-year BFA program centered on the making and understanding of images. It is a diverse department embracing multiple perspectives. The students work in virtually all modes of analog, digital, and multimedia photo-based image making, exploring photo-based imagery as personal and cultural expression.