An Asynchronous Roundtable Discussion

with Alenda Chang, Tara Fickle, Gregory Grieve, and Chris Patterson

 1. How would you describe games today to the uninitiated?

Chris Patterson (CP): I tell students that games are the most important unseen or outright dismissed form of politicized and influential media today, comparing it to the ways that, only in retrospect, we can see the colonial and racializing effects of British Literature during the British empire, and the forms of imperial/militarized violences in Hollywood movies during the American empire that are still in full force today. This is also what I say plainly on the first page of Open World Empire.

A more recent way I've come to describe games is as a kind of "dark world" (ala The Legend of Zelda) or an "upside down" world (ala Stranger Things) when we compare it to the world of social and other news media. In social media, we are meant to be transparently ourselves, to bandy about subtweets that establish our social capital while attempting to navigate the perpetrator/victim binaries of our highly surveilled virtual lives. Video games, in comparison, are a kind of shadow realm. People become anonymous, untethered to profile pictures, names, and for many games, any accountability for what they say or how they say it. It is easier to hide from this other/ed world, or to dismiss it all as “play,” but we have to remember that political strategies and cultures are often practiced and refined in games before they make their marks on our “light world.” Though Twitter dominates political newsfeeds, there are only 300 million people on twitter within a month, which is less than half that of people on Dota 2 (over 700 million) or Player’s Unknown Battlegrounds (over one billion). As with social media, to play these games is to enter a highly charged political landscape, whether it is in the gameplay itself, the arguments in chat and voice, or in viewing the esports players and Twitch streamers who appeal to mass audiences on multiple platforms.

Tara Fickle (TF): Since there is such a profusion of genres and platforms of games out there, I find it most interesting to discuss games in the context of specific cultural function: for example how, in America particularly, we view games. While some social stigma about video game violence and anti-social behavior lingers from the 1990s, over the last decade, especially since the pandemic began, we find games increasingly being praised—as powerful sources of social connection between separated friends and family; as educational resources for children; as crucial forms of escape and relief from the stress and horror of contemporary life. So I would describe video games as a simultaneous source of great pleasure and great anxiety, the latter of which tend to reflect our society’s particular values and concerns at a given moment: for example, concerns about privacy, about children’s use of technology, about media representations and the work environment of entertainment industries. Video games are complex art forms and pieces of software, and big, big business—and from any of these viewpoints, they can be used to better understand the society from which they come.

Alenda Chang (AC): Although I don’t think everyone needs to play games or love them, I spend a lot of my time telling people that it’s worthwhile to pay attention to them (in my case, as a kind of cultural barometer of environmental attitudes and crisis). Of course, I could nitpick, and say I don’t need to explain games to the uninitiated, because we all know at some level about games and play. Rather, it’s video games that have arguably erected certain barriers to entry, from fiddly controllers to masculinist, geek culture. At any rate, as someone originally trained in literature and film, I do take issue with a certain cavalier disregard for video games that somehow enables people to proudly say things like “Oh, I don’t play games” or “I’ve never played a game in my life,” because if you substitute “books” or “movies” for games (“I don’t read books” or “I’ve never read a book in my life”) it’s readily apparent that a stigma still lingers around games (as Tara said).

Gregory P. Grieve (GG): By the uninitiated I take it you don’t mean that they don’t know what play is. All higher mammals play. In fact, as I write this my two dogs wrestle at my feet. Also, I assume you don’t mean that the uninitiated don’t know what games are. The archeological evidence shows people have been playing games (ruled play) for at least 5,000 years (and it is hard to imagine that people haven’t been playing games as long as people have had language and culture). Finally, I don’t think you mean videogaming per se. For, by this point in time, I cannot imagine anyone who does not at least think they know what gaming is. Around 3 billion people around the globe game, and gaming narratives, gaming logics, and gaming aesthetics, are now rooted deep into the bedrock of our current media landscape.

I take the uninitiated to mean those often skeptical, sometimes openly hostile, humanistic scholars who see videogaming as a stigmatized media practice not worthy of study in the ivory tower. By humanism I mean the qualitative study of what it means to be a person. By stigmatized knowledge I mean forms of communication not accepted by those institutions we rely upon for truth validation. To these uninitiated classical humanists, I would describe video games as the single best method of understanding what it means to be human at this time. Why? Digital media are no longer supplemental to print, but are the dominant form of communication which structures thought, culture, and society. Videogaming’s procedural and simulating elements epitomize digital media and place them at the forefront of this transformation. In other words, the winds of digital change that swept across the globe since the 1990’s have finally breezed their way into the academy and are blowing the dust off the often unexamined foundational concepts of what constitutes ideal humanistic pedagogy and research, and in so doing have made evident the importance of the study of videogaming for both the academic and non-academic worlds.

2. What do you see as your discipline’s greatest contribution to our understanding of videogames? And what do you see games studies contributing back to your field?

CP: Though I received my PhD in literature, I identify much more with a kind of cultural studies, ethnic studies, and queer theory background, which I apply to my study of games. But to begin with literature, I don’t think we’ve seen nearly enough of what literary theory can do for the study of games. Too often literary scholars engage with games on a primarily narrative and representational level, which would not be great literary scholarship were it about a novel, either. Literary theory compels us to consider the dialectical movements of genres, tropes, styles, and and yes—the rules and boundaries of texts, so why should our study of games be any different?

Open World Empire takes pretty staid concepts in literary theory, like an erotics of reading that dissects our pleasures and desires, and uses them to think through games in our moment of Information Technology and American-led empire. From there it isn’t a far leap to apply other critiques from literary theory (like the imagined binary of form and content).

Some in literary studies have done fantastic work on comparing ludo-logics to texts in terms of networks and surface reading, though again I remain concerned with how we’re seeing games as a politicized medium in reference to structures of power at multiple scales, and how they are read alongside or against other more “respectable” media, like literature.

TF: My disciplinary background is in contemporary literature and in Asian American Studies, with a secondary focus on East Asia and US-Asian relations. The contributions of an Asian/American lens to understanding videogames are immense: Asia is arguably the greatest global game hub, the “birthplace” of videogames, esports (competitive video game playing), and a huge bulk of the game development and manufacturing labor force. Centering Asianness, both as a regional and a racial category, gives us a much more complex and accurate perspective on video games as a cultural product, market, and geopolitical instrument. In turn, I’ve found game studies’ attention to games as a model for strategic conflict immensely helpful for discussing and explaining, for example, the predominance of games in Asian/American culture and literature, especially used as metaphors to describe intergenerational conflicts between immigrant parents and second-generation children; struggles to navigate the bureaucratic intricacies of the immigration system and legal vagaries; or the daily, exhausting, strategic efforts to assimilate and “pass” as “real” Americans by concealing or downplaying threatening signs of racial or cultural difference. I also find game studies very useful for developing a more complex understanding of the “soft power” forms of US-Asian relations through video games, whether Animal Crossing and Pokémon or League of Legends and Hearthstone. I discuss some of these examples in my book, The Race Card.

GG: If religious studies and game studies were on a speed date, what could they quickly learn about each other? Would this blossom into love? And would this be just a brief fling, or the foundations for a long, productive relationship? No doubt, just comparing and contrasting subject matter is worth the encounter. Like two pairs of entangled twirling doppelgängers, religious practice and play, as well as ritual and gaming, have formal similarities and intriguing ontological differences. As Johan Huizinga long ago made evident, they appear so much the same but so very much different.  

Yet, once past the initial infatuation in our content, what can the discipline of religious studies learn from game studies, and vice versa? Abstractly, like two facing mirrors (or maybe lovers’ eyes?) they reflect off each other into a horizon of meaning that gives a greater understanding of our lived world then either can alone.  Operating as a disciplinary Archimedes’ lever, this horizon of meaning can allow each to learn to critically look beyond what is close at hand—religious practice and gaming—not to look away, but to see their original subject matter in a different light. 

Concretely, religious studies can learn that ritual operates with game-like rules which depend on situation and strategy and are embedded in larger cultural hegemonies which depend not just on belief, but on power and discipline. Religious studies can also see that religious practice is not really that unique, and might in fact just be a sub-set of a larger group of fandoms. Mostly what religious studies can learn, however, is not to seek for meaning in the eternal heavens, but to look closer to home in peoples’ situated everyday lives. In my humble opinion, games studies can glean at least two things from religious studies. First, religious studies’ constant urge toward creative conceptual critique can help game studies see that, maybe, just maybe, even for all their Wittgensteinian family resemblances, there can never be a universal definition of games, not just because games’ content is historically specific, but also that any definition is itself always going to be the product of specific discursive practices. Second, and for me what is the most important, is that even if games are socially constructed, historically situated (in short, merely made up make believe), they can still act like religion to help each of us orient ourselves by making us aware of our place in the spatio-temporal order of things.

CP: I’m drawn to Tara’s sense of games “as a model for strategic conflict” and how games operate within Asian American literature to explain inter-generational (strategic) conflict. We all seem interested in questions about disciplinary cross-pollination and how games can “act” like ecological worlds, or religions. One way I’ve seen my students use games in this way is to consider how they reveal our own ways of being “gamed”—by religion, family, commodifications, exploitations, and the university itself.

One way of being “gamed” I often discuss with students is to apply the “game theory” of incel-laden pick-up artistry to institutional life, to ask the question: why do we care so much about being seen, valued, and desired by our universities, while at the same time, it’s clear that our universities are partially responsible for much of the racism, colonization and de-valuing of othered life?

In pickup artistry, there’s quite a clear gamic answer: we’re all being negged. Negging is the pickup artists’ word for a strategy that involves insulting a woman in a complimentary way, as in, “you have a cute smile, but you’ve got some smudged lipstick.” The successful “neg” gives and takes away value simultaneously, cutting at a person’s self-esteem while gaslighting them that such a cutting even took place (“I meant it as a compliment!”). This stripping of one’s self-worth goes on and on until the woman sees the pick-up artist as the sole person who can give them their own value back to them, creating a relationship of dependency and need for validation from the “artist,” resulting, ideally for the pickup artist, in sex (this game’s version of “winning”).

The comparison of negging to our own desire to be valued within the University can feel silly, disingenuous even, but once we make it, my students cannot unmake it. It’s clear our institutions, our state, our professional organizations, have a habit of tearing us down just as quickly as building us up, and then pretending as if such de-valuing never took place (“but we have so many people of color!” “we’ve overcome our racism!”). This is colonial infrastructure at its most basic. Yet understanding this within ludic terms compels us to question our own reactions and strategies that respond to the institutions that continue to game us. Perhaps, by recognizing how we’ve been so badly negged, we can seek value from institutions or friendships that actually wish to see us thrive.

AC: I love to see games being studied from all of these disciplinary angles because it’s clear that no one field can “own” the medium. Some of the most unusual combinations, like religion and games, or ecology and games, are riskier but also potentially yield more surprises.

3. With a gamer community that is as divided as it is divisive, how do you see the politics of the medium manifesting now (e.g. activism)?

CP: Games have always had activist politics tied to them, representing various queer, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and other political standpoints. It is thanks to much of mainstream media’s dismissal of games and urge to infantilize its players that games are either de-politicized in dominant discourses or are seen as merely right wing. Numerous counter-examples abound worldwide from the bans on entire game consoles in some countries, to the restrictions of sexual content in North America, to the protest games created by various resistance groups (such as during the Occupy movement in Hong Kong in 2014).

These days, #GamerGate continues to dominate discussions of “Game Culture” because it met many of the stereotypes Americans already had about gamers, and because it resonated during the #MeToo movement from the standpoint of technocracy cultures which are quite white-male centric. From our own standpoint post-Trump, #GamerGate can become a bit too present, in that it is often invoked to position the vast majority of “game culture” as essentially problematic or ideologically possessed by mainstream (or AAA) games, to instead promote alternative gaming cultures under a different genre or more “mature” canonization.

On one hand, I find indie queer, anti-racist and Indigenous games deserve far bigger audiences than they get. On the other, I grow nervous when scholars split games into some that are more or less critical, more or less worthy of thinking, which has also been a marketing gimmick for both indie games and in literary cultures writ large (pulp fiction vs. “literature”). We risk reiterating the discourses that have plagued games from the beginning—that games (even some games) are frivolous and useless and “low” in terms of thinking and civility, and that this is a bad thing. My least favorite work in game studies are those that see gamers as ideologically possessed by games, which feels infused with classist, racist, and imperial understandings of how art works. Though much of game studies (thanks in large part to Henry Jenkins) has gone beyond these claims, they are still being written, and still garner media attention because they reinforce already-held opinions of gamers.

TF: I’ve been very impressed with the political activism that has been enacted by game creators as well as game players, and the range of forms this has taken. To take one recent example, the protest movement in Hong Kong over the last several years, we’ve seen everything from casual mobile games that are sympathetic or actively hostile to the protests; immersive and virtual reality games that place the user in the perspective of an actual protester; in-game “funerals” staged by protesters in Animal Crossing; and even celebrities in the video game world using their platform to express support for Hong Kong (and the concomitant US backlash).

That said, I don’t think that games or the game industry are inherently politically progressive or “non-toxic” by any stretch of the imagination. As Chris and I found when speaking to game developers for a co-edited anthology on Asian/American gaming we are putting together, the possibility for making meaningful political statements varies radically depending on one’s position in the industry—hence why many of the developers we spoke to had opted to leave jobs within large game companies and strike out on their own as independent game makers.

AC: I think Tara and Chris have already addressed some of the political complexities of game communities and players—there’s no way to talk uniformly about all players or all games, so some people are going to experience exclusion and bigotry and sexism, and others may experience inclusion and queer and anti-racist coalition-building (or the same person could experience both). I do believe in many ways the “game industry” is relatively conservative compared to other media industries, in terms of unionization, intellectual property, work hours, and so on, in part because of the rhetoric of “passion” and “fun” that lures (mostly male) workers in and keeps them there through crunch time and successive layoffs. That said, there’s a lot to admire in new movements like Game Workers Unite and the IGDA Climate SIG (a volunteer-driven special interest group within the International Game Developers’ Association dedicated to sustainability and climate justice).

TF: I want to underscore the importance of Alenda’s point about how the obfuscating rhetoric of passion and “love of the game” is something that esports and video game industry labor has very unfortunately inherited from both the professional sports and creative industry domains. This potent combination of affect and exploitation, set against a rapidly expanding, lucrative spectator/streaming culture and “disposable” gig economy, has especially disturbing connotations for young people working broadly in the video game industry. I discuss those effects, and how the combination of economic and affective rhetoric also relies strongly on, and revives, racial and nationalist rhetoric in an East Asian context in a recent article.

GG: If we strip the word of all its bells and whistles, politics simply refers to activities used for making decisions in groups. An activist politics is one that attempts to bring about particular social or cultural change.  Videogames become politically active when they express a creativity and a critique in the face of the given order of our lived worlds. Videogaming’s expressive power comes about because you, as player, are able, by interacting and being immersed in a simulated world, to enter another’s subjectivity.  Take for instance the game Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013), in which you play as an immigration officer in the fictional dystopian Eastern Bloc-like country. Or consider the game, Darfur is Dying (Take Action Games, 2006), where you play as a displaced Darfurian who must collect water while hiding from violent militia.

Can games change the world? The hope for such serious games is that their activist expression powers fandoms into actions which flow over boundaries of a game’s magic circle, into other digital spaces, and even into the actual world.  If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said that videogames have a great untapped potential for positive progressive social transformation, or at least a bit of consciousness raising. In short, we should all game, because in the words of Dr. Seuss, “If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.” Yet, history has shown that both videogames and fun have a darker side. I now believe that we all need to rethink how videogaming works ideologically. To extend Melvin Kranzberg’s laws on technology, videogaming is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Over the last two years, I have been researching the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, which, I argue, operates both as an online game and also as a fandom. It is an activist politics. But rather than creating positive social change, QAnon has red pilled millions of Americans, transforming them into racist fascists. This hatred and racism have flooded over from the original marginal digital spaces, 4Chan and 8Chan, into more mainstream media including Reddit, Facebook and YouTube, and as we all witnessed in the January 6 insurrection, into the actual world. 

CP: Gregory’s response reminds me of a pivotal essay by Anna Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross about how #GamerGate, as a global misogynist harassment campaign, operated very much like a video game, in both its rhetoric of heroism and its methods of campaigns and dungeon-crawling.

I’m now writing this in anger because it always fumes me a bit when I think about this, because in a way, the massive politicization of games within the right and through campaigns like #GamerGate (which went on to influence the rise of Trump) is… kind of our fault. And I use the third person plural not to mean us on this roundtable, but the academic, public intellectual us. Specifically, all the people in cultural studies and critical theory who had decided, up until around 2010, that games just weren’t interesting enough politically and culturally for serious study. While cultural critics of games did exist (Nakamura, Galloway, Jenkins), they were far too few, and the vast majority of game studies hadn’t adequately developed to prepare us for the nuances of race, colonization, gender, sexuality, nationalism, language, and other markers of difference that games continue to remake through new forms of activist politics.

Much has changed in the last decade, with programs at various universities giving students the tools of game-making within critical cultural studies modes of analysis. Yet, the activists in Hong Kong who made protest video games didn’t take critical and cultural game studies courses, nor have most of the indie game developers who make activist (and activating) games. For the most part, activist games have happened not because of, but despite game studies scholarship. Today, our roles as game studies academics have become clear: advocate for activist games, critical games courses, and game-centered campus events that involve protest movements like Land Back, Black Lives Matter, and other coalition building that can and does happen in the digital worlds of games.

(See: Sarkeesian, Anita, and Katherine Cross. “Your Humanity Is in Another Castle: Terror Dreams and the Harassment of Women.” The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, 103–26. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015.)

4. What is your take on the player as a subjectivity? What does it mean to be a player today, and do you see this as distinct from a “gamer”?

CP: I’ve been playing around lately with seeing the player not as a reader or a gazer but as a troll. Yes, like the internet troll kind of troll. I’m thinking of how games ask us to troll them, to be disobedient, and how they give us forms of release embedded in being disobedient, playful, and experimental, and how such disobedience can feel so cathartic precisely because it upsets (or simulates upsetting) the over-surveilled, linguistic and affective policing of our daily lives. We are stuck in such rigid, boxed-in roles that can only get reinforced with more representations. Today, rather than a single stereotype to deal with, we marginalized people and gamers have various empowered types to choose from, except that they all present us as just that: empowered, self-making individuals, who have risen above our victimization. It’s still a very tight box that gives a slight amount of access and privilege while requiring various forms of embodied obedience.

In playing games we are often refusing to play along with certain presumptions of our narrative-driven world. The speculative author Ken Liu has this interview where he sees the act of internet trolling as an attempt to disrupt the presumptions of diversity representation that provides cultural capital to ‘the most marginalized person in the room,’ but only when they reinforce narratives of purity or victimhood back at us (and conveniently gets us to ignore the structure of the room and the exploitation it took to create it). The acts of trolling that emerge are of course cynical, nihilistic, and often very harmful if not outright destructive. Yet when we think of them dialectically, as responses to anxieties and historical movements, we can see the gamer has more in common with the troll than we realize, as they are both situated to respond to “terrible situations,” and that is not in itself a terrible thing. 

TF: I find that the majority of students in my games classes strongly disidentify with the term “gamer.” While some of this distaste has to do with the association of an anti-social, “living in mom’s basement” stereotype, far more often I hear my students demur because of a sense of inadequate expertise. Female-identified students, especially, tend to emphasize that they are “bad” at games, or “don’t know anything about them,” simply because they don’t own a console, play first-person shooters, or read gaming news. Much excellent scholarship exists discussing exclusionary gender practices in game culture and their self-reinforcing mechanisms; these clearly vary significantly across different game genres. Arguably “genre” and “player subjectivity” mean roughly the same thing: games could be defined by the feeling intentionally induced in the player, whether a sense of soothing satisfaction—where you cannot die or lose, have no time limits, do not need extreme mechanical precision—or one of high stress and competition. The latter, which encompasses competitive online games described as “toxic,” is one that perhaps stems from the games’ tendency to replicate the feeling of life itself as, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

One last thing I’ll say is that this binary between gamer/non-gamer breaks down in very interesting ways when you consider the example of professional esports players, who play video games for a living. While they may once have identified, or been identified, as gamers in terms of their high skill level and time spent on the game, once it becomes their job, can they still be called “gamers”? Even “players”?

AC: I sometimes use the terms interchangeably, although I’m well aware of the negative associations around the “gamer” identity. Player is preferable because it is more inclusive—you might not play Death Stranding but you do play pickleball or poker. In my writing, I’ve tried to get at the spirit of experimentation that unites game play and scientific work, and from there it’s not a far stretch to argue that a playful (open, expressive, innovative, iterative, multiscalar) mentality is actually much needed as we confront less than tractable problems like climate change.

GG: I use the terms subjectivity, player, gamer, and fan as etic technical jargon, a specialized terminology associated with the critical study of videogaming.  Subjectivity, the capacity to experience thoughts. feelings and sensations, forms in the gap (béance) between gameplay and a game’s rules.  For instance, in the game Monopoly subjectivity is created when you pass go and collect 200 dollars (Hasbro / Parker 1986), or in The Game of Life (Milton Bradley Company, 1960), it is formed when you choose to go to college or straight into the job world. Videogaming subjectivity emerges in the control of feedback between a player and a game’s code.  For instance, in the mission "No Russian," from the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision 2009), the player can choose to participate or not to participate in a mass shooting at a Russian airport.

AC: Wow, thanks to Gregory for making a compelling case for “gamers” being more expansive than “players,” at least in terms of paratextual behavior. I’ve always thought of it the other way round, with gamers as a subset of players because the former is associated with video games and not all games. I think Tara’s also right about most people shying away from identifying themselves as gamers, even if they game, and this brings me back to my earlier pet peeve about people (including most academics) proudly professing that they don’t play games. It’s curious to me that we don’t have a term in English for games that’s equivalent to being “well read” (or for cinema, for that matter). Well viewed? Well played? It’s hard to shake that dual sense of playing/being played that Chris has shown to be operative in pretty much all game discourse.

5. What advice would you give to people (like graduate students) interested in game studies? What new intersections could be pursued in future research?

CP: I started in game studies because I was responding to what I believed were dismissive and elitist studies of games. I never thought it possible to be a “game studies” person until I read folks like Lisa Nakamura, Adrienne Shaw, Anna Anthropy, the book Games of Empire, and the many emerging “critical game studies” authors of the past decade. Their work has helped form a solid basis for me to build from, but also so I can depart from some of their critiques, as my own experience with games (and teaching them in Asia) is vastly different than theirs, as are the discourses I’m most invested in (like transpacific studies).

In our collaborative work, Tara and I have recently been discussing how Game studies needs to grow, and we’ve felt like one way to do that now is to “infect” other disciplines, and let other disciplines infect us as well. So, write about how games change the way we practice literary theory, media studies, or sociology. Write about how games change the way we understand race, gender, queerness, or even put pressure on these terms themselves. I feel like a lot of students get stuck in the insular debates of game studies, which most disciplines are completely unaware of. “Game Studies” itself often performs its own magic circle and acts like we can and should primarily be in conversation with each other. It makes those outside the circle feel like they can’t write about games even if they play them and analyze them well, while those inside the circle become most concerned with the others inside it. I don’t want this circle, or even an expanded version of it. Just shake it up and let it pop!

TF: Don’t feel like you have to be a “gamer!” In other words, don’t let imposter syndrome—which is unfortunately a normal part of graduate school anyway—proliferate through anxieties that you don’t know “enough” about games. People who pursue graduate study in, for example, 20th century US fiction, are not expected to have read every piece of US fiction published in the 20th century, nor would such an accomplishment (if even humanly possible) automatically make you a scholar in the field. That said, do read widely. People have done incredible work putting together online game studies reading lists; make use of those resources. Read “the old stuff,” and form your own opinions about it. Submit game studies work to conferences to meet other grad students and faculty. Even if you’re well versed, be prepared to grapple with the contradictions and problematic elements of games that you once “loved”—when you start looking at games with a critical eye, you are likely to feel acutely that there may be no such thing as ethical play at all, particularly with big-name, AAA games. Don’t feel pushed into solely quantitative or solely qualitative work—recognize that both are equally valid and valuable, and that interdisciplinary and collaborative ventures are often very rewarding. If you have the ability and bandwidth for coursework, consider taking or auditing a games-related course outside of your own discipline—for example, in Computer Science, Fine Arts, or Creative Writing.

I think that future generations of graduate students are in an exciting place—some institutions still have biases against game studies as a legitimate field, but many more are embracing it. Look for such institutions when considering a fellowship or program, or use them as models when proposing your own coursework plans, reading lists, or writing projects to advisors at your current institution. 

AC: I think it’s important to contextualize one’s interest in games in terms of other media or other disciplines so that you’re trained and/or prepared to teach and do research across several areas. You have to develop a finely honed sense of why your work matters for a broader audience beyond game studies researchers. Personally, although my first book is all about games, I’ve always written primarily for an environmental humanities audience—it was many years before my writing appeared in a games journal. To me, there’s still so much “low-hanging fruit” in games research, and games themselves are changing and proliferating so rapidly that there will never be a shortage of new material. Almost every games scholar I know acts as if their research area is a neglected niche—history of games, queer games, games as ecomedia, etc.—which goes to show that there’s little dominant discourse and room to grow and shape the field.

GG: The good, the bad and the ugly duckling. The good: When it comes to graduate students interested in religion and game studies, there are now new positions opening, especially at the larger elite institutions, in religion and media. Most of these seek competence in digital religion, which can be parlayed into the study of videogaming.

The bad: As we all know, higher education, especially in the humanities, is in crisis. It is hard to forge a career let alone support a livable life. Departments of religious studies are shrinking and even closing. And if positions do open, it is the norm now rather than the exception that these are for non-tenure track lecturers or contingent faculty. 

The ugly duckling: Someone just said to me, that planning thirty days in the future is just pixie dust. I think if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, it is that we know nothing about what the future holds. So rather than trying to plan what type of academic topics will be in demand, I think it is better to be like Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling, and follow one’s own passion and curiosity. This does not mean, not to plan. It does not mean, not to strive. It does not mean, not to work hard for crating better more stable working conditions for all of those in higher education. It does mean that you should not be in the academy to seek fame and fortune, but rather to learn the crafts of teaching and research so that you can satisfy your curiosity and hopefully make a difference in the world. 

AC: I’m totally with Gregory on not pursuing what seems trendy or likely to lead to a job unless you have a real interest in the subject. I also think, both as advisors and advisees, we have an obligation to ask ourselves, “Does the world/academia/my life need more of this?” I’ve been really fortunate to have teachers and mentors throughout my education who encouraged my odd approaches with words to that effect, like “This is a really wild interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, but I like it!” or “I’ve never seen The Bluest Eye translated into binary, but we could use more stuff like this.” May you find those people who are looking to grow scholarship beyond the bounds of existing convention.

6. What are you working on now or next?

AC: I’ve been working on a few things, including a piece on cloud gaming’s carbon footprint and the infrastructures undergirding digital play (with the late Jeff Watson), and obsessing over the modeling of digital assets like 3D plants that get put into AAA games, films, and television shows.

GG: I am currently working on the project, Videogaming and the Problem of Evil which investigates how the concept of evil operates as a keystone, supporting game play, game culture, and game communities, and, also how videogaming functions as a lens by which the wider public views video games in contemporary society. The project speculates that video games can operate as potent vernacular theodicies through which players engage the problems of evil. Broadly speaking, theodicies attempt to work out the problem of evil in the world. Vernacular theodicies are diverse prosaic everyday media practices that are entrenched in popular culture, rather than in the official “high” culture.

Video Games and the Problem of Evil is significant because it enables a better understanding of the role of evil in contemporary society. To be clear: I do not hold that video games are an essentially evil medium, nor am I a digital utopian who holds that video games can save the world. More reasoned reflection, however, deflates the unwarranted hyperbole of moral panic that entraps videogaming and allows scholars to study them with a practical wisdom that sees them as thought-experiments that reveal both practical ways of being-in-the-digital-world and, also as self-knowledge about our current existential situation. 

Video Games and the Problem of Evil will add to the research on the impact of digital technologies on current society in three ways. First, video games are an integral part of American culture, and, I argue, a necessary part of any conversation on New Media, and really what it means to be human in current society. Second, the investigation brings Religious Studies’ descriptiveness and Theology’s normativity into dialogue with game studies. Third, video games tell us much about how ethics is practiced in contemporary society.  Even classic works such as Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1950 [1938]), Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1958), and D. W. Winnnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971), reveal that play and morality, as well as games and ritual, have much in common, and game studies and religious studies have much to learn from each other. 

TF: I’m continuing to expand my work on intersections between Asian/American Studies and Game Studies, with a particular focus on esports. I also am working on an archival project on Aiiieeeee!, a canonical and controversial 1974 Asian American literature anthology. Chris and I, as mentioned, have an anthology on Asian/American gaming in the works, as well as an upcoming piece that discusses the racial form and mechanics of RPGs like Mass Effect, Genshin Impact, Divinity 2.