About
Hello and welcome to Playing Critically, a space for those who love to play and look at games on a deeper level. I’m Lia, a PhD student at Texas Woman's University. This podcast focuses on the ways others and I play games critically, discussing their meaning and impact in our everyday and scholarly lives, and how significant it is to see how games are capable of even more than entertainment, such as how film and books are discussed today in both public and academic spaces. Each episode of the podcast will focus on analyzing one digital game (usually a short, indie game to be respectful of everyone’s time, including the host, guests, and audience) and will focus on two perspectives, mine and a guest’s as a co-host.
Guests are scholars I know or have reached out to. Each may have different research interests that can involve media other than games, but they will have one of these research interests intersect with games in some way. And each have a rich passion for looking at games with a critical lenses (ranging from cultural, race, gender, etc. representation, from feminist to queer to decolonial, and looking at rhetorical choices by the developers and the impact of them on player audiences) and bring a unique perspective to the conversation.
We’ll begin with talking about how the guest scholar came to playing games critically and considering them in their research in the present. Then we’ll discuss our most intriguing thoughts about the game with our different points of view. My perspective will always include the rhetorical choices made by the developers and the impact of those choices on player audiences, but depending on the game, I may also take a trauma studies and cultural lens to the game as well. By taking a look at how we (me and my guests’) are playing critically, I hope you will be able to explore games more deeply as players, design games with these perspectives in mind as game designers, and recognize what interdisciplinary scholars bring to the study of games as game studies scholars.
Guests are scholars I know or have reached out to. Each may have different research interests that can involve media other than games, but they will have one of these research interests intersect with games in some way. And each have a rich passion for looking at games with a critical lenses (ranging from cultural, race, gender, etc. representation, from feminist to queer to decolonial, and looking at rhetorical choices by the developers and the impact of them on player audiences) and bring a unique perspective to the conversation.
We’ll begin with talking about how the guest scholar came to playing games critically and considering them in their research in the present. Then we’ll discuss our most intriguing thoughts about the game with our different points of view. My perspective will always include the rhetorical choices made by the developers and the impact of those choices on player audiences, but depending on the game, I may also take a trauma studies and cultural lens to the game as well. By taking a look at how we (me and my guests’) are playing critically, I hope you will be able to explore games more deeply as players, design games with these perspectives in mind as game designers, and recognize what interdisciplinary scholars bring to the study of games as game studies scholars.
Playing Critically Trailer
playing_critically_trailer.mp3 |