#SCMS2024 was really great. I only hit about 6 panels, but caught up w/met so many great people, had a wonderful time professionally, and finally sang karaoke (albeit, near the end to 10)! Also, love being reminded how much I’ve always dug Boston!
#scms2024 was great. I was so happy with the panel I was on. My most recent book was out, as was a new title in the series I edit. I saw a lot of people I really love to see each year. But, my childhood best friend died in the middle of reviewing submissions for the conference.
Hongmei Sun looks at animated stories that promote traditional Chinese Medicine using gamified narratives #scms24 #scms2024
Jeff Nagy shows us a history of algorithmic power that has roots in 1960s behaviorist psychology experiments with autistic children. #scms24 #scms2024
James Brennan: what are the consequences when financial economy and attention economy overlap? Blockchain and NFTs focus. #scms2024 #scms24
genomes -> gnomes -> intelligent design -> SETI (and some ChatGPT in there too). Microbiology is all about writing; basically we're all texts. Wild ride in this talk #scms24 #scms2024
Heather Warren-Crow presents on the problem of nonhuman writing - DNA is a kind of writing, connecting to natural language processing (to words in generally first) #scms24 #scms2024
I haven't had a chance to see as many session as I would have liked, but every talk I've seen at #scms24 #scms2024 has been really great. This morning's section on monsters-sex-porn was fascinating, theoretically rich, and thought-provoking.
Maggie MacDonald (who sits on the board of Pornhub's parent company) looks at Pornhub's protocols for non-human animated content - looking at governance and content moderation (warns us that the presentation is 'not theoretically dense' - but I think not everything needs to be!) #scms24 #scms2024
Jean Ketterling looks at the intersection of carceral logic and how the Witcher (particularly the episode whose character turns out to be cursed due to raping a priestess) connects to the #MeToo movement. #scms24 #scms2024
Adrianna Burton presents on a 'lewd version of a rogue-like,' Scarlet Maiden. Scarlet "is the most extreme top AND bottom and has stamina for days" - reads the game through Cohen's monster theory #scms24 #scms2024
Necromancy as a way to deal with bureacracy. Lichcraft encourages trans players to (literally) become the monsters they are portrayed as - as a kind of malicious compliance. Composing impossibility - living in the WTF #scms24 #scms2024
Percival Hornak provides a personal trans reading of Lichcraft, alongside a kind of LARP of the game with a team of players (maybe?) Bit.ly/hornak-wtf #scms24 #scms2024
Playing (with) Sexy Beasts this am. Wish all the games sessions were in rooms that can hold everyone who wants to be in the audience (like this one).#scms24 #scms2024
Book on table display. Book cover days Ultima & World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game, Carly A. Kocurek, Matthew Thomas Payne
Fun surprise at #scms2024 ... the Ultima book Matt Payne and I wrote is on display at the Amherst College Press booth!
F1: Jim Fleury gives us a history of games built as tie-ins to Netflix shows (and Netflix's move to provide a gaming platform in addition to video). #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
On Fong's talk: I really dig this kind of historical review and analysis, tracing the commands from dice rolls to textual menus to visual menus. Demonstrates how fascinating what might be considered gameplay infrastructures can be. #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Possibly the second-most depressing conference talk I've ever seen. (Doesn't mean it wasn't good tho!) #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Keever's use of Althusser, Weber, and Soderman in this war/horror game reminds me of Mark Sample's work on the use of torture in videogames. Also invokes the ending as an "FU" to the player; maybe linked to abusive game design approaches? #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Keever looks at the visual attention in games and 'targeting' which fixes he other as an object, over which you (the player) are subject. Where is the gaze focused? What about the things we can't see (maybe only hear or are referenced?) #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Sheraton Meeting wi-fi appears broken (looks like their network cert expired, so Chrome won't load anything). #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Justin Keever uses Amnesia: The Bunker to discuss failure via two routes in the game - what you see and what you don't see. "Games Studies scholars love to talk about failure." Cites Jesper Juul, Bo Ruberg, Benjamin Nicoll. #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
We have the scholarnames page at Kairos (kairos.technorhetoric.net/scholarnames/) where folks post how to pronounce their names. We need something like this for game studies (nobody knows how to pronounce "Bogost" apparently, not to mention "Kocurek" so maybe start with those two) #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
I really like Petrus's pixel art font for the transition slides. Games are stuck in romaticized utopias. #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
Petrus compares US approaches to game design vs her experience in Germany (no support vs. state support), then links the design issues back to cozy games...'wellness' of the player as a commodity is baked into games like stardew valley and animal crossing #SCMS24 #SCMS2024
