The past two months there’s been a lot on my plate. Between teaching, co-curating an event, various writing projects, and being very, very sick, I’ve had little time for other commitments. But at the forefront of my mind has been scholarship applications. In October, I handed in two applications — one for FQRSC at the Read More
The remainder of the Waterloo IMMERSe postdoc presentations detailed what’s been going on in the affiliate universities for the past year, as well as what the different institutions have coming down the pipeline. After Amanda gave her talk rife with potential connections and overlaps with our work, I got up and made the connections clear Read More
The Postdoc Day IMMERSe event at U Waterloo last week gave me a chance to present in front of and listen to presentations from games scholars doing work all over the network’s six schools. As I mentioned in my last weeknote, the meeting was not something I was originally meant to present at–I was sent Read More
Last week, I was called over to the University of Waterloo for a kind of IMMERSe summit. The IMMERSe Postdoc Day was meant to be for the network’s outgoing postdoc (our own Rob Gallagher) and incoming postdocs (Amanda Phillips at UC Davis and Rob Teather (McMaster) to give a summary of the work either done Read More
As my dissertation slowly begins to take a hazy shape (somewhere far off in the future, it sometimes feels), I’ve been turning my thinking and energy towards the geographic. There are all sorts of ways to assert this descriptor that interest me and stimulate thinking about media. There’s imaginary geography (Said’s concept of those perceived Read More
While CGSA brought us a number of great insights, we quickly redirected our energies toward working together on another conference presentation, this time for the Game History annual symposium here in Montreal. This paper, “A History of Happy Accidents, or Who Wrote The Elder Scrolls?”, stepped back and took a broad view of the history of Read More
As the first year of IMMERSe begins to wind down and Year 2 lies on the horizon, it seems like a good time to reflect a bit on what our node has been up to–at least, the aspects I can speak to directly. As I’ve written about on this site before, the Skyrim mods project began Read More
In one of her later essays, Eve Sedgwick (2012) muses ‘sometimes I think the books that affect us most are… the books we know about – from their titles, from reading reviews, or hearing people talk about them – but haven’t, over a period of time, actually read’ (123). Unread, these books can remain ‘objects Read More
As part of the IMMERSe research I’m currently involved in, our team has been spending time lately examining mods for the Bethesda Elder Scrolls game Skyrim. Mods are (generally) user generated content for commercially produced and distributed games, and can alter anything from the realism of how light reflects off of surfaces in the game Read More
‘One can set out by refusing speech, or by making speech the province of the weak, of women, of powerless characters who speak because they can’t act.’ (Chion, 2009, 327). As with the motion picture and, perhaps more pertinently, the animated cartoon, the move to voice acting in videogames introduced both new possibilities and new Read More