----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Where does all this end, and what does it call upon those of us who study and work with play and players? What does it mean to expect or count on transnational industries to self-regulate, especially in light of the onrushing climate catastrophe? In the United States, the question is almost moot, as the Supreme Court has ruled that videogames are speech and as such many forms of electronic entertainment are difficult if not impossible to regulate outside of that framing (see Brown, Governor of California, et Al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et Al: (548122013-001). 08–1448, 27 June 2011, doi:10.1037/e548122013-001). Further, how can/do our resistive recuperations and appropriations of the videogame reckon with the realities of the industries that not only provide the material and software infrastructures upon which our appropriations can function (frequently made at great expense to the planet and to the lives of miners, refiners, assemblers, shippers, and other laborers), but also in turn can re-appropriate resistive appropriations themselves for their own market purposes, effectively transforming alternative game-making into a kind of free-labor skunkworks (as fellow guest poster Bo Ruberg has written about; see Ruberg, Bonnie. 2019. “The Precarious Labor of Queer Indie Game-Making: Who Benefits from Making Video Games ‘Better’?” Television & New Media. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851090.)? What are alternative futures for games, and for the ways creators and players relate to (or do not relate to) the logics of the electronic entertainment industries? Can the videogame's powerful capabilities to represent systems provide an opening for discussions not only about the reality of the climate crisis, but also about the realities of the electronic entertainment industries as they relate to that crisis?
4/4 Jeff Watson, USC School of Cinematic Arts _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
