Stefano Gualeni


Stefano Gualeni, Ph.D., is an Italian philosopher and game designer who created videogames such as Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade, and Something Something Soup Something.
Gualeni is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Games of the University of Malta, where he pursues academic research in the fields of philosophy of technology, game design, virtual worlds research, and existentialism.
Since 2015, he is a Visiting Professor in Game design at the Laguna College of Art and Design of Laguna Beach, California.

Background

Born in Lovere, Italy, in 1978, Gualeni graduated in 2004 in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. His final thesis was developed in Mexico supported by ITESM.
Gualeni was awarded his Master of Arts in 2008 at the Utrecht School of the Arts. In his thesis, he proposed a model for digital aesthetics inspired by Martin Heidegger's existential phenomenology.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2014. His dissertation, titled Augmented Ontologies, focuses on virtual worlds in their role as mediators: as interactive, artificial environments where philosophical ideas, world-views, and thought-experiments can be experienced, manipulated, and communicated experientially.

Academic work

Gualeni's work takes place in the intersection between continental philosophy and the design of virtual worlds. Given the practical and interdisciplinary focus of his research - and depending on the topics and the resources at hand - his output takes the form of academic texts and/or of interactive digital experiences. In his articles and essays, he presents computers as instruments to prefigure and design ourselves and our worlds, and as gateways to experience alternative possibilities of being.
In 2015, Gualeni released the book with Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by postphenomenology and by Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, the book attempts to answer questions such as: will experiencing worlds that are not 'actual' change our ways of structuring thought? Can virtual worlds open up new possibilities to philosophize?
His 2020 book with Daniel Vella, , engages with the question of what it means to exist in virtual worlds. Drawing from the tradition of existentialism, it introduces the notion of 'virtual subjectivity' and discusses the experiential and existential mechanisms by which can move into, and out of, virtual subjectivities. It also includes chapters that specifically leverage the work of Helmuth Plessner, Peter W. Zapffe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugen Fink to think through the existential significance of the virtual.
His contributions to the edited volumes Experience Machines: Philosophy in Virtual Worlds and Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media similarly focus on the experiential and existential effects and possibilities disclosed by virtual technologies.
One of the central themes of Gualeni's work revolves around the fact that the history of philosophy has, until recently, merely been the history of written thought. He argues that we are, however, witnessing a technological shift in how philosophy is pursued, valued, and communicated. In that respect, Gualeni advances the claim that digital media can constitute an alternative and a complement to our almost-exclusively linguistic approach to developing and communicating thought. He considers virtual worlds to be philosophically viable and advantageous in contexts like thought experiments, in the case of philosophical inquiries concerning non-actual state of affairs, and for research into non-human phenomenologies.

Books

Monographic books

Stefano is a philosopher who designs games videogames and a game designer who is passionate about philosophy. Although his academic work largely takes the form of texts, he designs virtual experiences that have the specific objective of disclosing thought experiments and ideas in ways that are interactive and negotiable.
The following are examples of his ‘playable philosophy’ projects:
Other playable academic works: