Game Studies Stream at Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) 2017, November 10 & 11, 2017, Tempe, AZ

I have been attending the SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) conference now (on and off) since 2005, and I have always found the annual meeting to be thoughtful, friendly, interdisciplinary, and convivial.  For several of those years, I have been fortunate enough to be included in a series of game studies panels (previously helmed by folks like Patrick Jagoda, Stephanie Boluk, and Patrick LeMieux).  This year for SLSA17 with the help of Timothy Welsh and Alenda Chang (and others), we have revived the game studies stream!  Here is the schedule spread across two days, Friday and Saturday:

SLSA 2017 Game Studies Stream

Friday, November 10                               

[3G] Game Studies (I): Roundtable with Ian Bogost
Matthews Center 222: iStage (2nd floor)
9:00-10:30

Contributors:
Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Stephanie Boluk (University of California, Davis)
Alenda Chang (University of California)
Edmond Y. Chang (Ohio University)
Heidi Coleman (University of Chicago)
Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)
Patrick LeMieux (University of California, Davis)
Timothy Welsh (Loyola University, New Orleans)

[4G] Game Studies (II): Runtimes
MU 238 Apache               
11:00-12:30
Chair: Timothy Welsh

Time and Dark Souls
Timothy Welsh (Loyola University, New Orleans)

Dual Temporalities of Pseudocode: On the Broken Runtime of Pony Island
Jamal Russell (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Violence and Fragmented Time in Multiplayer Gaming
Ben Wirth (University of Washington)

‘A Name Burns Itself into My Mind’: Narrating Time, Prescribed Pathways, and the Problem of Futility in No Man’s Sky
Justin Carpenter (University of Waterloo)

[5G] Game Studies (III): Worlds
MU 238 Apache
2:00-3:30
Chair: Alenda Chang

Playing with Fire(watch): Game Mechanics, Aesthetics, and the Trouble with Wilderness Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (University of California, Davis)

Model, Manual and Meaning: Paratexts in SimEarth and in Climate Science
Katherine Buse (University of California, Davis)

Living Timelines – The Transformation of the Mechanomorphic Animal
Nicholas Hobin (University of Waterloo)

Collapse and Community Around the Ending of Game Worlds
Alenda Chang (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Saturday, November 11

[7G] Game Studies (IV): Gender and Queerness
MU 238 Apache
9:00-10:30
Chair: Edmond Y. Chang

Living at the Edge of the Galaxy: Queering Mass Effect with the Asari
Ashlee Bird (University of California, Davis)

Tricking Masculinity On Grindr
Jason Lajoie (University of Waterloo)

Queergaming
Edmond Y. Chang (Ohio University)

[8G] Game Studies (V): Alternate Realities
MU 238 Apache
11:00-12:30
Chairs: Heidi Coleman and Patrick Jagoda

Parasitical Pedagogies: Games, Performance, and Alternate Realities
Heidi Coleman (University of Chicago)
Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)

Weird Fun and Normal Fun: On the Concept of Play-Style
Peter McDonald (University of Chicago)

Being (Re)Framed: Dark Play as Affective Labor in the parasite ARG
Jordan Pruett (University of Chicago)

[9G] Game Studies (VI): Risky Business
MU 238 Apache
2:00-3:30
Chair: Stephanie Boluk

Liveness at Play: Twitch Streaming and the Production of Immediacy
Alexander Champlin (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Wager. Wage. Wager: Money as Mechanic in the Gambling Economies of Twitch TV
Stephanie Boluk (University of California, Davis)

No More Tigers, No More Woods: Playing Against Donald Trump’s Green Worlds
Patrick LeMieux (University of California, Davis)

Included below are other game studies panels and presentations:

Other Game Studies Panels:

Thursday, November 9

[1F] Playing Times
MU 246 Coconino
2:00-3:30
Chair: Chaz Evans

Twisting Time: The Ludonarrative of Nonlinearity in Braid
Jeffrey Bryan (University of California, Irvine)

Exponential Backlogs: Videogames and the Crisis of Time Compression
Chaz Evans (Northwestern University)

Ephemeral Instances and the Value of Invested Time: The Temporal Tensions for Comic Vine Wiki-writers and Forums Users
Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University)

[2G] Posthuman Peregrinations in Media
MU 238 Apache
4:00-5:30
Chair: Kristina Sawyer

Cybervisual Simulacra: Posthumanism, Time and the Afterlife in Charlie Booker’s Black Mirror and Ari Folman’s The Congress
Judy Ehrentraut (University of Waterloo)

Embodied Cognition, Robots, and Memory: Understanding Cloud-Computing as a Communication Triad in the Internet of Things
Kristina Sawyer (University of Illinois, Chicago)

Unstable Aesthetics: The Quake Engine and Jodi’s Untitled Game Mods Edwin Lohmeyer (North Carolina State University)

After Minecraft: Synthetic Ecologies of “Far Lands or Bust!” and Block by Block
Colin Johnson (University of California, Davis)

Friday, November 10               

[4D] Queering Media
MU 242A Lapaz West
11:00-12:30
Chair: James Malazita

Critical Platform Studies: Queer and Anti-Queer Ontologies in Game Development Software
James Malazita (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

From Subject to Subject Matter at the Intersection of Transgender Studies and Archival Studies
Harrison Apple (University of Arizona)

A Game is a Diffractive Apparatus: Metagaming Youtube and Tool-Assisted Subversions
Eileen Holowka (Concordia University)
Cody Walker (Concordia University)

[6F] Alternative Temporalities of Computer Gaming
MU 246 Coconino
4:00-5:30
Chair: David Rambo

Playing the Longue Durée: Deep History and Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Michael Gaffney (Duke University)

Sisyphean Software: Cycling through the Absurd Joy of Dark Souls
David Rambo (Duke University)

[6G] Machinic Media
MU 238 Apache
4:00-5:30
Chair: John Johnston

Game-ification of Art in the Posthuman Era
Kevin LaGrandeur (New York Institute of Technology and Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology)

Machines at the Speed of Light: Nonhuman Velocity/Temporality of Cybernetic Immanence
Mohammad-Ali Rahebi (Shiraz University; ali.rahebi@gmail.com)

The Techno-Politics of Swarm Systems
John Johnston (Emory University; jjohnst@emory.edu)

Mechanomorphosis – Realistic Animals in Virtual Worlds
Nicholas Hobin (University of Waterloo)

Saturday, November 11

Workshop: Coordinations and Coarticulations: Enacted Experiments and Games with Responsive Media
Matthews Center 218: Fishbowl (2nd floor)
9:00-10:30
Garrett Laroy Johnson (Arizona State University)

The British Dictionary defines the prefix “co,” of Latin origin, as meaning together; joint or jointly; mutual or mutually. “Co-” spills the notion of “togetherness” over the boundaries of the spatial association of proximity (to be together) and into much broader category of “group activity” cooking, collectivized movement dynamics like a group of people walking, or games like tag, cooking a meal together. A sense of wonder about this collectivity is the kernel of this workshop. What are togetherness and coordinations? What are the conditions under which they emerge? Can we create the conditions for enacted events to get a non-reductive sense of group coordination and ensemble? We will pursue these questions in enacted play, games and experiments with responsive media apparati and media-enchanted stuff

[8E] Spectregrams: Spectrality Before and After Media
MU 242B Lapaz East
11:00-12:30
Chair: David Cecchetto

Integral Nonsense: Listening through Fourier to Microtemporality’s (Primary)
Macro David Cecchetto (York University)

A Word on the Liveness and Death of Cinema
Kelly Egan (Trent University)

Heautoscopic Visualizations
Ted Hiebert (University of Washington, Bothell)

Indie Game Hauntology
Liam Mitchell (Trent University)

Keynote: McKenzie Wark, “The Accelerationists”
Saturday, November 11, 5:45pm
ASU Memorial Union, Room 221: Arizona Ballroom

From the twenties to the sixties, a small band of British scientists, science journalists and science fiction writers maintained a popular front against fascist irrationalism and against the inroads of corporate power over science. It was called the Social Relations of Science movement. Close to its center were a handful of first-rank scientists who also happened to be Marxists, and occasionally also successful writers in a wide range of genres from intellectual history to science fiction. They include JD Bernal, JBS Haldane and Joseph Needham. In the same orbit were pioneering feminists who made the connection between reproductive technology and the changing fortunes of women, such as Charlotte Haldane and Naomi Mitchison. Here I want to sketch a work in progress that would retrieve what is relevant about these intersections for our own darkening times.

McKenzie Wark, PhD., is a Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School for Social Research. Dr. Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard, 2007), The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011), Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) and various other things. His most recent book is General Intellects (Verso, 2017).