On Monday, September 18, my colleague Velian Pandeliev and I will be leading the first event in the Faculty of Information’s Crosstalk series: a set of informal public lectures organized by Matt Ratto, offered in connection with our PhD program, and designed to bring iSchool faculty from different disciplines together to discuss a shared topic. Our topic is video games, which I approach from an historical perspective and Velian approaches from a design perspective, though we share many of the same interests. Like other cultural artifacts, video games cannot be understood from any single disciplinary perspective. A designer may see an opportunity to create a tool that influences the world around them, an historian may see an artifact that embodies the forces that shaped it, and players inevitably make their own meanings. In this crosstalk, we will consider how historical and design approaches both complement and challenge each other, and what we can learn about multi-/interdisciplinary scholarship as we shift our own perspectives.
Details for this and other events in the Crosstalk series can be found in the PDF posted above. It’s open to the public, but the organizers are asking that attendees register in advance: https://forms.office.com/r/NXKuDEGH9k.
Ahead of the talk, the PhD students will be reading a couple of our recent publications, which I’ll share here for anyone else who might be interested:
- Velian Pandeliev, Alireza A. Namanloo, Kelly Lyons, Michael Bliemel, and Hossam Ali-Hassan, “A Serious Game for Teaching Data Literacy,” 2022 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM), https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10017613
- Alan Galey, “Behind the Scenes at ApertureScience.com: Portal and Its Paratexts,” Games and Culture 18, no. 4 (2023): 498–523 [open-access version: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15554120221106927]
During the talk, we’ll be mentioning some links which I’ve gathered together here for convenience:
- a special issue of Games and Culture I’ve edited on “Video Games and Paratextuality” in which my Portal article appears: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/gac/special-issues/video-games-paratextuality (note: this special issue just came out, and not all of these articles are open-access yet; I’m working on this)
- my co-authored chapter with Ellen Forget, “Video Games with Footnotes: Understanding In-Game Developer Commentary,” in (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games, edited by Ed Vollans and Regina Seiwald (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 139–159 [open-access version of our chapter: https://hdl.handle.net/1807/129351]
- on Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist “Am I not a man and a brother?” image from 1787, which appears in the 2013 videogame Bioshock Infinite:
- 1837 broadside of John Greeenleaf Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains,” printed by the American Anti-Slavery Society: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661312/
- Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-Century Design,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 2 (2000), 93–105
- Cyra Levenson, Chi-Ming Yang, and Ken Gonzalez-Day, “Haptic Blackness: the Double Life of an 18th-Century Bust,” British Art Studies 1 (2015): https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-01/harwood/p26
- 1837 broadside of John Greeenleaf Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains,” printed by the American Anti-Slavery Society: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661312/
- working versions of the ApertureScience.com website, originally launched in 2006 using Flash to simulate a DOS-style command-prompt inteface, emulated here by the good folks at the Valve Archive: https://valvearchive.com/web_archive/aperturescience.com/
- fan documentation of the ApertureScience.com website at the Half-Life wiki on Fandom.com: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/ApertureScience.com
The Veil of Code 