While the vast majority of game studies work examines games themselves, the paratexts that surround them are equally important for giving games their cultural meaning. We consider paratexts themselves as artifacts, pieces, and/or objects that are game-adjacent or surround the… Continue Reading
An FPS Special Issue In Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live, Kishonna L. Gray states that “There is a common misconception of minority gamers that they are not in fact true gamers… This mythical assumption is also evident in… Continue Reading
First Person Scholar is a University of Waterloo Games Institute-affiliated, middle-state, open-access web publication committed to diverse, intersectional, and social-justice-minded games scholarship. We are looking for a Guest Editor to head up the last of our 2019-2020 series of special issues highlighting under-represented and/or marginalized identities and communities in games.
This time around, we are looking to run a special issue specifically highlighting queer and trans people of colour. If you identify yourself as belonging to both of these intersections, we’d like to work with you and give you a platform to highlight critical issues in games that matter to you. Continue Reading
This call takes up threads of Indigenous Futurisms and Video Games Studies to weave a fiber-optic cable of survivance – (re)coding sovereignty into flowing non-binary streams of Indigenous-made video games and experiences.
As Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish scholar and designer Beth LaPensée notes, Indigenous communities are already in a post-apocalypse, and “doing more than surviving. We’re continuing our traditions in ways that are malleable to the situations we’re in now”(qtd. in Creegan). We ask how these games can shift players to these media landscapes that are, as Loft says, “replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things that mirrors, memorializes, and points to the structure of Indigenous thought” (xvi). We also ask how they can – from internal and external positionalities – (re)code how we understand games and larger networks of connection and relationality. Continue Reading
CFP: In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam suggests, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” In reimagining what it means to fail and what it means to succeed, queer games can offer rich experiences that move beyond the goals and practices of the hegemonic status quo of mainstream games. Queer design perspectives, particularly when they fail to meet the expectations of the status quo, can bring “difference” to “our discussions of video games and the experience of play” (after Ruberg 2015), and we want to hear all about it. Continue Reading
CFP: Disabled characters tend to appear as villains, sidekicks, and/or background props to add “flavour” to games, rather than as protagonists. These media representations both infantilize disabled bodies and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Access to games and gaming culture remains exclusive to the assumed able-bodied player. This special issue invites Mad and crip perspectives on games, play, and gaming culture. Continue Reading