Digital media and cultural studies research on race, gender, and power in videogames. More →
I’d like to call attention to Gerald Voorhees’ article “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games” in the most recent issue of Game Studies because it discusses race and offers some worthwhile points of analysis.
In particular, this section of Voorhees’ argument struck me:
The games’ narratives and visual representations continue to deploy race, ethnicity, [...]
I think it is important for those of us in media studies, and not just with a game studies focus, to teach how to “read” and interpret videogames given their budding status as one of the dominant media forms of the near future. This is particularly important if you subscribe to McKenzie Wark’s central argument [...]
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It was refreshing to be around so many different people from so many different backgrounds at the Games, Learning, and Society (GLS) conference in June, specifically because they were all incredibly excited about games. The conference had just a slight tinge of fangirl/boyism that was endearing and, in some ways, quite productive. After all, in [...]
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Last week I attended the Games, Learning, and Society conference. I also presented a talk there on a panel entitled “Representations of Self and Other in Games” which was a pleasure because it was one of the few explicitly political panels at the conference. Given the educational focus of the conference and the large attendance [...]
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This is a follow-up to a previous post.
Near the end of his talk Erik Loyer mentioned how music, although clearly a tool of emphasis in the post-plastic instrument peripheral games industry, still has a lot of untapped potential. One of the holy grails of game design, as most clearly demonstrated by the massive success of the [...]
Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany graciously accepted my invite to give a talk at the University of California, Riverside for a research group I am a part of this week. Our research this year has focused on play with a particular interest in historicizing and expanding play beyond the boundaries of the common conceptualization of [...]
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I saw this license plate on a truck today and was shocked by the connections to some issues I have been dealing with in my composition course this quarter. One of the selections we read from the popular culture criticism collection Signs of Life is by David Goewey. It’s an article titled “Careful, You May [...]
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In the past when I have taught race in videogames for my freshman composition classes I have had a hard time explaining how to push beyond representational critiques of racial signification. Naturally students are more adept at analyzing the visual presentation and iconography of race in games than breaking down the more subtle and technical [...]
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Twitter is the current hot social network and, for once, I think it is justified. As others have pointed out, what makes Twitter useful is its adherence to simplicity in design and features and the ability to be followed but not follow, or, its asymmetry.
Academics have been especially intrigued by its functionality in the classroom and [...]
Today N. Katherine Hayles gave a talk as part of a speaker series on Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside. It was entitled “Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and the Macropolitics of Global Spatialization.”
She set up a productive binary between the conservative transhumanist tendencies in theory and art and more progressive posthumanist tendencies. As she argued, transhumanism seeks [...]
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