Chris Richardson was kind enough to interview me about The Art of Failure for his This is not a Pipe podcast series.
https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/artoffailure
On the page I also mention some of the books that have inspired me as a writer.
Category: readings
Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA conference in Kyoto
Here are all the published papers from the 2019 DiGRA conference.
The Handmade Pixels interviews
For Handmade Pixels, I did a rather extensive series of interviews with developers and festival organizers.
I was interested in general questions of how they framed their own role and how they saw the history of independent games, as well as in the concrete details of their development or festival-organizing practices.
I am dropping half the interviews now, and will publish the rest during the later months of 2019.
| Anna Anthropy
Game designer known for games such as Dys4ia, author of the Rise of the Videogame Zinesters manifesto. |
Bennett Foddy
Educator and game developer behind punishing games such as QWOP and Getting over it with Bennett Foddy. |
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| Bernie DeKoven
Pioneer in physical and communal games, including with the New Games movement. |
Celia Pearce
Educator, writer and game developer who has worked with games, VR, and multimedia since the late 1980s. |
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| David Kanaga
Composer and game developer of games such as Proteus and Oikospiel. |
Jason Rohrer
Independent game developer of games such as Passage and One Hour One Life. |
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| Jonathan Blow
Independent game developer, best known for Braid and The Witness. |
Kelly Wallick
Chairperson of the Independent Games Festival since 2015, CEO and founder of Indie MEGABOOTH. |
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| Tale of Tales
Belgium-based artist duo—Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn—known for their earlier work with experimental and experiential games such as The Path and The Graveyard. |
Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK)
Are virtual reality objects real? I have a new paper out in the Disputatio journal, titled Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK) .
The paper came about as a response to David Chalmer’s 2017 paper The Virtual and the Real, about which Pawel Grabarczyk organized a seminar in Copenhagen in the summer of 2018.
TL;DR: Chalmers uses virtual reality to argue that there are structures (such as calculators) that exist regardless of their physical or non-physical implementation, and as such virtual reality objects can be perfectly real.
I argue, orthogonally, that virtual reality is not becoming “just-like-the-real-thing” based on any fidelity to the physical world. VR is not just technology, but art; a human act of communication and selective implementation. I also argue that VR is half-real: we are not magically transported to another world, as VR is only selectively implemented (it rarely has the photons that make up light, for example), and as users we we are conscious of how the world is a limited implementation made for the purpose of a particular experience.
ROMchip journal issue 1/1
G|A|M|E 7/2018: Digital Games for Special Needs; Special Needs for Digital Games
For your theoretical processing, G|A|M|E 7/2018 on Digital Games for Special Needs; Special Needs for Digital Games.
- E. Gandolfi, K. Calabria, R.E. Ferdig – Introduction
- M. Dalgleish – There are no universal interfaces: how asymmetrical roles and asymmetrical controllers can increase access diversity
- L. Imbriani, I. Mariani, M. Bertolo – WaTa Fight! How situated multiplayer competitive gaming can facilitate the inclusion of low vision and blind players
- T. Plothe – The Whose View of Hue?: Disability adaptability for color blindness in the digital game Hue
- K. Schrier – Reducing Bias Through Gaming
- B. Vercellone, J. Shelestak, Y. Dhaher, R. Clements – Haptic Interfaces for Individuals with Visual Impairments
American Journal of Play 11/1
For your theoretical work/play: American Journal of Play 11/1
Editor’s Note
Articles
Liberating Human Expression: Work and Play or Work versus Play
J. Talmadge Wright
Desire and Doubt: The Potentials and the Potential Problems of Pursuing Play
Christine Payne
Abstract Only>Full Text>The Politics of Playtime: Reading Marx through Huizinga on the Desire to Escape from Ordinary Life
Michael J. Roberts
T. L. Taylor
Ken S. McAllister and Judd Ethan Ruggill
J. Talmadge Wright and David G. Embrick
Book Reviews
Anthony T. DeBenedet, Playful Intelligence: The Power of Living Lightly in a Serious World
Peter Grey
First Paragraph Only>Full Text>Terry Kottman and Kristin K. Meany-Walen, Doing Play Therapy: From Building the Relationship to Facilitating Change
Jodi Ann Mullen
Victoria M. Grieve, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s
Peter N Stearns
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Paper Dolls: Fragile Figures, Enduring Symbols
Michelle Parnett-Dwyer
Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee, Families at Play: Connecting and Learning through Video Games
Mark Chen
Dominic Arsenault, Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Joseph A. Loporcaro
Game Studies 18, 3
For your theoretical consumption, Game Studies 18/3 special issue on Queerness and Video Games.
Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction)
by Bonnie Ruberg, Amanda Phillips
The place where queerness meets games is a site of radical potential. This introduction, and this issue, ask how we can push queer game studies beyond desires for inclusion and representation and instead embrace a queer tradition of rejecting the status quo.[more]
Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Softby Teddy Pozo
This article re-contextualizes debate in queer game studies over “empathy games,” represented by the games EMPATHY MACHINE (merritt k, 2014), Empathy Game (Anna Anthropy, 2015), and empathy machine (Mattie Brice, 2016), within debates over empathy in feminist theory. New terms for haptic game design aesthetics such as consent, cuteness, and the rad[more]
Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affectby Kara Stone
This essay uses a personal account of the process of creating a videogame to explore themes of queerness, disability, and labour. It intermixes theories of queer time with crip time to detail possible approaches to a queer, accessible art practice that takes seriously social inequalities yet moves towards healing.[more]
When (and What) Queerness Counts: Homonationalism and Militarism in the Mass EffectSeriesby Jordan Youngblood
This paper examines how two BioWare-developed titles–2010’s Mass Effect 2 and 2012’s Mass Effect 3– integrate various depictions of LGBTQ-affiliated characters into a larger systemic process of thinking about populations as “war assets” to be expended, rendering queer identity as useful only when considered as a “positive” resource in the fight.[more]
“theyre all trans sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fictionby Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler
Video game fans use fan fiction to critique video game narratives that exclude or misrepresent diverse gender identities in their design. Fans also recraft the video game narrative to include the representation they want to see, providing insight into how marginalized and minority players respond to diversity in games.[more]
Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practicesby Jess Marcotte
In this article, I make the case that control and controllers — the peripherals which players use as extensions of their bodies and minds to operate videogames — are a key entry point into the project of altering the hegemonic status quo of mainstream game design. Concepts from queer game studies, intersectional feminist theory, and critical design practices (particularly, the reflective game design framework) are brought together in order to analyze and subsequently queer five core aspects of control and controllers in videogames. I make use of examples from the work of queer creators, including my own, in order to queer each aspect.[more]
Coin of Another Realm: Gaming’s Queer Economyby Christopher Goetz
This essay explores gaming’s “queer economy,” joining intimate frameworks based on the study of affect and individual psychology with wider, systemic and economic analyses of the cultural and economic meaning of videogame play.[more]
Daddy’s Play: Subversion and Normativity in Dream Daddy’s Queer Worldby Braidon Schaufert
This article argues that the popular indie game Dream Daddy renormalizes the subversive gay daddy figure by replacing boundary-pushing depictions of sex with the positivity, joy, and optimism of the suburban upper- middle class. Attending to negative feelings, or “bad dreams,” in the game can wake players up to messier, kinkier, and queerer worlds.[more]
Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gamingby Matt Knutson
Applying Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity to play, this article examines time in high-stakes, professional play as a normative structure against which to recognize a set of queer temporalities, including backtracking, rewinding and resetting. A discussion of Life Is Strange illustrates both queer content and queered time in games.[more]
The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Modsby Tom Welch
This article examines queer videogame modifications as a specific form of free and affective labour. Drawing on multiple modders, I describe the varying relationships between queer players, developers, and the game object through mods.[more]
Queer Easter Eggs and their Hierarchies of Playby Eric James
Some of the earliest queer representations in mass-market games are Easter eggs, hidden artifacts that often present queer experiences as zany and noncanonical. Contrasting Easter eggs with representational politics that emphasize player choice, this article instead advocates for ambivalent design that confronts players with queer irresolvability.[more]
Engineering Queerness in the Game Development Pipelineby Eric Freedman
With its focus on video game engines, this essay proposes how a queer analysis of the labors and technologies that undergird the work in progress might strengthen more generalized discussions of the representational politics of video games, their audiences, and their production communities.[more]