A story about the Critical Gaming Project in The Daily (I was part of the interview for this story but alas made it only to the cutting room floor. But it’s still great that the CGP is getting much needed attention and press):
The Poetics of Play
December 8, 2010
By Sean SullivanTimothy Welsh felt like his research paper topic for his Marxism class in the graduate school English department was a dead end.
When talking about it with a friend, Welsh joked that he could instead write about how gang territory acquisition in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” resembled Marx’s description of primitive accumulation. He had suggested it as a joke, but he also realized that there might be something to the idea.
Welsh became so engaged in the topic that his paper ended up straying from “Grand Theft Auto” and instead discussed the “structures of feeling emerging from dissonances between a player’s experience of a game world, and [one’s] experiences in the real world.”
“My professor hated it,” Welsh said. “I don’t think she had any idea what I was talking about.”
Welsh is now a doctoral student and a committee member for a group called the Critical Gaming Project (CGP), an on-campus organization that promotes the critical study of games, including digital games, board games, and pen and paper games. In addition to organizing classes, the CGP also runs a website with information about the topic.
Full text: http://dailyuw.com/2010/12/8/poetics-play/