Digital media and cultural studies research on race, gender, and power in videogames. More →
Word cloud image via ghbrett.
In November 2009, I had the privilege of participating in a roundtable at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference with Anna Everett, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, and Kara Thompson on the Digital Humanities (DH). The panel was titled “Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Means of Digital Humanities Production.” Convened by [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Crossposted on Gameology.
Read part 2 here.
Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.”
Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of plot-centric progression and [...]
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