I am happy to announce that the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group, which also represents the Simpson Center and UW as HASTAC Scholars, are co-hosting an online forum on video game studies on the Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) website. The video game studies forum, which I had been helping develop last year is finally live! The forum, entitled “Press Start to Continue: Toward a New Video Game Studies,” addresses the following provocations:
1) New Approaches to Video Games
- How do games matter to the digital humanities?
- What are the affordances and constraints of video game studies? Pedagogy? Platforms? Politics? Everyday practice?
- How might we further interdisciplinary, multimodal approaches to video game studies (beyond the ludology/narratology debate, beyond the ethnography of players and synthetic worlds census-taking, beyond the “close”/“distant,” beyond serious/casual)?
- How might video games help bridge the gap between analog and digital archives, between cultural criticism and computational tools and methods?
- How might you ‘queer’ video game studies?
2) Video Games Pedagogy
- How do you teach video games as objects of study? How do you teach with video games?
- What are the benefits/challenges of teaching (with) games?
- How might video games complicate and challenge notions of “digital natives” or “digital labor”?
3) Gamefulness vs. Gamification
- How might video games encourage discussions about the role and importance of “play” in the digital humanities? What about gamification and the digital humanities?
- What are the various ways that gaming and gamification are at play in both our everyday lives and academic lives? What is the difference between the two?
- How might video game design (and play) be a critical practice? What are critical approaches to and critiques of “flow”?
The forum hosts include Amanda Phillips (English, UC Santa Barbara), Ergin Bulut (Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois), Alenda Chang (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley), Melody Dworak (School of Library and Information Sciences, University of Iowa), Grace Hagood (Rhetorics and Composition, University of South Carolina), and John Carter McKnight(Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, Arizona State University). The forum also has invited special guest respondants: Lisa Nakamura (Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research, and Media & Cinema Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Patrick Jagoda (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor of New Media 2010-12, and Assistant Professor Starting in 2012, University of Chicago), and Nina Huntemannn (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University).
Thank you to all of the co-hosts, guests, and HASTAC for this wonderful forum and opportunity!