A few of the Keywords for Video Game Studies working group will be part of a roundtable on video game scholarship, pedagogy, play, and design at the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest American Studies Association (PNASA), which is being held at the Watertown Hotel in Seattle.
The bad news is that I did not have enough travel funds to make it to my hometown area of Washington, DC for the annual convention of the Popular Cultural Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA). The good news is that my friend and colleague Timothy Welsh (who I was hoping to meet up with at the conference) is there and will assist me in telepresenting my paper via Skype. I am part of the Game Studies stream (organized by Katie Whitlock, Gerald Voorhees, and Joshua Call). My presentation is part of the “Game Studies XVII: Crossing Borders and Occupying Margins” session and is provocatively entitled:
Queerness Can(not) Be Designed: Video Games and the Trouble with Protocol
Is it possible to create a queer video game? What constitutes a queer video game? And are video games already queer? Considering Kurt Squire’s argument that video games are “designed experiences,” this presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games beyond queerness as window dressing, as simply LGBT-skinned plot, character, or subtext. In other words, video games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. Alexander Galloway defines protocol as “a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms” in ways that is “not by nature horizontal or vertical, but that protocol is an algorithm, a proscription for structure whose form and appearance may be any number of different diagrams or shapes.” Looking at games designed as queer—Gambit Game Lab’s A Closed World, Auntie Pixelante’s dys4ia, and Merritt Kopas’s Lim—this paper explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness, and more importantly, imagines the queer possibilities in interruptions to game protocol such as cheats, exploits, glitches, and paratexts like fandom and countergaming.
The second of my Spring Quarter courses:
ENGL 307 A: Cultural Studies: “Critical Approaches to Tolkien: Cultural Studies & Fantasy Literature”
Monday/Wednesday 3:30-5:20 PM
Spring 2013
http://faculty.washington.edu/changed/307/
J.R.R. TOLKIEN, in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, insists and argues, “I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meanings of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them…As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical” (xiv). This course will decidedly not believe the author’s intentions, rather we will draw on the broad archive of Tolkien’s novels, Peter Jackson’s films, and scholarship as occasions to identify and explore the key concepts, moves, and terms of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.
CENTRAL QUESTIONS AND ENGAGEMENTS INCLUDE: What are the different critical practices and methodologies of cultural studies? How might we employ different cultural studies approaches and lenses to Tolkien, film adaptations, and fantasy literature more generally? Why study fantasy, how is this oft dismissed “genre” important, and what values, ideals, and norms does it have? In this course, we will look at and analyze Tolkien through the lenses of cultural studies and deploy literature as theories about and dramatizations of different social relationships and realities, to unpack and analyze the intersections of cultural formations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, particularly in the US context. Ursula K. Le Guin in “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” argues, “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy.” This class will spend the quarter reading, watching, thinking, and writing about how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in. In other words, we will try to challenge Tolkien’s denials above and to answer Le Guin’s proposition about fantasy.
OVERALL, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading literature and watching film. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts–from fiction to scholarship to visual and digital–we will read with pleasure, close read, and read for analysis and argument. A requirement for the course is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. Students seeking W-Credit will be accommodated.
The first of my Spring Quarter courses:
ENGL 242 C: Reading Prose: “Not Your Average High School Novel Class: Re-Reading American Literature”
Monday-Thursday 10:30-11:20 AM
Spring 2013
http://faculty.washington.edu/changed/242/
MAYA ANGELOU once said, “When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” It is this sense that literature is important, that literature can reveal something about ourselves and the world, and that reading is a practice and lifeway maintained and sustained over time that is central to this class. In other words, literature is more than just words on a page, literacy is not a destination or a merit badge, and reading is as much about rereading as writing is as much about revising. This class will take up reading and rereading as critical practice by pointedly revisiting literature commonly taught in high school curricula in the US, literature needing rescue and revivification from this-is-so-boring mindsets, from the constraints of teaching-for-the-tests, and from the too easy themes and summaries of notes by Cliff and Spark. This is not your usual high school novel class. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Nella Larsen, J.D. Salinger, Ray Bradbury, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Art Spiegelman, and Suzanne Collins.
A REQUIREMENT for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. In other words, this class is about reading, critiquing, and analyzing our culture through literature. Our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various fictions and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.
FINALLY, as a class, we will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature. We will identify and develop different ways to read different kinds of texts–from fiction to scholarship to visual and digital–and understand and develop strategies, habits, and perspectives of reading, thinking, and writing. Foremost, we will read with pleasure and for pleasure. We will also rhetorically read, close read, read for analysis. And lastly, we will read and deploy literature as theory, as dramatizing the concerns, wonders, struggles, and politics of lived life and experience. The class counts for W credit, requiring you to complete 10-15 pages of revised writing including a set of short response papers culminating in a longer major paper project.
Although I was not accepted as a presenter to UC Berkeley’s “Speculative Visions of Race, Technology, Science, and Survival” conference (March 15-16, 2013), I am honored to be able to help and contribute by serving as moderator for the “Dislocating the Human” panel (the scheduled moderator was unexpectedly unavailable). Thank you to conference goers and organizers, particularly Alisa Bierria, for giving me the opportunity to participate!
1:45 pm – 3:10 pm: Panel 3
Dislocating the Human: Crossing Divides of Species and FormThe Future is a Parasite: Biology and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Fledgling
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, University of VirginiaAnimal. Asian. Cyborg: Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”
Tamara C. Ho, UC RiversideThe Deathly Interface: Techno-Orientalism and Digitized Flesh in Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Takeo Rivera, UC Berkeley“People of the Apokalis”: Spatial Disability and the Bhopal Disaster
Jina Kim, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
I have helped organize and co-author a new HASTAC Scholars forum on Alan Turing, posthumanism, and gender and sexuality:
Alan Turing, an unsung hero, mathematician, code breaker, and first generation computer scientist. Turing is most known for his work helping to break the German Enigma codes during World War I and his provocative 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” where he posits artificial intelligence, the universal machine digital computer, and the now oft-cited “imitation game” or “Turing Test.” Unfortunately, all of Turing’s brilliance, achievements, and technohistorical importance are overshadowed by another thing for which he is known: his homosexuality. In 1952, Turing was convicted of committing acts of “gross indecency” with a man and sentenced to chemical castration rather than imprisonment. Two years later, in 1954, Turing committed suicide leaving behind a legacy of questions, titillations, frustrations, and theorizations about technology, cybernetics, identity and embodiment, and posthumanism.
How might we read, configure, and imagine Turing as one of the first posthumanists, one of the first digital humanists? How might Turing be emblematic of the interventions, explorations, and interrogations raised by posthumanism, code studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities? And how might Turing’s own fraught personal and political life limn the boundaries, limitations, silences, excesses, and exclusions of these flights of inquiry? Turing hoped at the end of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that “at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. I believe further that no useful purpose is served by concealing these beliefs” (442). Now that the end of his century and the beginning of our new century has come to pass, finally, how might Turing provide new directions and open new possibilities for our disciplines, departments, and individual work?
The forum is hosted by me and Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies and New Media Studies, UC Berkeley, Jarah Moesch, American Studies, University of Maryland, Elliott Hauser, Information Science, UNC-Chapel Hill, Elaine Gan, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz, and Melissa Chalmers, School of Information, University of Michigan. The forum will feature special guest contributers and respondants including: David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, Jacob Gaboury, Ph.D. candidate, Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, Jennifer Rhee, Assistant Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University, Rudy Rucker, Computer Scientist, Science Fiction author, and a founder of the cyberpunk literary movement, and my dissertation chair Tom Foster, Professor of English, University of Washington.
For the full forum post: http://hastac.org/forums/alan-turing-first-digital-humanist
The diploma is in the mail:
Dear UW Graduate,
We have just received an update that the Autumn 2012 diplomas have been mailed. Please look your diploma over once it arrives to make sure your name and degree are printed correctly. If you have any questions about your diploma, please review the diploma information at http://www.washington.edu/
students/reg/grad.html#q3, or contact the Graduation and Academic Records Office at ugradoff@uw.edu or 206-543-1803. We also encourage you to review your unofficial transcript on MyUW. Official copies of your transcript may be obtained by ordering them through MyUW or by writing to the University of Washington, Transcript Office, Box 355850, Seattle, WA, 98195-5850. A $9.00 check or money order for each transcript you order should be included with the following information: Social Security Number, date of birth, and student number.
We wish you a productive and meaningful future as a University of Washington graduate.
The books for my classes next quarter are in the UW Bookstore. For my ENGL 242 E: Reading Prose: “Cyberpunk: Past, Present, and Future” course:
And, for my ENGL 466 A: Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Studies: “Critical Inquiries: Introduction to LGBT Studies” course:
Edmond Y. Chang is a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle. He studies technoculture, video games and new media, queer theory, cultural studies, and 20/21C American literature.
A Few Words about Boston
Every time something terrible, unthinkable, and awful happens in this little, fenced off area we call our nation, I am always amazed not by the heroism, compassion, and spirit shown by people but by how quickly, decisively, and maddeningly things often turn to fear, paranoia, racism, homophobia, and violence. In all of my classes, we talk about things like popular culture, politics, ideology, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other narratives, logics, and institutions. So it is important now to remember that even if the worst of the worst is what happened, the response should never be even more destruction, violence, persecution, or oppression. I am heartened that people are caring for one another. But I am saddened and starkly dismayed and disappointed by the worst kinds of thinking, wishing, and even doing. Let me take the time to wish everyone a safe and restful evening, to hope that everyone and those you know here and elsewhere are also safe, and to pay respects and condolences to everyone touched by these dark and desperate events. These horrors and machinations may be novel to most of us, but we cannot forget that violence, destruction, and death are everyday realities for many, many people and communities–even inside our borders. I hope for curiosity, not fear. I hope for honesty, not hate. I hope for critical thinking, not blind patriotism.
To my students, I am happy to talk about these things with people during class, during office hours, or during an appointment.