# Stefano Gualeni

Stefano Gualeni is an Italian philosopher, professor, and game designer who has created interactive websites and video games such as Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths, Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade, and Something Something Soup Something.
Gualeni is currently a full professor at the Institute of Digital Games of the University of Malta, where he pursues academic research in the fields of game design, virtual worlds research, the philosophy of technology, science fiction, and existentialism.
Since 2015, he is also a visiting professor in game design at the Laguna College of Art and Design of Laguna Beach, California.
He had been a visiting researcher in various international institutions, including the Centre of the Digital Humanities of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2019), the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (RCGS) at the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto, Japan (2023), and the Faculty of Media and Communication of the Singidunum University of Belgrade, Serbia (2024).

## Background

Stefano Gualeni was born in Lovere, Italy in 1978, Gualeni graduated in 2004 in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. His final thesis was developed in Mexico and is supported by ITESM (Tec de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México).
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 PhD in Philosophy (in the fields of existentialism and philosophy of technology) 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, literary fictions, 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 Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer with Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by post-phenomenology 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, Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds, 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, Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media, and Perspectives on the European Videogame 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 (where we can objectively test and evaluate possible courses of action and corresponding consequences), in the case of philosophical inquiries concerning non-actual state of affairs, and for speculative research into non-human phenomenologies.