With so many new articles coming out each month, who has time to read them all? On each episode of this podcast, we cover one article in the academic field of Game Studies in 15 minutes or less. Maybe you’re an academic looking for a way to stay current in the field while also spending time on the treadmill. Maybe you’re an avid gamer and theorycrafter working on expanding your knowledge of game studies. Either way, listen in and listen up.
Brendan Keogh and Taylor Hardwick. (2023). “Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher Education.” Games and Culture.
Loretta Fois (2022). “But First, Let's Jam: A New Materialist Twist on the Ontology of Play.” American Journal of Play 14.3.
Anderson, C. and A. Cullen. 2023. Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game. Games and Culture 0(0) (online early access)
Check out our latest review, this time of a game called Eco by Strange Loop Games. Eco is an online multiplayer collaborative game which casts players as citizens grappling with ethical, technological, civic, economic, and cultural tensions. Picture courtesy of Toast Machine. Toast built this public art installation from different materials, each representing one member of our neighborhood. The installation signifies each of our unique skills and tastes being weaved together to create a strong, intertwined community.
Larreina-Morales, M. E. (2023). How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps. Games and Culture, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231154710
Julian Kucklich. (2003). "Perspectives in Computer Game Philology." Game Studies 3.1 https://gamestudies.org/0301/kucklich/
Danielle Kelly, Brona Nic Giolla Easpaig, Paola Castillo. (2023). “‘You Game Like a Girl': Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming.” Games and Culture 18(1): 62-78.
Lankoski, P., Apperley, T., & Harviainen, J. T. (2023). Platform-produced Heteronormativity: A Content Analysis of Adult Videogames on Patreon. Games and Culture, 18(1), 102–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221084453
Marina Fontolan, James Wilson Malazita, Janaina Pamplona da Costa. (2022). Language, Identity and Games: Discussing the Role of Players in Videogame Localization. Game Studies 22(3).
Bergstrom, Kelly. “Ignoring the blood on the tracks: exits and departures from game studies.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 39:3. Listen to our review of one of the most thought-provoking and generative articles we have reviewed so far (and one of Alex's personal favorites): Kelly Bergstrom's "Ignoring the Blood on the Tracks: Exits and Departures from Game Studies." It's worth a listen and a read.
Aaron Trammell (2022) Decolonizing play, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 39:3, 239-246, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2080844
Agloro, Alexandrina. (2022). Another World is Possible: Building Games for Just Futures. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 39:2, 165-172
This perspicacious editor's intro to a special issue fills Cody and I with questions, hope, and visions of the future. Chess, S. and Consalvo, M. (2022). The future of media studies is game studies. Critical Studies in Media Communication.
Alex read the book, Cody didn't. Listen in as he asks all the questions you have about the awesome book, Treacherous Play, by Marcus Carter.
Check out our review of the BRAND NEW article by Christine Tran on Egirls, gendered work, and livestreaming. This article opens up an exciting area in need of scholarly attention and investigation. Tran, Christine H. (2022). “‘Never Battle Alone': Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as ‘Real' Work.” Television & New Media 23(3) Podcast mentioned in this episode: https://anchor.fm/techcommtalk/episodes/Social-justice-and-tech-comm--Part-2-Doing-social-justice-e1for29
Metagames, hypermediacy, and antagonistic narrators-- oh my! Listen in as Cody and I review a fabulous new article that deep dives into There Is No Game, a metagame that is both self-reflective and playful. Thorne, Sarah. (2021). “There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Studies 12.1.
Check out our super quick review for a super brief article. Colby, Richard, Johnson, Matthew S.S., Shultz Colby, Rebekah. (2022) Colby, Richard, Johnson, Matthew S.S., Shultz Colby, Rebekah. (2022) At a Glance: Teaching, Writing, Gaming. Composition Studies 49.3.. Composition Studies 49.3.
Bo Ruberg, “Trans Game Studies,” JCMS 61, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 200–205.
Harrer, S. (2021). We Are the Champions? Performing whiteness in ASCENSION: DAMN OF CHAMPIONS. Simulation & Gaming, 52(5), 533-553
This article taps into many areas of interest for game scholars and community members: disruptive gaming, playful resistance, games that subvert capitalism, and ways to spread and inspire political action. Listen in! Huang, V. G., & Liu, T. (2022). Gamifying Contentious Politics: Gaming Capital and Playful Resistance. Games & Culture, 17(1), 26–46.
Luke Thominet (2021) Open Video Game Development and Participatory Design, Technical Communication Quarterly, 30:4, 359-374, DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2020.1866679
An absolutely mind-blowing talk by Meghna Jayanth. Read it, watch it, check it out now. The future of games may depend on it! DiGRA India Conference 2021 Keynote #1: Meghna Jayanth “White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsYN0H7Z1sc YT (1h18m) or read: https://medium.com/@betterthemask/white-protagonism-and-imperial-pleasures-in-game-design-digra21-a4bdb3f5583c
Check out our review of an attempt at a practical ontology of objects in game worlds by Jesper Juul. Play the accompanying game first! https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ Juul, Jesper. “The Game of Video Game Objects: A Minimal Theory of When We See Pixels as Objects Rather than Pictures.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 376–81. CHI PLAY '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450337.3483449. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/essay.html
Cody and Alex review a thought-provoking piece by Kishonna L. Gray and Brigitte Perkins on transformative games and Black cyberfeminism. This practical and theoretically-engaging work is exactly what you need to be reading. Gray, Kishonna L., Perkins, Brigitte. (2021). Exploring Hybrid Gaming Cultures through Black Cyberfeminism. Footnotes 49.4. (Magazine of the American Sociological Association). https://www.asanet.org/exploring-hybrid-gaming-cultures-through-black-cyberfeminism
Review of "Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch's Community Guidelines" by Andrew Zolides. Zolides argues that Twitch's Community Guidelines reinforce the sexist ideological discourse within Twitch and the gaming community as well as emboldens those seeking to police women's bodies. Zolides, A. (2021). Gender Moderation and Moderating Gender: Sexual Content Policies in Twitch's Community Guidelines. New Media & Society, 23(10). 2999-3015
Listen in as Cody and Alex dive into one of their favorite articles to date. This is games scholarship at its absolute best--compelling, brilliant, relevant. As Cody says in the podcast, every sentence in this article is fire. Vossen, E. (2021). There and Back Again: Tolkein, Gamers, and the Remediation of Exclusion through Fantasy Media. Feminist Media Histories 6.1.
Cody and Alex review a brand new article! Sparrow, Lucy A., Gibbs, Martin, and Arnold, Michael. (2021). “Ludic Ethics: The Ethical Negotiations of Players in Online Multiplayer Games.” Games and Culture 16(6).
Listen in as Alex and Cody discuss "Designing for Disability: Evaluating the State of Accessibility Design in Video Games" by Mark Brown and Sky LaRell Anderson. We also talk about an email we received from Miguel Sicart in response to our recent review of his article "Playthings." Drama? Listen to find out! Brown, Mark and Anderson, Sky LaRell. (2021). Designing for Disability: Evaluating the State of Accessibility Design in Video Games. Games and Culture 16(6).
Listen in as Alex Interviews prolific professor, game designer, and author of We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/we-the-gamers-9780190926113?lang=en&cc=us#
Listen to Alex and Cody chat about "Extracting the Pedagogy: Using Games as Texts in the Language Classroom" by Alex Hogue. Published June 7, 2021 in Analog Game Studies: https://analoggamestudies.org/2021/06/extracting-the-pedagogy-using-games-as-texts-in-the-language-classroom/
Review of “Grades on Games: Gaming Preferences and Weekly Studying on College GPAs” By Kelsey Prena and Andrew Weaver
Review of "Playthings" by Miguel Sicart, published in Games and Culture May 18, 2021
Debus, Michael S., Zagal, José P., Cardona-Rivera, Rogelio E. (2020). A Typology of Imperative Game Goals. Game Studies 20(3).
Esports Research: A Literature Review. Games and Culture 2020, Vol. 15(1) 32-50 by Jason G. Reitman, Maria J. Anderson-Coto, Minerva Wu, Je Seok Lee, and Constance Steinkuehler
An interview with acclaimed Game Studies scholar Samantha Blackmon on her recent article with TreAndrea Russworm, "Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought" published in Feminist Media Histories, Vol 6 N 1.
Interview with Shira Chess, author of Play Like a Feminist, published in 2020. Part of the Playful Thinking series by MIT.
Review of “The Right Way to Play a Game” by C. Thi Nguyen, published in Game Studies volume 19, issue 1 in May 2019
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