----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Greetings, empyre! This week, we're lucky to be joined by discussants Derek Curry, Brent Povis, Aaron Trammell, and Timothy Welsh. Tim's work on "mixed realism" and the perennial bugbear of violence in video games helped frame this month's discussion. The last time I saw Derek, I was playing his game WarTweets (made w/Jennifer Gradecki) at the 2019 SLSArcade, which turns Trump's tweets into missiles that have to be neutralized by direct Twitter participation. I know Aaron from his dedication to carving out a space for analog game studies in a digitally dominated world (witness the journal http://analoggamestudies.org/). And finally, I'm fannishly excited to have Brent Povis join this conversation as a working board/card game designer, whose game Morels is a favorite in my household and simulates--what else?--a mushroom-hunting walk in the woods (http://www.twolanternsgames.com/the-morels-story.html). Beware destroying angels.
Week's topic: Analog by design In many ways, this week's focus extends last week's concern with the sustainability of gaming and the need for environmental forms of play. Over the next seven days, let's make room to talk about all the non-digital games, or digital games that deliberately cross thresholds into the "real" world (e.g. alternate-reality, pervasive, locative, augmented-reality, serious, art games), or "RL" activities treated as games (gamification, neoliberal capitalism). Furthermore, how might an attention to the analog reorient us toward the material underpinnings of games, from player labor (playbor) to game development workforce issues (diversity, unionization), or games deliberately meant to be destroyed or played a limited number of times (legacy)? Cheers, Alenda -- Guest bios: Derek Curry Derek Curry is an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. His interdisciplinary practice combines artistic production with research techniques from the humanities, science and technology studies, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. He uses a practice-based research approach to investigate topics where information may be limited, and to create artworks and games that provide an experiential understanding of topics where information may be limited, such as automated decision-making systems used by algorithmic stock trading systems and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) gathering practices. Brent Povis There are few times on any given day when Brent Povis (US) is not designing, playing, or fantasizing about playing tabletop games. This obsession began at a young age when he realized that most 80’s family fare in board gaming was lackluster, struggled with that reality, then was floored by the realization that he had the power to change them. Brent has been delighted to see the renaissance in board gaming over the past quarter-century, inspired designs now ubiquitous across genres and themes. He enjoys the creative challenge of bringing the outdoors to the kitchen table, art kinetic with sunshine and rustling leaves and tactics based on evaluation of multiple positive options such that each turn is like the choice between competing forest paths, knowing that the day hinges on the moment but that in the end both present the best of all possible worlds. His 2-player strategy game Morels (2014 Card Game of the Year) expresses his fascination with foraging, Agility (2016 Best 2-Player Game Nominee) with animal behavior, and designs in process our shared attempts to fathom the cosmos. Aaron Trammell Aaron Trammell is an assistant professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He graduated from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015 and spent a year at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC as a postdoctoral researcher. Aaron’s research looks at the persistence of analog games in today's digital world. He is interested in how political and social ideology is integrated in the practice of game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal *Analog Game Studies* and the Multimedia Editor of *Sounding Out!* Timothy Welsh Dr. Timothy J. Welsh is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans where he teaches in the Film+Digital Media concentration. He is the author of Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction as well as articles on videogames, digital culture, and literary theory. _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
