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/
Minisode 08 - Breaking the Mold and Cultural Musings
Episode 30 - Everything's Better Embed
Minisode 07 - Horror Games
Minisode 06 - Relationships and Forward Motion
Episode 29 - Shoot Them!
Minisode 05 - Text Games and Far Away Places
Episode 28 - Uninterviewable
Minisode 04 - Wandering Around and Feeling
Episode 27 - A Review Comes For The Arcade
Minisode 03 - B-grade Games
Episode 26 - Five out of Ten: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Escape to Na Pali, Side B
Episode 26 - Five out of Ten: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Escape to Na Pali, Side A
Minisode 02 - Interactive Fiction and Object Toys
Episode 25 - The History of Everyday Games
Minisode 01 - Cyberpunk and Personal Stories
Episode 24 - The Zine Knight Rises
Episode 23 - Books Fight Boss
Episode 22 - On 'Killing is Harmless'
Episode 21 - Actually, It's About...2014
Episode 20 - The Founderhead
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