Now onto NACVGM!

If anyone has experience planning forums/lines for communication outside of conferences events for the attending community, I would love some advice/thoughts.

As much as it’s been a pleasure to be a hand in getting this conference started, it needs to transition to a community. Part of that is a plan for continuing outside of my effort and also a way to keep in touch more regularly/asynchronously.

Some of my work this next year is to help transition the conference to new leadership (as the conference needs to be run by grads for grads and - fingers crossed - I will fall out of eligibility for this role soon).

I hope to keep that spirit and texture because it’s honestly a huge source of energy for me (and all of us at the conference, I think).

That’s said, the external sources and material they are bringing in is extremely exciting! Something I love about the conference is just having to go into the deeply of a very different vector into game studies than the one I had. The newness of that work often leaves fascinating corners and edges.

With that out of the way, some lingering thoughts/feels I have:
We’re very fortunate to have the concentration of folks we do at RPI. The scholars visiting from programs unrelated to games are remarkable given how hard it is to accomplish research without the guidance of those who know the field.

Also huge thanks to @halfrobot.com, a number of the NYU students mentioned your guidance in applying to the conference and they were a really great presence. Thank you for helping us get the critical mass we had this year!

Secondly: huge shoutout to @jmalazita.bsky.social and @kategalloway.bsky.social. Thank you to @rpihass.bsky.social for providing the venue and GEM for helping pay for food/get the word out. Also huge thanks to Alex Goss and @noah-k.bsky.social for helping run the dang thing.

Alright, now that we are done with the weekend, I have some reflections on the grad conference. First off: it was amazing and great and I am constantly in awe of all the cool work folks do and grateful that they share it with venues as small as the one I run.

The concludes the 3rd Critical Game Design Graduate Conference conference! Huge thanks to all the presenters and to @rpihass.bsky.social for hosting. Also thank you to Alex Goss and @noah-k.bsky.social for helping run the show.

Last but not least, Trystram Spiro-Costello closes out the conference with some phenomenal work. Trystram is a returning presenter and I couldn’t be happier. Great work, great heart, and an excellent final note for the grad conference.

Anke Sun is giving us the pen ultimate talk with “EchoCity” an exploration of Sonic Commons. Always love a sound talk and this one is great. I haven’t seen a lot of Brandon Labelles work in games and it’s cool to see it here.

Alvin Lai is now presenting “Easter Eggs and Procedural Rhetoric” to analyze Red Candle Games’ Devotion (2019). This game (and its reception) has generated an incredible amount of research. This is a good reminder to play it!

Second the last panel kicks off with Emma Goldhaber presenting “‘Read ‘em and Gatekeep:’ A comparison of journalistic and videogame legacy practices.” Preservation, editorial filtering, and censorship. All deeply pressing topics in the face of platforms and infra like Steam or Substack recently.

Many folks during the Q&A asked great questions and also felt compelled to share the teams they support (me included).

Sport! We have sports! “‘They Don’t like us, We Don’t Care:’ Eagles Fandom Contributions to Philadelphians’ Urban Imaginary” by Victoria Marchiony started off with a survey of audience asking “what words come to mind when you think of the Eagles?” The answers included things like “poles” and “riots”

Next up with from Lillian McIntyre we have “‘Fangs Bared at God:’ Xenogears, Religion, and Psychoanalysis in the lost Decades Japan. Absolutely great use of large robots in the slides.

Rounding out the Ethics panel, Jordan Johnson is presenting on “designing Community: a multi modal approach to understanding civic engagement with games” ideology embeddings, work in policy, and reading actions.

Starting off the back half of the day, Matthew Hlady with “Morally Engaging Games” analyzing and advocating for more institutional support and education of civic engagement from protests to collective discussions through games!

Closing out the morning panels, Alex Goss is sharing the research and play of an experimental TTRPG project “Making infrastructure playable.” Opening with Bjork, TVs, and road signage in Montreal, Alex’s work is always a treat to see. The project was also performed at EMPAC center here at RPI.

In the first half of the last panel for the first half of the conference: “Memory Web” by Marcos Devarie features a game that explores local relationships to space and extension through the transient populations such as students. Very fitting for the college of Illium (Troy)!

Next up, “Vocal Local-ization” by Janine Bower talking about actor examination in a host of localized video games with a focus on The Witcher 3… a theme is emerging!

Next up we have our first NYU presenter at conference! Spyridoula Potamopoulou’s “Biased Localization and Queer Erasure” is doing some very rad recovery work and analysis of how games are localized (and some problems with how that’s been done).

Great rounds of questions: metagaming, intention of design, streamers cultivation of discourse.

The second talk, “Playing with Seasons” by Jacob Reese is really doing so great analysis on locality, acclimation, and repetition as a strategy of resistance to capitalism in cozy games.

Our first talk, “Card Loops Against City Branding” by Yue Li was an excellent research/making project in response to the advertising present in the Kunming Metro.

Starting this thread a little late, but coming to you live: The Critical Game Design Graduate Conference 2026!