Critical Distance: Keywords in Play

This episode we speak with Dr. Xavier Ho, discussing his data visualisation and design research, as well as the curation process of the thoughtful queer indie games exhibition ‘Pride at Play’ (https://prideatplay.org/). It is part 5 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Xavier Ho is a lecturer and a queer games researcher at Monash University. He received the inaugural CSIRO Medal for Diversity and Inclusion, was appointed as Junior Chair in Sexuality Studies at the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sydney, and was named a 2023 Australian Broadcast Corporation TOP 5 Arts media resident. You can check out his work here: https://jtg.design/, and follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/Xavier_Ho. The podcast series is part of the Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations. As a joint venture between Critical Distance and DiGRA, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience. Our goal is to highlight the work of graduate students, early career researchers and scholars from under-represented groups, backgrounds and regions. The primary inspiration comes from sociologist and critic Raymond Williams. In the Preface to his book Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Williams envisaged not a static dictionary but an interactive document, encouraging readers to populate blank pages with their own keywords, notes and amendments. “Keywords in Play” follows Williams in affirming that “The significance is in the selection”, and works towards diversifying the critical terms with which we describe games and game culture. Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Interviewer: Mahli-Ann Butt Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Special Thanks: Hugh Davies, Chloe Yan Li

37 mins

This episode we speak with Dr. Stephanie Harkin, discussing the concept of “techno-femininity” from her award winning PhD Thesis (2022) Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity, and Coming of Age in Videogames. You can read her PhD here: https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/86788440-fcec-420a-8df1-b7c35f976066/1/stephanie_harkin_thesis.pdf, follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sa_harkin, and read more of her work on Academia.edu: https://swin.academia.edu/SHarkin. It is part 4 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Stephanie Harkin is an early career researcher interested in girls’ gaming cultures and representations of girlhood. She completed her PhD at Swinburne University of Technology where her thesis explored girlhood and the coming-of-age genre in videogames. She has previously published on gender and games in the journals Game Studies, Games and Culture, and Girlhood Studies. The podcast series is part of Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations. As a joint venture between DiGRA and Critical Distance, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience. Our goal is to highlight the work of graduate students, early career researchers and scholars from under-represented groups, backgrounds and regions. The primary inspiration comes from sociologist and critic Raymond Williams. In the Preface to his book Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Williams envisaged not a static dictionary but an interactive document, encouraging readers to populate blank pages with their own keywords, notes and amendments. “Keywords in Play” follows Williams in affirming that “The significance is in the selection”, and works towards diversifying the critical terms with which we describe games and game culture.” Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Interviewer: Mahli-Ann Butt Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Special Thanks: Hugh Davies, Chloe Yan Li

28 mins

This episode we speak with Dr. Felania Liu. The episode is part 3 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Dr Felania Liu is a game researcher, and is founder and curator of the Homo Ludens Archive. She currently lectures at Beijing Normal University and has previously worked at the Department of History, Institute of Humanities, Tsinghua University /Durham University. Felania is also responsible for cultivating the game research community in China and for fostering international collaborations in the field of video game studies from the perspectives and techniques of Social Sciences in China. As a researcher, a historian, a curator, and a gamification designer, Felania specializes in using fun and game mechanics to solve problems in education, recruiting, training, learning, marketing and the designing of events. Felania promotes video games as forms of media that can bring meaningful communication and are able to make positive social impacts to the world. The podcast series is part of Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Interviewer: Hugh Davies Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Special Thanks: Mahli-Ann Butt, Chloe Yan Li

33 mins

This episode we speak with Dr. Tingting Liu, discussing her research as a cultural anthropologist examining digital intimacies, gender, platforms and gaming in China. It is part 2 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Dr Tingting Liu is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University, China. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Queensland in 2018. Dr. Liu used to serve as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, as well as a part-time lecturer at the University of Sydney. Dr. Liu’s research interests centre on digital media, video games, gender, sexuality, and their intersections. Her pioneering research on Chinese digital games has been published in leading international journals, including Games & Cultures, Information, Communication & Society, and Television & New Media.   The podcast series is part of Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Interviewer: Hugh Davies Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Special Thanks: Mahli-Ann Butt, Chloe Yan Li

21 mins

This episode marks the beginning of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This episode we speak with Dr. Gejun Huang. Gejun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He was a Lecturer in the School of Communication at Soochow University and earned his Ph.D. and MA in Media Studies from the Radio-Television-Film Department of the University of Texas at Austin. His academic interests mainly touch on the digital game industry, media entrepreneurship, cultural policy, as well as digital inequalities and digital privacy. He has published in peer-reviewed journals including Big Data & Society, Cultural Trends, International Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, American Behavioral Scientists, and Information, Communication & Society. The podcast series is part of Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Interviewer: Hugh Davies Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Special Thanks: Mahli-Ann Butt, Chloe Yan Li

23 mins

This epsiode we speak with Florence Smith-Nicholls about the paper "The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10949. Florence is a game AI PhD researcher based in London. They also work as a Story Tech, a member of the writers' room at the indie studio Die Gute Fabrik. Building on their background as an archaeologist, they have contributed to the field of archaeogaming through experimenting with archaeological approaches to titles such as Elden Ring and Nier: Automata.   Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed. Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart

30 mins

This episode we are doing something a little bit different - interviewing a group of scholars about their Call for Papers on "The Post-Gamer Turn", which can be found here: https://postgamerturn.wordpress.com/ .  Abstract submissions of 500-800 words are due on November 30th 2022. We discuss with Mahli-Ann Butt, Amanda Cote, Emil Lunedal Hammar and Cody Mejeur the rationale behind the edited collection, their backgrounds doing diversity work in game studies, and their thoughts about the future of the dynamics they identify. "This edited collection engages with the shifting understanding of “Gamers”/gamers/players in game culture, the games industry, and game studies – which Butt refers to as “the post-Gamer turn” (2022, p. 51) – to address the ongoing issues inherent in the use of a limited identity category. The post-Gamer turn does not signal the end of the “Gamer” identity but denotes a way of recognizing its promises as a sustained fantasy with real power and implications for who plays games and how. Engaging with the limits of the “Gamer” identity and questioning the boundaries of representation in games does not settle, solve, or supersede the concept of a “Gamer,” but instead reveals evolving relations between players and the games they play. Doing this work now is not only important as a matter of theoretical rigor, but also as a means for making game studies a more inclusive and vibrant scholarly community. Recognizing diverse perspectives on games, “Gamers”/gamers/players, and game studies is of urgent practical and political necessity. It has been nearly a decade since the events of Gamergate, where the tensions between “Gamers” and players were violently, publicly highlighted, and this edited collection asks what has changed in games and game studies with regard to conceptualizing players/gamers/“Gamers,” as well as where further change is needed." Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Special thanks to Mahli-Ann Butt for editing this episode.  

29 mins

Everest Pipkin is a writer, game developer and software artist from Central Texas whose work follows themes of ecology, information theory, and system collapse. As an artist and as a theorist, they fundamentally believe in the liberatory capacity of care; care not as an abstract emotion but rather as a powerful force that motivates collective work towards a better world.They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and live and work in southern New Mexico. They have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.   Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed. Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Transcription: Charly Harbord

42 mins

Alesha Serada is a PhD student and a researcher at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Their dissertation, supported by the Nissi Foundation, discusses construction of value in games and art on blockchain. Inspired by their Belarusian origin, their research interests revolve around exploitation, violence, horror, deception and other banal and non-banal evils in visual media. In this episode we discuss Alesha's paper "‘Died from Debeeration’: the Case of the First Belarusian Political Game" which characterises the game MENSKBand in the context of cultural, technical and political change in Belarus. Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed. Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Transcription: Charly Harbord

30 mins

In this episode we talk with Gregory Whistance-Smith, an independent scholar based in Edmonton, Canada. The discussion focuses on the book "Expressive Space: Embodying Meaning in Video Game Environments" https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110723731/html?lang=en Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and inhabit. Like buildings, cities, and gardens before them, these virtual environments express meaning and communicate ideas and affects through the spatial experiences they afford. Drawing on the emerging field of embodied cognition, this book explores the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment that sits at the heart of spatial communication. To capture the wide diversity of forms that spatial expression can take, the book builds a comparative analysis of twelve video games across four types of space, spanning ones designed for exploration and inhabitation, kinetic enjoyment, enacting a situated role, and enhancing perception. Together, these diverse virtual environments suggest the many ways that video games enhance and extend our embodied lives.   Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed. Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart Double Bass: Aaron Stewart Transcription: Charly Harbord

34 mins

Jaroslav Švelch is an assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the recent monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published work on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games and his monograph Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Videogame Monstrosity is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2023.

25 mins