Below, I have pulled the Game Studies Stream panels and events from the larger Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference schedule, including other game-related presentations:
Game Studies Stream
Thursday, November 7th
11:30-13:00 Session 2A: Game Studies Stream: Affecting/Identity
Chair: Ashlee Bird
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 11:30 | Samuel Pizelo “See Hero, Kill Hero:” Representation and Strategy in League of Legends Competitive Play (abstract) |
| 11:50 | Kasyoka Mwanzia What If The Lion Wrote? Stories From The Absented In Game Narratives (abstract) |
| 12:10 | Ashlee Bird Digital Dispossessions: The Importance of Regional Specificity and Sovereign Spaces to Video Game Representations of Native American Cultural Heritage (abstract) |
14:00-15:30 Session 4A: Game Studies Stream: Designing/Literacy
Chair: Peter McDonald
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 14:00 | Joshua Hussey Embedded Folklore and the Image of Agglutination in Videogames (abstract) |
| 14:20 | Jason Hawreliak and Jennifer Rowsell Analog Game Design for Literacies Education (abstract) |
| 14:40 | Peter McDonald An Era of Reflexive and Designed Play (abstract) |
15:45-17:15 Session 5A: Game Studies Stream: Ludic/Experimenting
Chair: Ranjodh Dhaliwal
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 15:45 | Arianna Gass Literary Ludics and Queer Desire (abstract) |
| 16:00 | Doug Stark Fluxus Play Before Games: Experimental Play as Cultural Technique (abstract) |
| 16:15 | Patrick Jagoda Nonsovereign Games: Experiments with Control and Consent in Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic (abstract) |
| 16:30 | Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal Playing with Oneself: Sports, Games, and Experiments (abstract) |
Friday, November 8th
08:00-09:30 Session 8A: Game Studies Stream: Practice/Process
Chair: Patrick LeMieux
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 08:00 | James Malazita Truth, Rationality, and Affect in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering (abstract) |
| 08:15 | Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk ALT CTRLS: Metagaming the Standard Interface (abstract) |
| 08:30 | Joshua McCoy Clearing Smoke and Shattering Mirrors: AI as a Substrate for Adaptive Games (abstract) |
| 08:45 | Lishan Az Experiments in Immersive Games for Black Feminist History Education (abstract) |
09:45-11:15 Session 9A: Game Studies Stream: Queering/Worlds
Chair: Kathryn Brewster
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 09:45 | Kara Stone Repairing Games: Duration and Debility (abstract) |
| 10:05 | Daniel Lipson Speculative Consent: Contracts, Autonomy, and World Building in Robert Yang’s Hurt Me Plenty (abstract) |
| 10:25 | Kathryn Brewster Shadows, bloodlines, heritage: Queer futurity in the age of evolving games (abstract) |
11:30-13:00 Session 10A: Game Studies Stream: Reflecting/Infrastructure
Chair: Alenda Chang
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 11:30 | Ben Wirth “Put the phone down on the pillow, it will be like I’m there”: The Ethics of Empathy as a Form of Play (abstract) |
| 11:45 | Rainforest Scully-Blaker Power to the Player: Literacy, Legibility, and Play as Critique (abstract) |
| 12:00 | Ryan Leach Back to the Screen?: An Infrastructural Approach to Critical Hacking Games (abstract) |
| 12:15 | Alenda Chang Throwing Shade: Environmental Civil Disobedience and the Changing Preconditions for Play (abstract) |
14:00-15:30 Session 12A: Game Studies Stream: Spoiling/Gender
Chair: Liam Mitchell
Location: Emerald Bay DE
| 14:00 | Jeffrey Bryan No Fun Karaoke (abstract) |
| 14:20 | Derek Curry Cheats, Spoil-Sports, and Whistle-blowers: High-Frequency Traders as Gamers (abstract) |
| 14:40 | Liam Mitchell On Gender and the Acousmatic Voice in Videogames (abstract) |
Saturday, November 9th
09:00-11:00 SPECIAL EVENT: Game Studies Stream: Demo/Playing (SLSArcade)
Location: Viewpoint Gallery
This featured session of the Game Studies Stream brings together game makers, scholars, teachers, writers, and players to demonstrate their designs and creations. Participants can walk around, try out different games, and talk with creators in this remixed “poster session” and “arcade.” Featured games engage a range of perspectives, disciplines, and topics including social media, science and technology, literature, alternate realities, digital humanities, gender and sexuality, metagaming, and environmental studies.
Featuring: Stephanie Boluk, Katherine Buse, Alenda Chang, Edmond Chang, Derek Curry, Ranjodh Dhaliwal, Berend Forfetir, Lucero Gonzalez, Jennifer Gradecki, Intae Hwang, Kevin LaGrandeur, Patrick LeMieux, Colin Milburn, John Misak, Joseph Ozias and Melissa Wills
14:00-15:30 Session 18J: ROUNDTABLE: VGA Reader: Emerging Infrastructures for Video Game Art
Location: Doheny Beach D
The VGA Reader (https://www.videogameartgallery.com/vga-reader) is a peer-reviewed journal for video game practitioners and audiences interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, explored through the lens of art history and visual culture. The journal, along with its parent organization VGA Gallery, are examples of a network of new support structures that facilitate conversation and exploration of video game art, documenting and disseminating discourse about the far-reaching influence of video games on history, society, and culture. This roundtable session presents an overview of similar emerging infrastructures aimed toward the development of video game art. What venues, publications, institutions, platforms, communities, and alternative economies exist to support artists making video games and their audiences? Which are currently in development? What kind of constitutions and foundational logics should they take on? What have they already achieved? What practices have developed that are counter-productive for the discipline of video game art? Which have already come and gone and in that case how do we have access to their institutional memory? What can these kinds of infrastructures do to promote inclusivity and education? This session is an open conversation on the taxonomy and review of these kinds of initiatives that serve a similar purpose yet are resolved as very different spaces, texts, and practices.
Featuring: Chaz Evans, Tiffany Funk, Kishonna Gray, Evan Meaney, Whitney Pow
Other Game-Related Sessions
Thursday, November 7th
11:30-13:00 Session 2D: Revisiting Reunion: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and the Experimental Gaming of Art, Life, and Chess
Chairs: Anne Goodyear and James McManus
Location: Doheny Beach B
| 11:30 | James McManus and Anne Goodyear “For Duchamp, Life and Art: It’s All a Game of Chess” (abstract) |
| 11:50 | Anne Goodyear The Reunion of Duchamp and Cage: Art, Collaboration, and Time Travel (abstract) |
| 12:10 | Dennis Summers “A Game of Chess – There is No Solution Because There is No Problem.” (abstract) |
14:00-15:30 Session 4K: ROUNDTABLE: Art, Life, and Chess: Reunion Revisited
Chair: David Familian
Location: Doheny Beach Lounge
In 1968 Marcel Duchamp and John Cage did a performance called “Reunion.” They assembled a group of their friends to both witness the perform and be part of this celebration. The chessboard for Reunion used cutting-edge technology designed and developed for Cage by Lowell Cross. Reunion is an event without a score. The game works as an indeterminate experience: as a game of chess is played, the moves of the players on the board trigger a composition, and the sound is distributed to eight speakers surrounding the audience. The John Cage Trust recreated the chessboard. Come experience John Cage’s chessboard with a score composed by Alex Joseph Lough. This is a unique opportunity to experience this groundbreaking interactive sound work.
Friday, November 8th
08:00-09:30 Session 8G: Experiments in Interpretation: Humanistic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence Research
Chair: Evan Donahue
Location: Emerald Bay C
| 08:00 | Bradley Spiers Computational Reveries: Hearing Music in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (abstract) |
| 08:15 | Gabrielle Benabdallah Poetics of Machine Desire: An Experimental Inquiry into Voice Interaction Design and Natural Language Processing (abstract) |
| 08:30 | Théo Lepage-Richer Operationalizing Meaning: On (Bad) Poetry and Machine Learning (abstract) |
| 08:45 | Evan Donahue Theory of Games: Games as Experimental Technologies in Artificial Intelligence Research (abstract) |
09:45-11:15 Session 9B: Affective Interfaces I
Chair: David Parisi
Location: Emerald Bay A
| 09:45 | Ania Malinowska Loving AI: the rise of ambient sentience (abstract) |
| 10:00 | Kyle Machulis The Hidden Game: Intimate Haptic Interactions in Multiplayer Online Video Games (abstract) |
| 10:15 | David Parisi Touchless Embrace: The Perpetually Deferred Dream of Hugging from a Distance (abstract) |
| 10:30 | Teddy Pozo The Haptic Aesthetics of Control in Video Game Design (abstract) |
11:30-13:00 Session 10B: Affective Interfaces II
Chair: Mark Paterson
Location: Emerald Bay A
| 11:30 | Jason ArcherIn the Guiding Grips of a Robotic Surgical Assistant (abstract) |
| 11:45 | Carlin WingInstruments of Improvisation: Playing Along to FIFA’s World Cup (abstract) |
| 12:00 | Mark PatersonNeuroplastic Interfaces: Sensory Substitution Devices and the History of Brain Plasticity (abstract) |
| 12:15 | Christy SpackmanLaboring in Smell’s Shadow (abstract) |
15:45-17:15 Session 13B: Embodied Knowledge: Experiments with Feeling(s) in Games
Chair: Josef Nguyen
Location: Emerald Bay A
| 15:45 | Josef Nguyen Playing with Digital Technologies and Analog Consent (abstract) |
| 16:00 | Christopher Goetz From kinetic to moral legibility: the case of melodramatic videogames (abstract) |
| 16:15 | Bonnie Ruberg Puppy Play: Nintendogs and the Present Absence of Queer Sex in Video Games (abstract) |
| 16:30 | Whitney Pow Unlearning the Keyboard, Relearning the Body: Hardware Intimacies in Sean Wejebe’s The Longest Couch (abstract) |
Saturday, November 9th
08:00-09:30 Session 15D: Form and Meaning: Cognition, Sensation, Mediation
Chair: Laura Otis
Location: Doheny Beach B
| 08:00 | Laura Otis Experimenting with Multi-Sensory Imagery in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (abstract) |
| 08:15 | Daniel Gardner Re-framing games: Re-mediating peritext, the parergon, and the periphery for games. (abstract) |
| 08:30 | Thomas Howard “Experience Is Forever in Motion”: The Divided Brain and Experimental Thinking (abstract) |
| 08:45 | Els Woudstra The Skin of the Platform (abstract) |