News/Research

BCNM Around the Web March 2021

15 Mar, 2021

BCNM Around the Web March 2021

Check out the amazing work of our alumni around the web this March!

Jane McGonigal

Jane recently gave a keynote speech at The Tinderbox PlayAway Game Festival, which was a festival in which "over thirty game designers, artists, composers, educators will convene for a series of panel discussions, workshops, demostrations, music performances, digital play sessions and game jams."

Get more information about the festival and its line-up here!

Bo Ruberg

Bo recently hosted a seminar by The Sussex Humanities Lab and the Sussex Centre for Sexual Dissidence with Amanda Phillips titled "Reality is Radical: Queer, Avant-Garde, and Utopian Gaming," discussing "the politics of contemporary games."

From the seminar description:

So what are the politics of contemporary gameplay and game-making? Do games have a part to play in the framing and pursuit of social justice? What might it mean for design and play practices to be queer, speculative, utopian, and/or avant-garde? What kinds of normativities, performativities, and ludic affordances circulate in and around game cultures? And what happens when the often rule-constituted realm of games collides with queer studies and queer activism, and with the desire to question so many of the dominant rules of reality?

Learn more here!

Bo also spoke at a virtual event hosted by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and the 370 Jay Project titled "Co-Opting AI: Games."

From the description:

This event will explore the deep historical and cultural links between games and technology, and specifically artificial intelligence. Featuring Kishonna L. Gray, Bo Ruberg, Julian Togelius, and Mona Sloane, the discussions will examine how games serve as a frontier of AI research, but also what – and whose – narratives shape “technological innovation” and “progress”, how this is connected to gaming cultures (or not), and how it is linked to wider structures of power and oppression.

Learn more about the event here!

Additionally, Bo was recently mentioned in a WIRED article on video games and gender expression.

From the article:

Bo Ruberg, an assistant professor in film and media studies at UC Irvine, literally wrote the book on queer games. The Queer Games Avant-Garde is the natural result of The Queerness and Games Conference, which Ruberg first organized with friends in 2013. The conference goes beyond the academic and explicitly puts the people who study games and the people who make them in a queer context. Their book is a series of interviews with queer video game designers, the kind of people who create the strange and quirky games they love the most.

Read the entire article here!

Lastly, Bo was featured in a Bitch Media article on queerness and video games.

From the article:

“We can think about queerness in relation to games in a way that goes beyond representation,” says Bonnie Ruberg, author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (2020). “You would miss so much of what was interesting if you only looked at the characters. The words, the cuts, the art.” Ruberg says that games, like literature, can be read through a queer lens, and perhaps more essentially, played in ways that are queer.

Read the rest of the article here!

Reginold Royston

Reginold recently took part in a virtual roundtable discussion titled “Digital African Diasporas.”

Learn more about the event here!

Trevor Paglen

Trevor was recently featured in a Neural article about his recent project "Octopus."

From the article:

Trevor Paglen has used his “Bloom” exhibition at Pace Gallery as a platform to integrate a further virtual work. “Octopus” allows online visitors not only to experience the exhibition, using a portal connected with different cameras through which it is possible to see both the artworks and present visitors, but it also allows for remote ‘presence’. Authorising their personal webcam to be streamed into the gallery, faraway visitors appear on specific monitors distributed throughout the space.

Read the entire article here!