This Monday, at 1:30pm, Ed Chang (Drew University) will be on campus to give a talk (“Queer Games, Straight Design”), and later in the afternoon (3:30pm, in the Maker Lab) he will facilitate a workshop (“Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality”). When you have a moment, would you mind circulating this announcement? Ed’s a fantastic speaker, and I’d love to see people in the room for his talk at 1:30. Of note, the workshop requires registration, but there are still spots remaining.
Details and URLs below. Thanks!
Best,
Jentery
“Queer Games, Straight Design” | Edmond Y. Chang (Drew University) | https://maker.uvic.ca/chang/
Monday, March 10th, 1:30pm, David Turpin Building A104
Supported by the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory and the Maker Lab in the Humanities
Is it possible to create a queer video game? What constitutes a queer video game? And are video games already queer? This presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games beyond queerness as window dressing, as simply LGBT-skinned plot, character, or subtext. In other words, video games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. This presentation explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness, and more importantly, imagines the queer possibilities in queergaming—the happy accidents, glitches, workarounds, even failures that open up alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames. In other words, how might we imagine ways of playing against the grain and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well?
Poster: https://maker.uvic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/changtalk.pdf
“Close Playing Race, Gender, Sexuality” | Edmond Y. Chang (Drew University) | https://maker.uvic.ca/chang/
Monday, March 10th, 3:30pm, Maker Lab in the Humanities
Supported by the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory and the Maker Lab in the Humanities
Video games are not perfect magic circles of play, they are not completely separate from the “real world,” and for many game scholars, it is the intersection of game, developers, players, and the dominant culture that demands attention. In this workshop, we will take up “close playing” to look at and unpack race, gender, and sexuality in games. Close playing, akin to close reading, requires critical attention to game narrative, game mechanics, game design, and play as both an embodied and social experience. Close playing also requires a certain distance from the game and from play, a conscious disruption of the interactive and immersive fantasy. Close play reveals that the magic circle is always, already blurred or broken.
Registration is required for this workshop, which is limited to ten participants. To register, simply send an email to maker@uvic.ca.
Edmond Y. Chang is an Assistant Professor of English at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His areas of interest include technoculture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, video games, popular culture, and contemporary American literature.
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Jentery Sayers
Assistant Professor, English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought
Director, Maker Lab in the Humanities
University of Victoria
jentery@uvic.ca | @jenterysayers
maker.uvic.ca | jenterysayers.com