Critical Distance: Keywords in Play
Leisure:Video Games
C. Thi Nguyen is a former food writer, now a philosophy professor at University of Utah. He writes about trust, art, games, and communities, and is interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.
His first book is Games: Agency as Art. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. And games turn out to be our way of writing down and communicating modes of agency; by playing them, we can try out different forms of agency. (Here’s a summary of the book and Thi's website is https://objectionable.net/.)
“Keywords in Play” is a monthly interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience.
Our goal is to highlight the work of graduate students, early career researchers and scholars from under-represented groups, backgrounds and regions. The primary inspiration comes from sociologist and critic Raymond Williams. In the Preface to his book Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Williams envisaged not a static dictionary but an interactive document, encouraging readers to populate blank pages with their own keywords, notes and amendments. “Keywords in Play” follows Williams in affirming that “The significance is in the selection”, and works towards diversifying the critical terms with which we describe games and game culture. For more on games writing and culture please visit https://www.critical-distance.com/
Keywords in Play Episode 11 - Victor Navarro-Remesal and Thiago Falcão
Keywords in Play Episode 9: Sonia Fizek
Keywords in Play Episode 8 - Lindsay Grace
Keywords in Play Episode 7 - Malath Abbas
Keywords in Play Episode 6:Jamie Woodcock
Keywords in Play Episode 5: Eli Smith
Keywords in Play Episode 4 - Rob Gallagher
Keywords in Play Episode 3: Bo Ruberg
Keywords in Play Episode 2: Emilie Reed
Keywords in Play Episode 1
Minisode 16 - Milkmaids and Vikings
Episode 51 - Red Angel
Minisode 15 - Horror Games Mark II
Episode 50 - PostMesmeric
Episode 49 - Heavy Eyed
Minisode 14 - We're Back
Episode 48 - The Critic and the Dragon
Episode 47 - A Measured Response: Hbomb
Episode 46 - Talking on Games
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