what is your song

craft an instrument of the finest code, tune it for a range of motion & depth of sound, design a "right" way to play—you've made a videogame

— Iris bull (@ibull) April 24, 2014

information economies

where do we begin to build away from capitalism 

we try to create new economies with crypto-currency

shift away from resource extraction and into resource generation

what is there but information?

digital citizenry and death

Users employ the Internet and various digital technologies to create politics around various consumptive practices. These politics inform both the creation of an activity-based citizenry (you play Minecraft? which server? PVP? oh, you also like Candy Crush…?), and the construction of channels (YouTube, F2P, Steam, AdSense) that generate wealth for real world people. 

These technical and digital—in some sense, virtual—channels transcode the human mind and body of the user into a resource that is more easily harvested over time. 

when is it a game

i have some ideas about the disposition a person would require in order to conceive of prison as a game space.

i am uncomfortable with games that benefit from the seemingly game-like qualities of systematically broken systems. maybe this is a reflection of my education about the american legal system and private, for-profit prison facilities that plague People of Color across the United States.

(my source)

in a way that television cannot, games have (and often exercise) the power to situate systems in a kind of permanence that reflect the insufficient nature of the legal system itself. there is no room for the player to interject into the code and change the way a system works.

what does it mean to “play” within the prison industrial complex?

per/for/man/al/ity

if i knew who was you

i would know the future

no dancing or fantasy

play, but no games

 

layers and layers and layers and layers

rolling into each other constantly

stop, the home invasion

poverty demands you jig

 

privilege upon privilege upon privilege is

wool upon wool upon wool

there is no becoming

for the wealthy, an undoing of infancy

 

the node is and is not

blinking until death

slow collapse, the network

what was virtual becomes lost noise

cool as an organizational principle

When you organize the distribution of resources by culture, then you don’t have a way to protest the misdistribution of resources…. If cool is your criteria for organization, right? It’s very hard to challenge stuff. – @fturner, source

my decolonization project

what does it mean to value, appreciate, feel fulfilled in building of relationship between systems and yourself that is not about power, control, and domination?

gender and minecraft: console-ing passions 2014

Full disclosure, this presentation is an abbreviated analysis of a forthcoming book chapter on conventions of gender in Minecraft. This is also work that I am more comprehensively developing for my master’s thesis, provided the process of writing it doesn’t kill me over the next few weeks.

By way of some introduction to this paper, I’ll first describe how Minecraft presents itself and rhetorically defines gender and sexuality. I will then talk about how this this framework differs from sociological understandings of gender and the lived experiences of people who play the game. I’ll then walk through the ways in which labor facilitates the gendering of players and vice versa. To make sense of this epistemological framework I’m then going to explore the limitations of ontological possibility in the game. In many ways this conference presentation is about Minecraft, and in others it’s not. It’s about almost every game I have ever played in which I was forced to adopt a digital representation of myself.