I am back from SLSA 2012, back from Milwaukee, WI, which is a friendly little city (where people remind me that you can cross the street against the light if you want to). This my third time going to the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual meeting. It is a great conference full of interesting people, ideas, and a generally welcoming, relaxed, and interdisciplinary space. Though it was tough to jetset right at the beginning of the quarter–while finishing up my dissertation, teaching, and getting ready for the job market–it was a worthwhile conference. I was honored to be part of the “critical game studies” stream again this year, the second year they have had such a focus at SLSA. It was amazing to meet and hear papers by folks like (see the full program here):
- Katherine Hayles: Mapping Daemon : Geography, Power, and Mixed Reality in the New World Order
- Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMieux: Metagames, Metafiction, and Money: Statistical Play in Moneyball and The Universal Baseball Association
- Zach Whalen: A Counterfactual Historiography of Three Game Platforms
- Ian Bogost: Bone of My Bones and Flesh of my Flesh: The Genesis of Ms. Pac-Man
- Patrick Jagoda: Failed Games: Thresholdland and the Transmedia Aesthetics of Play
- Mary Flanagan: Playful Aesthetics
- David Golumbia: Game of Drones
- Alenda Chang: E-Cologies and (Post)human Nature
- Lisa Nakamura: Sexual Harassment and the Discourse of Indigeneity in Digital Game Culture
- Timothy Welsh: The Vitality of the Digital: Bioart and Videogames
It was especially nice to be able to catch up with my sister, Alenda, and one of my best friends and former UW grad student, Tim–both of whom presented excellent papers. Though I cobbled together my paper in the eleventh hour (just like a pro, right?), I think I put together a compelling piece, drawing on my dissertation chapter on the “seductions of gamification” and thinking about the possibilities and problems offered by the intersection of posthuman technologies and gamification ideologies. Here is the Prezi presentation I made for my paper: