Critical Distance: Keywords in Play
Leisure:Video Games
This episode we have a departure from academia; a different approach to the creation and transmission of knowledge. We interview Eli Smith, Traditional Music Consultant for Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2. In our first COVID-19 recording (you may hear some sirens), we discuss the American music archive both as living tradition and recording technology, and the ways in which these interface with the virtual space of a digital game.
Eli is a folk singer, banjo player and guitarist who grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village. Smith has recorded for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and regularly performs as a solo musician and with the string band the Down Hill Strugglers http://elismithmusic.blogspot.com/
“Keywords in Play” is an 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.
Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance
Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed.
Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart
Double Bass: Aaron Stewart
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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