Summer is a time to kick back, relax, and read a whole bunch of game studies scholarship, right?

Starting in a few weeks, I’ll be facilitating a summer game studies reading group for our Ph.D. students here at UC Irvine, many of whom already study games or are just getting into the field. We’ve got folks from Informatics, my department, but also Anthropology, Visual Studies, and more. The goal is to meet once a week and build a shared vocabulary around games by reading and discussing texts together.

Inspired by Adrienne Shaw’s presentation here at the UC Irvine Critical Game Studies Conference in the spring, our topic for this summer’s reading group is “canons and counter-canons.” Here were my design goals in putting together reading list, as they’re laid out on our community document:

1. To offer grad students a crash course in the big names of game studies — not so that they can replicate longstanding issues of citing and re-citing the same limited (and privileged) voices, but so that they can be conversant and therefore “legitimate” in the field, and building from that legitimacy disrupt and reimagine game studies in their own work. We might call this the “canon” of game studies, but definitely note the air quotes.

2. To highlight the work of key voices in game studies whose work has often gone overlooked or undervalued, with a special emphasis on non-cis-male scholars, scholars of color, queer scholars, and others invested in social justice — with the hope of encouraging students to see game studies as a field that is diverse, complex, and ripe for dissent. We might call this a counter-canon of game studies: not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.

3. To bring a selection of contemporary works addressing culture, history, identity, social justice and (broadly speaking) the social contexts and meanings of video games into dialog with these earlier works.

Hopefully the UCI summer game studies reading group will become an annual tradition!

I’ve been “on leave” from UC Irvine this past academic year as I’ve wrapped up my postdoc at USC, but really soon I’ll actually, officially be starting my position at UCI. I’m teaching my first UCI courses this coming fall — a big undergrad lecture and my first (!) seminar oriented toward PhD students. I’ve taught MFAs before, but PhDs are a different game, and I’m excited to dive in.

I got to design the graduate seminar from the ground up, which is really exciting. It’s called “Technology, Sexuality, and Gender.” Here’s the course description:

In the contemporary moment, expressions of sexuality and gender are increasingly overlapping with experiences of technology, digital media, and digital culture. Desire and identity are being explored and performed in online spaces, via mobile applications, in video games, and through digitally-mediated communication. In fact, gender, sexuality, and sex itself play important roles in all forms of technology, both at present and across the history of emerging and evolving computational media, not just those forms that seem most directly related to romance or the body. This class surveys some of the many ways in which sexuality and gender intersect with the study of digital media and the practices, communities, rhetorics, and imaginaries that surround it. Though sexuality and gender are the focus of the course, intersectional frameworks will also be key.

Topics covered in this course will include: the gendered and queer histories of contemporary technology; gender, race, and the material production of technology; gender in/and video games, including questions of feminism, trans experiences, and constructions of masculinity; LGBTQ topics and queer theory in video games; gender and sexuality in virtual worlds; pornography and the internet; sex and mobile technologies; gendered speech and emoting in online spaces; social media and non-heteronormative communities; teledildonics and sex (with) machines; intimacy and virtual reality; gender bias in code and algorithms.

This course is interdisciplinary by nature and offers a variety of conceptual and methodological perspectives on studying gender and sexuality. Graduate students from a variety of academic backgrounds are encouraged to enroll, including those from information studies, science and technology studies, media studies, gender studies, queer studies, anthropology, sociology, and related fields in the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences.

I’m hoping for a diverse, dynamic group. If you’re a UCI grad student, come check it out — or feel free to get in touch with questions. Can’t wait!

Back in March, I had the wonderful opportunity to give an invited guest talk as part of the Art Dean’s Lecture Series at UC Santa Cruz in conjunction with “Video Games as Visual Culture,” a class developed and taught by the fabulous Soraya Murray. The guest speaker lineup for the course was amazing, including my friends and colleagues TreaAndrea Russworm, Aaron Trammell, Alenda Chang, Matt Payne, and more.

The talk that I gave was called “Speedruns, Slow Strolls, and the Politics of Walking: Queer Movements through Space and Time.” It’s about speedrunning and walking simulators as modes of gameplay that disrupt normative expectations for how spatiality and temporality operate in video games — and about how moving too fast or too slowly creates space for alternative modes of desire and being in otherwise mainstream games. I’ve put the transcript up for you to read online. You can find the PDF here.

My talk at Santa Cruz was adapted from a chapter of my monograph, Playing Queer: Sexuality, Gender, and Identity in Video Games beyond Representation, which is all about the ways that we find or enact queerness in games through their design and/or how we play them. The project is in the revision phase now, so hopefully it will be out by late 2018. If you’re looking for a book to check out in the meantime, remember to pick up your copy of Queer Game Studies!

With assistance from some amazing students and peers, I put together this helpful, friendly info sheet about they/them pronouns (pdf). It’s designed as a resource for your workplace or community — especially if you work with cis folks who want to support gender inclusivity but who don’t know a lot about pronouns or why they’re so important.

I wrote the info sheet after having conversations with some of my students who use they/them pronouns. I realized that too much of the burden of educating faculty was falling onto these already marginalized folks, and that I needed to be taking more responsibility for getting my colleagues on board with supporting our students of all genders.

How can you use this info sheet? You could post it on your office door, email it to colleagues, put it up on a department website, or tack it up on a cork board in a shared area. Of course, there are many ways to talk about gender and pronouns, and this resource may not be right for you or your community. I totally respect that!

Feel free to print, share, or adapt the PDF of the info sheet. Thanks to all who gave feedback on the earlier draft, and thanks to Jetti Allen for sharing the image attached to this post. Folks who use they/them pronouns, as the skeleton says, you are completely valid and also that’s awesome, bud.

This March, at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago, Teddy Diana Pozo, Whitney Pow, and I put on a pretty rad panel that explored the relationship between video games and queer affect.

It’s an area of research that I’m really excited about, and (if all goes according to plan) you’ll be seeing more from me — and from my amazing queer game studies peers — on the subject in the months and years to come.

If you didn’t make it to the panel, that’s ok, because the transcript of my talk is now up online. It’s called “Feeling for Others: Video Games and the Uses of Queer Affect.” Here’s the talk in PDF form. If you’re interested in games, queerness, and/or affect studies, I hope you’ll check it out!

To give you a taste, here’s a little excerpt from my discussion of empathy, which owes a lot to the smart, insightful queer game-makers I’ve been talking with as part of my Queer Games Avant-Garde project:

To say that queer media exists in order to allow straight people to inhabit queer experiences is to describe and condone appropriation. The notion of empathy, as it is being used, makes queer lives consumable. It offers players the opportunity to play at queerness – to become, to use Lisa Nakamura’s term, identity tourists. Empathy also names a kind of embodied colonialism – the occupation of queer bodies – which is understood and indeed celebrated aptly through metaphors of bodily invasion — like “stepping into someone’s shoes” or “seeing through their eyes.”

In this sense, the rhetoric of empathy does a kind of violence to queer experience – while also refusing that same queer experience its right to resist. Insisting on empathy as the main affective register of queer games strips these games of their less acceptable, less “relatable,” and more dangerous emotions – like queer anger and queer desire – using the hegemonic policing of affect to render them safe for the status quo.

You can read the whole presentation here. And if you’re interested in video games and queer affect too, get in touch. I’d love to chat!

My big research task this spring has been my new book project, currently titled The Queer Games Avant-Garde: LGBTQ Video Game Makers and the Future of Interactive Media. This book is something like a spin-off from my monograph, Playing Queer, which I wrote in the fall — and so far it’s been really eye-opening and also a lot of fun.

The project is structured around interviews with contemporary indie game makers who either identify as queer or make work related to queer issues. Rather than rehashing the narratives about “diversity” in video games that we’ve already heard, these interviews are focused on the topics like the designers’ artistic influences, creative practices, and politics.

There will be about 20 artists profiled in the book, and I’ve completed around 15 interviews. I’ve already learned so much from these amazing creators. Here’s an excerpt from the book proposal:

Unlike a traditional monograph or edited volume, The Queer Games Avant-Garde features a wide range of voices. Rather than label queer games as a unified “scene” or a “movement,” this cacophony suggests resonances across many artists’ work. Those who have encountered queer games of the sort discussed in this book before may have only heard of a small handful of games. However, in truth, there are hundreds of scrappy, small-scale, personal, and highly influential games that address LGBTQ themes or could be considered queer–and that number is growing every day.

Exposing readers to the work of many queer game-makers, some well known and some just now entering the scene, offers a much wider, richer, and more nuanced sense of this work its increasing influences on how mainstream video games are made. These interviews delve deeply into the power and also the pitfalls of making queer games. The interviews become primary documents for future scholars to draw from as the field of queer game studies continues to grow. They also serve as sources of inspiration for others who want to make video games from the perspectives of marginalized people.

Stay tuned for more info soon as the project enters its final stages. The full manuscript should be under review by this summer, and hopefully these fascinating interviews will be in your hands by 2018!

It’s been ten (ten!) years in the making, but The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories 1934-1944 by Gisèle Prassinos is finally out from Wakefield Press.

I co-translated the volume and wrote the introduction, which is titled “Gisèle Prassinos: Where Innocence Unleashes Its Ferocity and Its Monsters.” (My sincere thanks to Wakefield, who found a second translator to help me out when dissertation-writing and job-hunting was eating up my time back in 2014-2015.)

I’ve been in love with Prassinos’ surrealist short stories since I was an undergraduate. I highly recommend her writing for anyone who likes their literature weird, dark, and feminist in a way that is less about raising women up and more about tearing the existing, gendered world of power and logic to shreds. Her work is both childlike and fierce.

I had the opportunity to get to know Prassinos in the years between 2007 and 2010, when I visited her at her retirement home in Paris. Sadly, she died in 2015. I miss her and think about her often, but I’d like to believe that she would be proud to see this volume — the first book-length translation of her short stories from French into English — out in the world.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, I’ll be taking part in a book reading at Poetic Research Bureau on Saturday, June 17, 2017. Come hear stories from The Arthritic Grasshopper and more recent releases from Wakefield Press!

Thanks very much to my co-panelists Edmond Chang, Evan Lauteria, and Timothy Welsh for a wonderful round table at the 2017 Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association Conference in San Diego this weekend!

The session was titled “New Voices in Game Studies,” and it was a lovely opportunity to share some of our recent work with the PCA/ACA game studies community — and to think ahead to our visions and hopes for the future of game studies.

The slide I’ve included here pretty much sums up what I want to see happen, and what I think really is ALREADY happening when it comes to “new voices in game studies.” This field has long wrestled with issues of exclusion and marginalization, but I believe that we are seeing a serious sea change. Game studies is moving toward social justice, identity, and “diversity,” and a whole range of voices are beginning to be heard alongside those folks who hold established, privileged positions in the field.

And so… Queer people, non-cis-dudes, people of color, non-neurotypical people, people with disabilities, people of diverse religions and cultures of origin, and other beautiful, marginalized humans, UNITE & TAKE OVER GAME STUDIES.

<3 the revolution <3

It’s been a few years since my last trip to the Gotland Game Conference, a wonderful event where industry and academic talks about games and culture meet student design work. Now I’m going back for 2017!

I first spoke at the Gotland games program (now “Uppsala University campus Gotland”) back in 2010 and then again in 2011. The faculty and students are all warm, thoughtful, and talented folks and I’m really looking forward to spending some time in Visby again this year.

For the 2017 conference, I’ll be giving a talk called, “Interrogating Empathy: Alternative Models of (Queer) Feeling in Video Games.” It’s related to the panel I ran (along with Teddy Diana Pozo and Whitney Pow) about queer affect and video games at SCMS in Chicago. Here’s the abstract.

Over the past few years, “empathy” has become a buzzword in game design and game scholarship: the new gold standard for supposedly immersive, impactful, and socially meaningful video games. This is nowhere more true than in games that address the perspectives of marginalized people. Many contemporary queer indie games, for instance, have been labelled “empathy games,” because they seem to give straight players the chance to experience what it feels like to be LGBTQ. However, a number of these game queer indie game-makers, such as Robert Yang, Mattie Brice, merrit kopas, and Anna Anthropy, have spoken out against “empathy,” which can actually describe the straight appropriation of queer lives. As Yang wrote in a recent blog post, “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes.”

This talk interrogates the notion of empathy in video games and calls on designers and scholars alike to look for new models of what we feel when we play — especially when it comes to queer games. It draws from Donna Harraway’s concept of “being with” to explain how video games can allow us to exist alongside other perspectives without appropriating them. In this way, the talk argues for a model of feeling in video games that truly promotes social justice, instead of giving problematic lip service to the importance of “diversity.”

Thanks to Ulf and all the wonderful folks at Gotland for inviting me back this year. I can’t wait.

The 4th annual Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) took place in Los Angeles this weekend, and I’m very happy to say that it was a huge success. QGCon 2017 was hosted by my very own Interactive Media and Games Division here at USC, co-sponsored by a number of other wonderful groups on campus, and made possible by my outstanding cohort of co-organizers.

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to everyone who gave talks, presented games, and volunteered. This event is my warm, happy heart. It’s so amazing to see queer folks come together to explore and celebrate video games.

Photos and videos from QGCon 2017 are coming soon, so stay tuned. We had a packed weekend of amazing speakers, arcade games, and presentations, so definitely check those materials out when they’re ready. You can also read about the event in great write-ups like ones for The Observer and Soule.

Psst, if you’re interested in helping out with QGCon 2018, or you want to bring a QGCon event (what we call “QGCon Locals”) to your town, we want to hear from you! Here’s how to get in touch.