Gameology 2.0

The Workshop on Integrated Design in Games is offered in conjunction with Nanocon IX, the ninth installment of the game convention sponsored by Dakota State University’s Gaming Club. The Workshop will be an annual event, and every year’s workshop will feature a different theme. This year, the theme is horror. Integrated design means that all aspects of design come together to create a single experience, unified by a common theme.

This little essay is about cultural privilege and, eventually, video games. It just takes a little while to get to the games, so bear with me.

When I decided that being a "sensitive guy" wasn't good enough, and that I wanted to better understand who I was in terms of what the experience of others was like, I made a horrid discovery. I had a ring in my pocket - no, not just a ring, but THE ring, the "one ring to rule them all." Worse, I'd been slipping it on and off heedlessly, nearly unconsciously.

As I'm writing this, my 2-month-old son is sleeping on my chest (in a wrap-type sling). I said that my comments on Gameology (regarding sex, relationships and romance in gaming) would be a combination of the academic and the personal. This post is going to be more toward the personal end of the spectrum.

My review of the Void went live on Play This Thing! last night, and I'm thinking about how that review turned in part into a discourse on Eastern Philosophy - and the review partially into an analysis of how I played that game.

I've been thinking about process a lot lately - the processes of human growth and development, the process of becoming a parent (a much longer and more complicated thing than reproducing, though human sexual reproduction is a wonder in itself). This has also brought my thoughts back to philosophies that are about process and becoming, rather than telos (ends, goals).

Having recently become a father, the issue of graphic and gratuitous violence in games has been in my thoughts lately. It probably says a lot about me that this leads me to wonder where all the games with sexual and romantic content are.

So, no, this isn't an anti-violence screed, though I am thoroughly bored with bodies that explode and splatter in viscerally rendered 3d. It's more of a pro-sex, or specifically sex-positive screed.

A roundtable discussion of specific approaches and close playings that explore the methodological contribution of literary studies toward videogame studies. 300-word abstract and 1-page bio to Mark Sample (samplereality@gmail.com) by March 15.

All participants must be MLA members by April 7. Also note that this is a proposed special session; the MLA Program Committee will have the final say on the roundtable’s acceptance.

Psychoanalysis and gender have dominated scholarship on the horror film for several decades, but they are by no means the only lenses through which horror can be viewed. The fields of ecocriticism, urban studies, transnationalism, and globalization provide exciting new opportunities for exploring the horror genre. At the same time, horror has manifested across media platforms, including television and video games.

Many institutions have and are creating digital humanities centers to support the growing needs related to digital humanities research. For local researchers, additional support is always great news. In terms of the larger academic landscape, this is also great news because it means a stronger overall infrastructure for support for research that's interdisciplinary and technically demanding (e.g.; demanding of older computers and machinery, high level computing resources, community critical knowledge mass, etc.).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER GAMES

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN ATHENS 2011

April 6th-9th, 2011

We hereby invite scholars in any field of studies who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of computer games to submit papers to the international conference "The Philosophy of Computer Games 2011", to be held in Athens, Greece, on April 6th-9th 2011.

Book Description: In her famous book, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), Nina Auerbach writes that each age embraces the vampire it needs. This statement speaks to the essential role that monster narratives play in culture. They offer a space where society can safely represent and address anxieties of its time. In the past decade, our changing world faced fears of terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few.

"Games can’t tell their stories through disconnected segments of gameplay strung together by cut scenes. Games need to tell their story through the gameplay. Narrative should drip from every texture and be integrated into every facet of the world. It should come through in the menus and the interface and in every loading screen."
- Daniel Floyd and James Portnow

The concept of the singular author is being transformed by a culture driven by collaborative media. Movies, graphic novels, and videogames all require a combined effort by artists from disparate fields to tell their stories and, as a result, the notion of a cohesive narrative must now extend beyond the bounds of language. Furthermore, open-content journalism and narrative frameworks, such as Twitter and fan fiction, have blurred the distinction between reader and author. Our conference invites papers that consider how interactive forms of media challenge conventional concepts of narrative and authorship. How must we adjust our conception of narrative to address the contributions of illustrators, designers and programmers? How does collaboration on a longstanding serial affect the relationship between author and work, especially in the absence of an original creator? What happens to the relationship between author and audience when electronic media allows users to contribute to a story?