My second weekend of conferencing begins soon! This time I am headed to the frosty city of Toronto for the Society for LIterature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meeting. This year’s conference is organized around the theme “Out of Mind.” As with last year’s SLSA, I co-organized a “Game Studies Stream.” This year, with the help of Alenda Chang, we put together a “mini-stream”–four panels instead of six–collecting together a diverse array of presentations. Here is the stream, which is on Saturday, November 17:
GAME STUDIES 1: Virtual/Reality/Play
Chair: Edmond Chang
8:30 – 10:00
Carmichael/ Jackson
Synthetic Spaces and Indigenous Identity: Decolonizing Video Games and ROM Hacking Super Mario Bros.
Ashlee Bird (University of California, Davis)
Stereoscopic Toys and Victorian Virtual Reality
Amanda Shubert (University of Chicago)
20XX: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Finance, and Star Citizen
Stephanie Boluk (University of California, Davis); Patrick Lemieux (University of California, Davis)
LARP as Queer Space, Queer Contact, Queer Pedagogy
Edmond Chang (Ohio University)
GAME STUDIES 2: (Non)representations
Chair: Alenda Chang
10:30 – 12:00
Carmichael/ Jackson
Mind the Gap: The Space Between Representation and Lived Identity in Cosplay
Chris Wildrick (Syracuse University)
Design and Deception at the Interface: TIS-100 and the Necessary Evils of Nonrepresentation
Jamal Russell (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Anti-Realist Simulation Games
Doug Stark (UNC Chapel Hill)
Games, Heterotopias, and Impossible Spaces
Ben Wirth (University of Washington)
GAME STUDIES 3: Design(ing)
Chair: Alenda Chang
1:30 – 3:00
MacDonald
Learning to Play: Smart Toys, Data-Driven Friendships, and Technologies of Animation
Meredith Bak (Rutgers University)
Disciplining Game Design
Peter McDonald (University of Chicago)
“Out of (Shakespeare’s) Mind and into the Classroom: Our Augmented Reality App for Teaching Hamlet”
John Misak (NYIT) & Kevin LaGrandeur (NYIT and Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies)
Building Multispecies Entanglements through Infrastructural Play
Alenda Chang (University of California, Santa Barbara)
GAME STUDIES 4: Control and Resistance
Chair: Stephanie Boluk
3:30 – 5:00
MacDonald
Non-Human Being in Videogames
Jason Hawreliak (Brock University)
Monotonous Play: Fantasies of Freedom and Work in Stardew Valley
Jordan Pruett (University of Chicago)
“The Dangerous Game”: Patterns of Play and Resistance in Korean eSports Ecologies
Samuel Pizelo (UC Davis)
A Theory of Conscious Everything: Self-Reflexivity and Panpsychism in David OReilly’s Mountain and Everything
Justin Carpenter (University of Waterloo)
#SLSA2018 is the hashtag. SLSA has an (un)official Facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/litsciarts/ and the Game Studies Stream has a growing FB group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/slsagamestudies/
I look forward to the stream and the rest of the conference! I also look forward to the fact that there is a Momofuku Noodle Bar across the street from the conference hotel!