(video)Games & (high) Culture
First Festival “Catalogus Ludorum” (2025)
Bari, 16–18 December 2025
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM

16 December – CyberLudens Workshop – APULIA DIGITAL – ITS ACADEMY PUGLIA
17 December – Talks and Round Tables – APULIA DIGITAL – ITS ACADEMY PUGLIA
18 December – Talks and Round Tables – APULIA FILM HOUSE

General Description

Three days dedicated to the relationship between Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics, Culture, and Videogames,
featuring over 30 Italian and international speakers: scholars, game designers, historians, philosophers, artists, and industry professionals.

The festival offers round tables, lectures, technical demonstrations, workshops, interdisciplinary exchanges, and activities specifically designed for students.

FULL PROGRAM HERE

Questions and Reflections 2025

I

Who Moves the Pieces: Man, Machine, or Game?
The fundamental question running through the eighth edition of VGHC concerns the very nature of action and responsibility within the contemporary World/Ludus — a world shaped by new and intricate forms of conflict and strategic competition.
If traditional geopolitics once seemed dominated by leaders, states, and ideologies, and contemporary geopolitics now contends with increasingly scarce strategic resources, global interdependencies, and the planetary scale itself — what role remains for the human player?
Are we truly in control, or — unable to grasp complexity — are we entrusting ourselves to invisible algorithms? Or perhaps it is the Game itself — with its rules and its archetypal structure — that has always defined the realm of the “possible” within which the pieces move?
Is there still room to rethink and reinvent rules, strategies, structures, and possible scenarios, both for individuals and for societies?
And ultimately, what happens when these two forces — Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitical Projection — meet within the realm of the video game, the most performative, immersive, and malleable medium of our age?

II

AI, Geopolitics, Games, and New Conflicts
When Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitical Projection meet within the video game medium, a new symbolic and operational territory emerges — a space where algorithms can not only simulate wars and strategies but also anticipate and influence real political decisions.
Military and strategy games thus become not only pragmatic laboratories of foresight but also mirrors of the possible.
To what extent — and in what ways — do the new wars and global conflicts, powered by massive computational intelligence, shape strategic games?
Do these new forms of simulated warfare influence, beyond soldiers and governments, the collective imagination of player-citizens?
Or does the collective imagination itself — shaped by the binary, populist, and spectacular logic of today’s transmedia communication — influence how we conceive of conflicts?
How much does the intertwining of AI and Geopolitics in (video)games reveal this complex entanglement between historical reality and the “cultures of war”, in a world where psycho-digital borders matter as much as geographical ones?

III

Narratives and Cultures of War: Playing to Understand, Playing to Learn
Even before it manifests in reality, war is hybrid in research — and even more so in teaching.
It requires us to hold together multiple perspectives: the geopolitical (necessarily a “top-down” view), the economic, political, and social (attentive to the experiences of men and women), and the cultural (focused on subjects, collectives, and civilizations), in order to grasp the moral and behavioral dimensions inside and outside the battlefield.

How can we navigate such complexity in a way that remains intelligible even to non-specialists?
Can play serve as a tool to face this challenge — to comprehend (and deconstruct) the cultures of war and their narratives?
And finally, to what kinds of narratives can this form of play grant us access?

FULL PROGRAM