This episode we speak with Dr Brendan Keogh, discussing his new book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545402/the-videogame-industry-does-not-exist/). It is the final part of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchang…

This episode we speak with Dr. Xavier Ho, discussing his data visualisation and design research, as well as the curation process of the thoughtful queer indie games exhibition ‘Pride at Play’ (https://prideatplay.org/). It is part 5 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australi…

This episode we speak with Dr. Stephanie Harkin, discussing the concept of “techno-femininity” from her award winning PhD Thesis (2022) Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity, and Coming of Age in Videogames. You can read her PhD here: https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/86788440-fcec-420a-8df1-b7c35f976066/1/stephanie_harkin_thesis.pdf, follow he…

This episode we speak with Dr. Felania Liu. The episode is part 3 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Dr Felania …

This episode we speak with Dr. Tingting Liu, discussing her research as a cultural anthropologist examining digital intimacies, gender, platforms and gaming in China. It is part 2 of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been as…

This episode marks the beginning of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This episode we speak with Dr. Gejun Huang. …

This epsiode we speak with Florence Smith-Nicholls about the paper "The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10949. Florence is a game AI PhD researcher based in London. They also work as a Story Tech, a member of the writers' room at the indie studio Die Gute Fabrik. Building on their background as an archaeo…

This episode we are doing something a little bit different - interviewing a group of scholars about their Call for Papers on "The Post-Gamer Turn", which can be found here: https://postgamerturn.wordpress.com/ . Abstract submissions of 500-800 words are due on November 30th 2022. We discuss with Mahli-Ann Butt, Amanda Cote, Emil Lunedal Hammar and …

Everest Pipkin is a writer, game developer and software artist from Central Texas whose work follows themes of ecology, information theory, and system collapse. As an artist and as a theorist, they fundamentally believe in the liberatory capacity of care; care not as an abstract emotion but rather as a powerful force that motivates collective work …

Alesha Serada is a PhD student and a researcher at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Their dissertation, supported by the Nissi Foundation, discusses construction of value in games and art on blockchain. Inspired by their Belarusian origin, their research interests revolve around exploitation, violence, horror, deception and other banal and non-ban…

In this episode we talk with Gregory Whistance-Smith, an independent scholar based in Edmonton, Canada. The discussion focuses on the book "Expressive Space: Embodying Meaning in Video Game Environments" https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110723731/html?lang=en Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering n…

Jaroslav Švelch is an assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the recent monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published work on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, a…

In this episode we speak with Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans on paratexts and their forthcoming collaboration "Not in the Game: History, Paratext and Games", soon to be published with De Gruyter. Regina Seiwald is highly interested in the relationship between literary theory and narratology across the languages. Her focus thereby lies with the Anglo…

Esther Wright is Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University. Her work is situated within the field of Historical Game Studies, critically examining how digital representations of the past found in popular visual media have the potential to shape public understandings of history. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Warwick in August 2019, i…

April Tyack is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University and vice-president of DiGRA Australia. April researches player experience and how games facilitate different types of experiences. In this episode, April discusses the paper Off-Peak: An Examination of Ordinary Player Experience (2021), published with Elisa D. Mekler. The paper critiques …

This episode we speak with Felan Parker about his work on cultural intermediaries and indie games. Felan is Assistant Professor of Book & Media Studies at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, and a scholar of media industries and cultures specializing in games, digital media, and film. His ongoing research, supported from 2016-2019 b…

This episode we speak with Leon Xiao about the paper "What are the odds? Lower compliance with Western loot box probability disclosure industry self-regulation than Chinese legal regulation", co-authored with Laura Henderson and Philip Newall. This empirical study of loot boxes and probability disclosure is (as of this interview) a preprint and hen…

This episode we speak with Adrienne Shaw about the paper "Encoding and decoding affordances: Stuart Hall and interactive media technologies". This paper brings Stuart Hall's concepts of encoding and decoding into proximity with ideas of affordance and technology. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443717692741 Adrienne Shaw is an Asso…

This episode we speak with Alenda Y. Chang about games, ecology, literature, and environmental relations. Alenda is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media. Her wri…

This episode we talk with Aaron Trammell about challenging canonical thinkers, race, torture and TTRPGs, with special reference to his open-access piece "Torture, Play and the Black Experience" https://www.gamejournal.it/torture-play/. Aaron is Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how D…

Víctor Navarro-Remesal is a media scholar specialized in games. He teaches History of Videogames and Interactive Narrative at Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Game Design at UOC. He’s the author of ‘Libertad dirigida: Una gramática del análisis y diseño de videojuegos’ (Shangrila, 2016) and ‘Cine Ludens: 50 diálogos entre el juego y el ci…

C. Thi Nguyen is a former food writer, now a philosophy professor at University of Utah. He writes about trust, art, games, and communities, and is interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. His first book is Games: Agency as Art. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the me…

This episode's guest is Sonia Fizek, to discuss a forthcoming book on 'delegated' and 'interpassive' play. Sonia is a digital wanderer and a ludic thinker. On a more formal note, a professor at Cologne Game Lab in media and game studies and a co-editor in chief of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Previously a lecturer at Abertay University…

This episode we speak with Lindsay Grace about love and affection in games. Lindsay is Knight Chair in Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance and the 2019 recipient of the Games for Change Vanguard award. Lindsay's book, Doing…

This episode we speak with Mal Abbas, an independent game designer, artist and producer working on experimental and meaningful games. Malath established Scotland's first game collective and co-working space Biome Collective, a diverse, inclusive melting pot of technology, art and culture for people who want to create, collaborate and explore games,…

This episode we speak with Dr Jamie Woodcock. Jamie is a researcher based in London. He is the author of The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working The Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is inspired by the workers' inquiry. His research focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organisin…

This episode we have a departure from academia; a different approach to the creation and transmission of knowledge. We interview Eli Smith, Traditional Music Consultant for Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2. In our first COVID-19 recording (you may hear some sirens), we discuss the American music archive both as living tradition and recording t…

“Keywords in Play” is an interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audie…

In this episode we speak with Bo Ruberg, who is Assistant Professor at UC Irvine in Film & Media. Their interdisciplinary research crosses media studies, queer studies, the Digital Humanities, cultural studies, and an engagement with computational fields. From 2015-2017, Bo served as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Interactive Media & Games…

“Keywords in Play” is a monthly interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wide…

“Keywords in Play” is an interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audie…

Last minisode of the year for the Critical Distance Confab. I tried to think of a theme, but really it's just two indie games worthy of some attention and love. Angelina Bonilla aka Red Angel co-hosts with me this month. We've been able to bring the minisodes back thanks to our listeners' support on Patreon. To help us to add more new features to t…

This month on the Critical Distance Confab, Angelina Bonilla better known as Red Angel was kind enough to come on. Red Angel started off as a writer for online publications. However, after some time there, she wanted to for a while to turn her efforts to video. Ignorant of the wider YouTube critical community, she just started her channel. She bega…

I'm not dead, the minisodes are back, back from the dead that is, on the Critical Distance Confab. In the spirit of October, we bring you another minisode installment on horror games. Co-hosting with me this month is my podcast associate from PopMatters, Nick Dinicola. In case you don't know, the purpose here is to highlight some games we feel aren…

This month on the Critical Distance Confab we welcome Alex Carlson from the YouTube channel PostMesmeric. Alex Carlson is a relative newbie to the world of YouTube video game criticism. He had some experience with written criticism, most notably on Hardcore Gaming 101, but transferred over when he was introduced to the idea that YouTube could be us…

This month on the Critical Distance Confab, all the way from New Zealand, is YouTuber Mitch Cramer. Mitch Cramer, aka HeavyEyed, is a relatively new to the world of YouTube video game criticism. Starting off as a band manager, he moved away from that to put some video production skills to use. He started a channel and steadily plucked away at it un…

After a year long hiatus, the minisodes are back on the Critical Distance Confab. In case you missed them the first time around, the idea behind these minisodes is for myself and a co-host to highlight some games that haven't gotten a lot of criticism or much attention at all. The hope is that one of you intrepid listeners will try one of them out …

Joining me for this month's interview is author of actual books and YouTube critic Joseph Anderson. Starting from a desire to build up his online presence to attract a book agent, Joseph Anderson decided to create some YouTube videos to release himself of some "petty gripes" he had regarding the Dark Souls vs. Dark Souls 2 debate. He felt that a lo…

I managed to snag critic, rhetorician and YouTube vaudevillian Harry Brewis, more commonly known as Hbomberguy for this month's interview. Mr. Hbomberguy is a bit of an odd duck with regards to YouTube games criticism. He first came to internet prominence through his videos of ridiculing internet dumbasses and that work forms a clear line regarding…

Freshly back from E3, YouTuber Hamish Black, the man behind the Writing on Games channel, sat down with me for this month's interview. Nearly two years ago exactly, Hamish Black took the plunge and began making critical YouTube videos. He began by tying the academic work he learned at university to video games. However, he soon found his formula a …

With this interview, we move away from YouTube for the moment to talk with Philip Jones, the director of the 2015 documentary Gaming in Color. The documentary started with an intent to focus on the then-new Gaymer X convention. But as the original crew fell away due to lack of funding, Philip Jones and others picked up where they left off and expan…

This month I interview YouTuber Kevin John, also known as Cagey. Cagey is a small time YouTube essayist, a jolly old soul from Scotland. From writing at fan sites he struck out on his own with his own YouTube channel. His output is much shorter than many of the other people we've featured here as he prefers concise arguments. We discuss his worship…

In this episode, I interview the newly crowned Critical Distance 2016 Journalist of the Year, Heather Alexandra. Each new interviewee seems to bring some new aspect to the video criticism form. Heather Alexandra instead of jumping straight into video essays, began with the longer form of Let's Play, but with a critical bent. From there she continue…

Our first interview of 2017 is with Great Levels in Gaming YouTube producer Max Barnyard. Like our previous interviewee, Max Barnyard focuses his criticism on specific elements of video games; in this case, the construction and purpose of exemplary level design. video games. But what is a level in a contemporary video games? We discuss that questio…

We end this year of interviews with Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit. Mark Brown went a different direction with his video based video game criticism. Instead of interviews, opinion shows or holistic game examinations, he devoted his channel to the exploration of craftsmanship in video games. Devoting his energy to explaining a singular thing in …

Continuing on with our series of video in video game criticism, this month, I have Sam Gronseth, the Game Professor of the YouTube channel Games as Literature, on to talk. Sam Gronseth taught a class to teach literary analysis using video games instead of novels or short stories for several charter schools. He then turned those lesson plans into a …

Somewhat late, we present this month's interview of the Critical Distance Confab! I interview Ian Danskin of the Innuendo Studios YouTube channel. In 2014, Ian Danskin made his first YouTube video about celebrity in internet culture, This is Phil Fish, and what that means. He expected a few views and he would build his audience over time, except th…

We are back with another interview on the Critical Distance Confab! This month we are joined by Bob Whitaker, associate professor in Modern History at Louisiana Tech University and founder of History Respawned. In 2013, he started the YouTube channel by looking at video games from a historical perspective. Not content to focus only on games portray…

Welcome back for another interview on the Critical Distance Confab! This month our guest is Noah Caldwell-Gervais, a video maker who is skilled at creating richly layered arguments. He started making long-form video essays on games in 2013 with a thorough look at the Fallout series. Since then he has been applying his critical lens in videos that e…

The good, the bad and the ugly with the Critical Distance Confab. For those who don't know, the idea behind these minisodes is for myself and a co-host to highlight 3 games each. These are games that haven't gotten a lot of criticism or much attention at all. The hope is that one of you intrepid listeners will try one of them out and write about it…