Is the only winning move not to play? Refusing and Resisting the Reactionary Technopolitics of Games. 4S Toronto 50th anniversary conference. Open panel. Submit your abstract by April 30!

Planning to go to 4S in TORONTO this October? Study GAMES? Then you should apply for this open panel put together by me and @thechristinet.bsky.social. Abstracts due April 30!

It's beautiful. And also a great celebration of Toronto.

This is the end stage of being constantly contrarian. You just end up being a garden variety reactionary.

I've never beaten the final Crown levels in Super Mario 3D World. Congrats.

There has to be a Munchausen by proxy situation going on.

Not sure if anyone here who follows lives in New York but my friend Liz is looking for a place in Brooklyn. Her lease ends in two weeks so any tips/recommendations would be amazing.

hey guys - i'm in a pretty dire housing situation right now. i have to move at the end of the month (lease expires) but prior plans w/ people completely fell apart & i'm back to square one. i'm looking for a room in Brooklyn, trans friendly, 1100 a month max, not a temporary sublet. plz let me know.

BlueSky is very functional today!

Don't Look Now is so good!

There was a lot of hostility toward Japanese games from 2008 to like 2013. It was very bizarre.

I always ignored the coins and went straight for the green star on that last one because I always fell off otherwise!

CFP poster featuring WarGames reference.

STS folks, @alexross73.bsky.social & I are leading an open panel for 4S 2026 (in Toronto!) on games vs./as reactionary politics 🎮 WarGames references & re-imaginations of gamer capital galore!

Submit your 250-word abstracts via the @4sweb.bsky.social system & message us with any burning questions 🔥

Hey Michael! Can I be added to this starter pack? Really cool initiative you have here.

4S Toronto poster that says: Is the Only Winning Move Not To Play? Refusing & Resisting the Reactionary Technopolitics of Games. Open Panel. Submit your abstract by April 30. A Playstation 1 controller and a scene from wargames is also shown.

Short text from 2nd paragraph: digital workers, creators, and audiences alike are called to play games structured by capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other oppressive systems that overdetermine who has real agency or power. These problematic playsites have also emerged as fields of contestation and alterity, from trans and queer speedrunning leagues (Brewer, 2023) to multiplatform networks for Black feminist resistance to toxic technoculture that provides its own grammar of play (Gray, 2020; Fletcher, 2022). Thus, we ask how we can use games to speculate on or build better futures separate from systems of validation, authentication, datafied/ commodified extraction and their patriarchal, colonial, and racialized epistemes. How does studying games as physical and rhetorical assemblages help us (or perhaps even hinder) us in this task? Perhaps the only winning move is not to play.

Our panel aims to encourage a multidisciplinary approach, and we will ask for contributions from STS, game studies, platform studies, media studies/media theory, political economy, creator studies, feminist media analysis, decolonizing play, and other critical approaches. Games are highly integrated into life, work, and leisure, and many are called upon, against their will, to become players. Rather than celebrating the masterful player/designer of games, our panel wants to aim to better critique how games move through, within, and are supported by technoscience and technopolitics. More questions? Reach out to Alexander Ross, University of British Columbia alexander.ross@ubc.ca or Christine H. Train Alberta University of The Arts, christine.tran@auarts.ca.

Hi everyone! For any academics who follow me here: @thechristinet.bsky.social and I are running an open panel on video games + technopower for the 4S conference in Toronto this year and we are looking for abstracts! Here is our call for abstracts below!

Paging @shuchancellor.bsky.social

Incredible thank you

Why is Steve Crowder being haunted by Gordon Freeman?

Totally agree. He's very serious about the anti-nuclear proliferation messaging in MSG1.

What! Wow.

The early 2000s feels like a cultural wasteland.

I watched Ebert & Roeper's best of 2005 and was shocked what was in their top 10 list. Peter Jackson's King! Haggis Crash! The 40 Year Old Virgin. It all felt kind of dire actually.

Whoa this was made by Treyarch? In the same year as World at War?

The last Call of Duty game I ever played.

Paging @declouxj.bsky.social

Love that this website is becoming barely functional!

Honestly wondering if this site will be dead in two years lol

This is actually insane.

Great version!

Basically cried at the end of that episode. The show knows how to deliver a gut punch when you least expect it.

The Lido generally has the best playlist of any bar in Mt. Pleasant.