Review: The State of Play

Book: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture
Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson

The State of Play is an edited collection of short articles from a variety of contemporary videogame critics, whose professions and backgrounds are diverse and varied. Several contributors teach and write to the academic community; others have made some money making games and writing critically about their play experiences. If there is some question about method, this volume serves to exemplify what a diversity of critical lenses looks like for a seemingly complex and sometimes esoteric medium. While the concept of play is a guiding heuristic for the editors of this collection, the book as a whole is perhaps better conceived of as a curiosity cabinet from which readers can examine different—none seemingly better or worse—modes of critical engagement with respect to games. In addition to more traditional forms of textual analysis, the collection also demonstrates how letters, choose your own adventures, and abbreviated historiographies work in the proverbial toolbox for critical writing. If the goal of this volume is to seed conversations about the landscape of contemporary critical game analysis and design, it succeeds. It does so by situating together authors who use personal experience or political ethos to index different relationships people can develop with other people/players or games themselves.

things

here is a thing:

this thing: you think there is a problem with it

to investigate the problem, you untangle (to the best of your ability) the thing.

writing

it’s a funny feeling, being unmotivated to type. it’s not that the words don’t come… it’s just that i can’t coax them out onto the screen. they flood the pages of my notebook these days, but encouraging them elsewhere has been a failure.

or perhaps it is not the words that have been traumatized by the screen, but the areas of my body involved in the cognition of typing. this is, perhaps, how i’ve come to tell myself that what i was doing wasn’t working, what i need to do requires silence and contemplation, and what other people need from me is less important than what i need to develop for myself.

it feels nice to write—it hasn’t always. the dissonance resonates with distant memories about writing in a diary that would never be private. more today than then, the performance of my self expression would seem to be its own resource that i exploit for the pleasure of others—it helps to keep me fed and warm. not always happy, but alive.

is that what this blog is…alive?

action-ability is survival-ability

when Haraway tells us—“we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system–from all work to all play, a deadly game”—i am reminded that the disambiguation of what the body is or is not in a computerized, networked society predicates its survival as an organism (cyborgian or otherwise) (1992: 128). 

Racism, Media, Protest

UO Coalition to End Sexual Violence

The history of media coverage of sexual assault is steeped in racism. Members of the UO-CESV recognize the history of white supremacist uses of rape and are very concerned about how media attention to this case may be framing our protests and concerns in a way that plays into longstanding racist narratives. It is important to note that this case does not reflect the typical demographics of race and sexual assault and we need to be scrupulous in bringing all perpetrators to justice, regardless of their race, class, or sexual identity.

We are also very conscious of the fact that women of color have been raped with impunity by men of all races. The intersections of racism, sexism, and economic disadvantage have been used to silence their testimonies and deny them justice. Contemporary research illustrates the continued vulnerability of women of color as well as LGBTQ community members to sexual violence, and we…

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