special issue

(Re)Coding Survivance: Sovereign Video Games Special Issue

First Person Podcast Episode 37

Michelle Lee Brown, Beth LaPensée, Maru Nihoniho, Meagan Byrne, and betsy brey 1 Comment

Welcome to a special edition of First Person Scholar. Today, we’re introducing a special issue on Indigenous and Sovereign Games, called “(Re)coding Survivance,” edited by Michelle Lee Brown. Our podcast this month features a conversation between four amazing Indigenous game designers, developers, and scholars. Michelle Lee Brown, Beth LaPensée, Maru Nihoniho, and Meagan Byrne discuss game design, Indigenous futurisms, survivance, and so much more. Continue Reading →

First Person Scholar: Call for Collaborators

Guest Editor: Spring/Summer 2020

First Person Scholar

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 →

Nonbinary

A Choose-Your-Own Adventure

Adan Jerreat-Poole

Follow the thread / of twine / to find / your way home / if home ever existed in the first place / We make space / for our breath / for our spines / that are bending / Breaking / the binary / of a binary culture / built on binary code and passcodes / passwords we are hacking / with our
Living, loving bodies Continue Reading →

Possibilities for Queer Community-Building Through LARP

Sharang Biswas
In-game photo by Karin Ryding from a Sweden Run in 2012

More than just trying to present an immersive, believable world, both games attempted to ensure that players were grounded in a sense of history. Moreover, by creating worlds dominated by queer issues, it was queer histories that rose to the forefront. Players were given the opportunity to gain some level of understanding of how being queer here and now directly related to the events then and there. Continue Reading →

FPS Special Issue: Call for Papers

Queer Making and Design

Jess Marcotte, Special Issue Guest Editor & Betsy Brey, FPS Editor-in-Chief
Call For Papers

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 →

VR: An Altered Reality for Disabled Players

Rebeccah Redden

Rebeccah Redden is a Kitchener-based filmmaker, writer, and science fiction nerd. She spends most of her day living with mental illness and helping kids do 3D printing and virtual reality. She enjoys having an opinion on everything and reminiscing about… Continue Reading →