[Cody Mejeur]

Hi All!

Let’s use this thread for introductions–and if you’re just joining the group, please introduce yourself!

I’m Cody Mejeur, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University in the Department of English. I work with narrative in games, specifically the narrative construction of ludic realities in the lived, embodied experience of play. My dissertation, Queer Narrative, Queer Play: Player Experiences and Ludic Realities in Video Games, uses walking simulators and other first-person narrative games as case studies. My work is particularly informed by cognitive, queer, and feminist theories of narrative and personal experience. I’ve published on games in the English classroom, representations of queerness in games such as Bioshock and Pokémon Go, and experimenting with narrative form using digital humanities tools. Beyond my research, I work in the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition lab at MSU, and help with coding and preservation efforts at the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, founded by Adrienne Shaw at Temple University. My visualizations of the archive, Queer Intersections: Visualizing the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, are available here: http://queerintersections.cmejeur.org

Looking forward to chatting with everyone and sharing work and ideas!

[Sarah Stang]

Hey everyone!

I’m Sarah Stang, a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Ontario. I’m in the Communication & Culture program working under the supervision of Jennifer Jenson. My research focus is on issues of representation in games, especially around gender. My dissertation work is looking at how monsters in games function as symbolic representations of marginalized identities (focusing on gender, queerness, disability, madness, old age, and fatness). I’m drawing on scholarship on mediated monstrosity (especially in film and literature) and analyzing in-game monsters using textual analysis methods and the concepts of the abject and the grotesque.

I’m also the essays editor at First Person Scholar and on the editorial board of Press Start. Those are both graduate-student run game studies publications, so if you’re interested in getting your work out there, feel free to chat with me 🙂

[Jared Hansen]

Hello!

I’m Jared Hansen, a first-year PhD student at the University of Oregon. My MA thesis was on the effects of the damsel-in-distress stereotype on players of a classic Zelda game. I did a 2×2 experiment where I manipulated the genders of the hero and the victim. While I met the requirements for graduation, I’m still in the process of doing a follow-up study on that research. I co-authored a paper that was presented at ICA earlier this year that was a paratextual analysis of the Twitch Plays Pokemon event, where we analyzed the player-created pseudo-religious texts. And next month I’m presenting a paper at NCA about player motivations for playing dead MMORPGs.

I’m still trying to figure out my research interests, but I’d say I’m fascinated with video game nostalgia, the platform of Twitch, and player-avatar relations. I really look forward to networking and getting to know other researchers in this group!

[Anonymous]

Hi there!

I’m Carlos Ramírez, a PhD candidate at the University of Seville, Spain. I’m in the Audiovisual Communication program, doing a research on cultural representation in video games, particularly on representations made by regions at the periphery of the mainstream industry. I’d love to meet new fellow researchers and, who knows, maybe someday organize something all together!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by .

[Péter Kristóf Makai]

Cheerio, I’m Péter Kristóf Makai, a postdoc at Linnaeus University’s Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. I wrote my BA and MA on the Monkey Island series and Disney theme parks’ creation of narrative structure and intermedial references to themed entertainment. I wrote my PhD on cognitive literary studies of novels featuring people on the autistic spectrum. My postdoc is about the investigation of evolutionary theory and Darwin’s thought across media borders, including video and board games, but also nonfiction, science fiction and TV documentaries. I have published in Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien on Tolkien-inspired game genres, and in Tolkien Studies about Tolkien as an early theorist of virtual reality. I have published on fairy tales and mythopoetics in computer games in Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Applying New Methods Generates New Meanings, and have been active in the game studies and intermedia communities in the past few years.

[Cody Mejeur]

So exciting to meet everyone! Péter, it’s awesome to see another cognitive humanities/literary studies person doing games work too! Please keep sharing the group in your networks. Hopefully we can build an active community here to support one another, and I’ll keep adding resources as I’m able–please do the same!

[Cody Mejeur]

Oh! And if anyone wants to be an admin and help grow the group, lmk! More the merrier.

[Damian Stewart]

Hey!

I’m Damian, just started an MA in Game Studies and Engineering at Alpen Adria Universität in Klagenfurt, Austria.

Originally (a long time ago) from New Zealand, i’ve spent the last 15 years in between music, and art, and software development both in and out of games.

I’m probably mostly going to lurk here but I am interested in finding an online space for informal discussion of papers/ideas (Struggling to find one to be honest! The relevant-seeming reddit forums are fairly dead. Maybe there’s a Discord or Slack or a Discourse-like wen forum I haven’t heard of? Any pointers gladly received!)

[Cody Mejeur]

Hi Damian, it’s great to have you here! There are a few places for discussion I’m aware of, but they aren’t all particularly active–I think it’s unfortunate reality of folks being grad students and faculty with extremely busy schedules. But there’s the Game Studies Open Forum on Facebook, the GamesNetwork listserv (I believe run out of Finland, but used internationally), and DiGRA has a discord. I’ll add some of these resources to a new doc shortly!

[Ea Christina Willumsen]

Hi all,

Found this group thanks to Cody’s post on the DiGRA Students Group. Great initiative! I personally like to keep my academic engagements off social media as much as possible.

My name is Ea and I’m a PhD student at the University of Bergen in Norway. I’m a part of the Media Aesthetics Research Group and the Institute for Information Science and Media Studies, but fortunately I am not forced to build my diss around aestehtic theory; rather, it’s very game studies-centric, theoretical, some might even say FORMALIST or STRUCTURALIST, although those terms may be derogatory to some (constantly changing my mind on that, hence I attempt to avoid labels).

My dissertation is focused on the relationship between avatars and gameworlds and is rooted in a data-set consisting of analysis of 100 different titles. While this make it seem as if it’s an empirically driven project, it’s actually more of a theoretical investigation where I attempt a pragmatic approach to avatar-typologization through a bottom-up approach. I engage with a bunch of different avatar theories (Vella, Klevjer, Banks, Bayliss, Westecott, etc.), primarily to problemitize the idea of “one-definition-to-rule-them-all”. Rune Klevjer and Kristine Jørgensen are my supervisors.

I have a MA in Game Analysis from the IT University of Copenhagen, where I did my thesis on what I term Automated Avatar Actions and Character Autonomy, under the supervision of Espen Aarseth. I have a BA in Communication and Computer Science and like to occasionally dive in to the more technical aspects of games, for example how reading of source code can contribute to more formal game analyses.

I’m excited to follow the development of this forum!

[Kristopher Purzycki]

Hello all,

My name is Kris Purzycki, a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. My overarching research focus is media studies but that branches out into publication production and editing, broadcasting, computer games and philosophy, and multimodal writing.

Though my background is English, my dissertation pulls from anthropology, geography, philosophy, and architecture to examine the phenomenon of game experience and how games enable placemaking. Just finished a chapter about Pokemon Go and places-out-of-place. So much fun but I’m a little tired of thinking about that particular game…

I also do a lot of work in various modes of publication and broadcasting. On the print side, I am an editor for the Proceedings of the Computers and Writing Conference and founding editor of OneShot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play, an experimental publication of games as critical texts whose inaugural issue should be out early next year. I also do a bit of live streaming but am not thrilled with the current platforms and would like to develop another service that is more academically friendly (creative commons, archiving, no advertising of connection to some global corporation…). Also have a little radio show here in Milwaukee, Screens, where Allain Daigle and I talk about screen based media every week.

Sorry about the long bit – so thrilled that Cody started this and hope we all can uncover new ways to connect, collaborate, and create some great work! I saw interest in a Discord channel. That would be fantastic.

Finally, would anyone be interested in a monthly meetup in MOO-space? I am co-wizard of PhronesisMU, a fledgling MOO (MUD object oriented) and would be thrilled to host a regular gathering place.

[Cristian Mancilla]

Hi, everyone.

I used to write a blog (in Spanish) on the study of video games while completing both my undergradute and graduate programs. I thought of undertaking a PhD during the 2nd half of 2017 and the 1st half of this year, but couldn’t find a professor who accepted to supervise my project. So, decided to develop this project independently, because making it happen is more important to me than getting a PhD—game studies have waited for too long now. I’d be delighted, then, if any of you had some comments on the project I’m about to start working on, which is published in Research Gate.

[Cody Mejeur]

Hi Cristian! I’m really interested in your project, and particularly how you see it fitting into/relating to other game studies projects that look at form and structures in games. The ludology camp of game studies in particular has long focused on game structures, forms, and ontologies (almost to the exclusion of anything else), and the two examples that are coming to mind are Espen Aarseth and the folks at IT Copenhagen that have been working on game taxonomies and classification systems, and Markku Eskelinen’s Cybertext Poetics. I’m attaching an article I had in my Zotero here (if it will let me!).

If you’d like to discuss the project further, please make a new thread so we can keep the discussion going!

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Cristian Mancilla]

Hi, Cody. Sorry for not replying before. I had forgotten about this.

I haven’t read about the topic in a while (since 2005 maybe). Back then, there wasn’t something as I’m intending to propose. Right now, I must read all what has been written on the inner structure of video games, but a quick scan of titles led me to the research published by Alvarez & Djaouti as the closest to what I’ll work on. Espen shared some articles with me, indeed, but I’ve delayed the project as I’m still finishing two other projects I was working on before. So I still have to update my readings and check how will this project fit within the current scholarship. 😉

[Cody Mejeur]

Hi Cristian, no worries at all! Still getting the group going as I’m able, and need to make a better habit of checking it myself! That makes total sense, and while there has definitely been work on this area since 2005, I think the sense I’ve gotten from Espen and others work on this is that building typologies and a systematized way to study and categorize games is still very much in-progress, so plenty of room for your proposed project. As you get back to it, let us know here how it’s going, and we can keep discussing it!

 

[Damian Stewart]

Hi Cody, I’d also forgotten about this group. FWIW the best place I’ve found to talk about Game Studies stuff is the Game Studies Study Buddies channel in the Ranged Touch discord server – Game Studies Study Buddies is a monthly podcast that’s worth looking into, as well!

[Cody Mejeur]

Hi Damian,

I think most folks have forgotten about this group, and I’m at least partly to blame for that–after making it last fall, I got distracted by a number of other projects and didn’t keep up with this as much. I’m still very interested in developing it, particularly as a place to gather discussions, cfps, and resources for game studies folks working in the humanities and across fields. I just started a Zotero group to start gathering sources/bibliographies on different topics, it’s linked in the Docs!

Thanks for the recommendation on Game Studies Study Buddies! I will definitely check it out, and add it to the resources and links here too. How have things been going for you with finding topics for your studies?

[Liz Owens Boltz]

Hi everyone! I’m new to this group (just joined Humanities Commons thanks to Cody’s invitation).

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology & Educational Technology at Michigan State, and my work focuses on the ways games foster disciplinary reasoning and habits of mind (e.g., historical empathy, science and engineering practices). I’m also the Program Coordinator for the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (also at MSU). I also write/play original music.

Excited to be here!

[Cody Mejeur]

Yay, so happy you’re here, Liz! Liz has done fantastic work lately with walking sims and learning–if memory serves, it was Firewatch among others?

[Jonas Richter]

Hi everybody,

since “game studies” often just refers to the study of digital games, and I’m particularly interested in analog games, I’m actually not sure if I’m in the right place. (Maybe making the group description explicit in this regard is an option?)

My academic background is the study of religion, and German language and literature (particularly the medieval period). I now work on a dictionary of Middle High German. But occasionally there’s spare time left for research on games, like the early modern Game of Seven (often called “Glückshaus”), or the card game Karnöffel, or the history of cubic dice with five blank sides (Schimmelwürfel, farinet, farinacci).

If your focus is on digital games, that’s perfectly fine of course. I might lurk anyway. 😉

[Dylan Altman]

Hi, Everyone:

 

I’m Dylan Altman. I’m a current English Instructor at California State University Northridge, Oxnard College, and LAVC. I am also the Associate Chair of the Council for Play and Game Studies. I used to own and operate Select Start Press, which was a small indpendent publishing company dedicated to publishing books about video game scholarship. I served as an editor, contributor, and designer. We published three books: What Your Teachers are Playing, Heroines of Gaming, and Making Mulaka. However, SSP closed in 2020 due to Covid 🙁

[Author]

Posts