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Gonna get back on my bullshit by live-posting the first-ever student-led game studies conference at @nyugamecenter.bsky.social — GS1: Game Studies in Action. [ Organized by Prof. Karina Popp ] (Apologies to those who liked/shared earlier posts, they were messed up / had to delete! See again below)

First up, an analysis of irony-poisoning, front-stage / back-stage (c.f. Goffman) collapse and constant truth obfuscation under panoptical hierarchies of control in fishtank.live (You can read abstracts of any of these w/ author names at https://gstudies.one/)

Love to see it: dealing with heteropessimism by playing otome games and also by going to otome raves where cosplayers take on the roles of the male love interests (distributed-takarazkua vibes, imo)

Disrupting immersion and the distancing effect in Danganronpa V3. The characters are alienated and so are you! Complete with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (which ofc just means distancing effect). f&*K immersion, man

In-depth examination of mechanics & affective states involved in the RTTP (“Reacting to the Past”) pedagogy for live role-playing games set in history; getting past simplistic ideas of empathy to look at the merger of intense bleed-feeling and reflective distance to spark critical thinking

The “crayon problem” (where one crayola crayon is dubbed “flesh” color) and how it surfaces in the Sims 4, where fans for years decried or addressed (via modding) how lopsided skin tones limited range of dark-skinned avatars; analyzing as intense amounts of fan labor on EA’s behalf (c.f. Stanfill)

Analyzing the propagandistic rhetoric about “terrorism vs. counter-terrorism” in CS2 using Harris & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Also citing 80s discourse over the word “terrorism” feat. Edward Said, Netanyahu

Looking at the Chilean indie game Rangers in the South, overtly committed to cultural representation — but ALSO importing a huge amount of neocolonial rhetoric in eurocentric genre tropes & mechanics from JRPG/WRPG, “evil native orcs” vs knights in armor, humans colonizing from the north, etc.

Worth noting that the last talk ended by proposing Galvarino as a better model for an indigenous Chilean (Mapuche) hero, as an actual historical figure who literally fastened knives on his hands to fight the colonizers, and if comics can do it why not games?

Sound design of Helldivers 2 analyzed in the long fascist tradition of sensory spectacle; the game has a spectacle-creating sound design (loud, punchy, distorted guns & explosions) fitting its macho-fascistic parody, but is ALSO quite typical in this style among AAA contemporaries