Understanding Intersectionality through Critical Game Design

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Game design encourages people to think in terms of systems. This workshop, presented at the 2016 HASTAC Conference, takes advantage of the way games easily represent systems to help students (and their instructors!) work through intertwined oppressions. Theories of intersectionality attempt to describe how phenomena like racism and sexism, for example, mutually reinforce and alter each other. However, this can be difficult to capture in words. Instead, this workshop tasks participants with creating a set of rules that simulate how different oppressions interact with one another. This activity is useful for talking about the theoretical concept of intersectionality, and its emphasis on designing games will require students to think about power and identity in systematic terms rather than representational ones

Straight-washing "Undertale": Video games and the limits of LGBTQ representation

A widely beloved video game, Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) has proven popular with players, reviewers, and commentators from across sectors of games culture that often hold conflicting views. What makes Undertale's broad appeal particularly surprising is its queer content, which can be found in both the game's representational and interactive elements. As many have observed, homophobic attitudes have long characterized reactionary gamer subcultures, which are often explicitly hostile toward diversity. Yet these subcultures are also among those most vocal in their appreciation of Undertale. What explains this seeming contradiction? While it is tempting to interpret this phenomenon as a sign that gamer culture is becoming more inclusive, a critique of the discourse surrounding the game's reception reveals that Undertale has in fact been straight-washed by many writers and fans. This straightwashing entails both an erasure of the queerness found in Undertale and a recasting of the game as one that jibes with the interests of heterosexual male gamers, such as innovative design, player mastery, nostalgia, and humor. At a moment when diversity has become central to academic and popular discussions of video games, increased LGBTQ representation is often presented as the ready-made fix to antiqueer discrimination. Yet the straightwashing of Undertale serves as a cautionary tale. It suggests that the cultural impact of LGBTQ representation in video games has its own limitations, and that a game with queer characters may not only fail to change the mindsets of straight players; it may itself be stripped of its queer potential by its reception

Pixel Whipped: Pain, Pleasure, and Media

At a time when technology seems increasingly poised to render the material realities of its users obsolete, putting the body back into digital media has become a matter of pressing social significance. Scholars like Lisa Nakamura have written compellingly about the importance of attending to the embodied identities of those who sit behind the screen: a crucial step toward disrupting the systems of inequality that characterize much of twenty-first-century Western digital culture. Similarly dedicated to issues of social justice, this project argues for turning attention to another essential element of the relationship between technology and the body: how digital media makes users feel. Far from being disembodied, digital tools have become crucial platforms for expressions of selfhood and desire. Yet, on a phenomenological level, virtual experiences also have a surprising capacity to directly affect the real, physical body. To demonstrate this, this project maps a network of key examples that illustrate how pain and pleasure—commonly imagined as the most embodied sensations—have in fact been brought to life through a range of media forms. Beginning with the novels of the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and Pauline Réage, this project contends that concepts of sadomasochism and literature have evolved side by side for more than two centuries. Moving from textual to visual forms, the project turns to Pier Pasolini’s Salò, a film that notoriously “hurts to watch,” to investigate the intersection of violence, complicity, and viewership. Next, the project moves into the digital realm, offering a reading of the erotic power exchange that drives video-game interactivity. In the final chapter, the project explores digital BDSM: practices of bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism that take place entirely in virtual spaces. Across these chapters, the project argues for the value of “kink” as a critical lens, much like the “queerness” in queer studies, which underscores the cultural and personal significance of experiences that hurt. Together, the works and cultures considered here bring much-needed attention to the place of non-normative desires in media, both digital and non-digital. They also serve to productively challenge the perceived divide between the “virtual” and the “real.

Curating with a Click: the Art that Participatory Media Leaves Behind

23 pagesAt a moment when technological participation seems to promise to bring innovation and democratic access to the contemporary museum, the results from one community-curated exhibit suggest that conservative cultural biases continue to shape the American public’s taste in art. In 2013, the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania collected more than 10,000 online votes for their People’s Choice exhibit. Voters were invited to choose their ‘top’ three artworks from among 125, and the twenty-five artworks that received the most votes were then displayed, while those that didn’t make the cut stayed tucked away behind closed doors. Rather than promoting diversity by making curatorial practices interactive and accessible however, the People’s Choice voting process rendered difference invisible. The result was an exhibit that appealed to the largest number of voters, yet excluded artwork that challenged dominant norms of gendered or racial privilege. Voters consistently chose realistic paintings of landscapes and white female subjects over abstract works, pieces by women, and images of people of color. The People’s Choice exhibit serves as a valuable lesson about the use of participatory media in museums, and about the potential pitfalls of crowdsourcing in new media cultures more broadly, demonstrating the importance of self-reflection as a key component of participatory cultural programming.University of Oregon Librarie

SURVIVORS: Archiving the history of bulletin board systems and the AIDS crisis

The history of the Internet and the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis are fundamentally intertwined. Because of the precarious nature of primary early Internet materials, however, documentation that reflects this relationship is limited. Here, we present and analyse an important document that offers considerable insight in this area: a full printout of the bulletin board system (BBS) discussion group “SURVIVORS.” Run by David Charnow, SURVIVORS operated as an “electronic support group” for members living with HIV/AIDS from 1987 to 1990. These dates represent a period of overlap between both the AIDS crisis in America and the use of BBSs as a predecessor to contemporary Internet technologies. The contents of SURVIVORS were printed by Charnow before his death in 1990 and later donated to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Through our discussion of these documents, we articulate the striking relationship between the SURVIVORS printout as a material document that preserves a digital past and the lives of those whose stories are contained within the printout. We argue that it is not only the content but indeed the precarious, shifting media format of the SURVIVORS printout, born digital and now preserved on paper, that gives it its meaning. Thirty years after his death, Charnow’s printout of SURVIVORS keeps a critical piece of the interrelated histories of HIV/AIDS and the Internet alive, while also raising valuable questions about the archiving of these histories

PLAYING AT THE POLLS: VIDEO GAMES IN/AS PLATFORMS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

This panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both figurative and computational “platforms” for American political participation. As COVID-19 forced many politicians to abandon massive rallies and other in-person engagement into 2020, American politicians turned to video games for alternative means of public outreach, from “Biden Island” in $2 to Twitch streams with Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. This panel contextualizes these and other “ludopolitical” phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from digital media studies to queer studies and political economy. We attend to the mass re-politicization of games and question the politics of identity, content moderation, and labour that are downloaded onto policy when party communication becomes strategically playful