Digital media and cultural studies research on race, gender, and power in videogames. More →
A Case for Narrating Gameplay
1982 I begin on the shaggy tan carpet of my living room in front of a wood paneled television flickering the image of a game I later find out is called Missile Command. My hands grip the rubber of the joystick and click it violently left and right, smashing the big concave red buttons in [...]
Read more →Inception as Videogame
In the past year, I have been struck by how often I see videogames as informing other media productions. Up until recently, games were often thought of as struggling for legitimacy by trying (and inevitably failing) to represent/approximate “reality” and/or appealing to more respected art forms. Academics, designers, fans, and media have all been guilty [...]
Read more →Cultural Politics, Critique and the Digital Humanities
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 [...]
Read more →Are Twitter Trends the New Barbershop?
Recently, a friend of mine joined Twitter and the first direct message he sent me was a simple question: “Why are all the people posting on Twitter trends black?” It was an intentionally exaggerated but honest and innocent question and one I had been thinking about a lot lately. In the past few months, I had [...]
Read more →Kick-Ass and the Ethics of Gameplay
The Need for Videogame Literacies Kick-Ass is an important film for videogame scholars to see, especially with an audience. Many have made the claim that videogames have influenced film, but this influence has never been more apparent to me than in Kick-Ass. However, my concern is not with tracking the obvious visual/stylistic similarities (e.g. the first [...]
Read more →War as Videogame
Linked in the quote below is a video and write-up from the Huffington Post about a recently Freedom of Information Act released video showing the murder of innocents, including journalists, in Iraq in 2007 by the U.S. military. I am not sure I have seen a more disturbing example of the similarities between gameplay and [...]
Read more →Characterization as Sameness in Final Fantasy
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 [...]
Read more →How I Use Leeroy Jenkins to Teach Race in Videogames
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 [...]
Read more →Game Studies Research and Critical Blindspots
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 [...]
Read more →Games, Learning, and Society 5.0 Talk: Analyzing Race in Games
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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