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

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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

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.