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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">Hello empyre and guests. I’ve been a lurker for a few months, but I
would like to join this conversation about games and representation because it
directly relates to the kinds of questions I am asking in my research around
video games and affect.<o:p class=""></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">Jen Malkowski’s
excellent questions: “Do you perceive that the analysis of representation in
games (which, of course, has a history) is a somewhat/sometimes maligned pursuit
in Video Game Studies right now? If so, what do we make of that resistance?”</p><p class="BodyA" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><o:p class=""></o:p></p><p class="BodyA" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt">My sense
of the first issue is that yes, the analysis of representation in game studies
is a somewhat maligned pursuit right now. But I would qualify that by saying 1)
I think a narrow focus on representation in any media is a limited approach
that can be enriched with other types approaches, and 2) That being said, the
reasons that game studies tends to malign representation as a critical approach
has a particular history that I find problematic for people like myself, and
others here, who are interested in analyzing how gender, sexuality, and race
operate in games.</p><p class="BodyA" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><o:p class=""></o:p></p><p class="BodyA" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt">What do I
make of the resistance to representation? Partly, I think it comes from game
scholars needing to push back against the long shadow of “media effects” and
the idea that video games are corrupting influences. It’s easier to avoid the
hard questions about violence, for example, if you skip over things like
narrative and images to focus instead on platforms and code. More
significantly, though, I think it is an after effect of the “ludology/narratology
debates”, which to me were never so much about narrative per se, but about the
status of images and representation in games and what is perceived to
constitute the proper object of game studies. Though we’ve thankfully abandoned
this argument, it left its mark on the field in an odd separation between
approaches that focus on computation and approaches that focus on
representation. Recently though, more and more work addresses and redresses
this divide.</p><p class="BodyA" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><o:p class=""></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><o:p class=""> </o:p>A bit about my work: My
current book project puts theories of affect in direct conversation with video
games. Doing so, I argue, constructs a conceptual bridge between the
computational and representational divide in game studies (critical code
studies, software studies, platform studies on one side and approaches
interested in aesthetics, audiences/users, narrative, etc. on the other) and
zeroes in on the contact zones between bodies, platforms, images, and code to
redress the atomization of these approaches in game studies.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:
none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">Looking forward to
following this conversation as it develops.</p><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Aubrey</div><div class=""><br class=""></div>
<!--EndFragment--><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Aubrey Anable<br class="">Cinema Studies Institute<br class="">University of Toronto<br class="">2 Sussex Ave.<br class="">Toronto, ON M5S 1J5<br class=""><br class="">(647) 997-0570<br class=""><a href="mailto:aubrey.anable@utoronto.ca" class="">aubrey.anable@utoronto.ca</a><br class=""><br class=""><br class="">
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