@thechristinet
✨Retired tech model writ(h)es about the Internet (they/she) ✨TT Asst Prof @ Alberta University of the Arts ✨Researcher of digital work, play, livestreaming & the creator economy ✨PhD U of Toronto iSchool ✨ https://thechristinet.wordpress.com
CFP poster featuring WarGames reference.
STS folks, @alexross73.bsky.social & I are leading an open panel for 4S 2026 (in Toronto!) on games vs./as reactionary politics 🎮 WarGames references & re-imaginations of gamer capital galore!
Submit your 250-word abstracts via the @4sweb.bsky.social system & message us with any burning questions 🔥
Elbows up! Protecting Canadian sovereignty by gutting the last handful of functional national institutions we have left.
It’s an in-person only panel, but we’ll see about consent for recording and posting after! Submit and see!
In his Manifesto for the Ludic Century, Eric Zimmerman (2004) positioned games as the defining, archetypal media of the 21st century. This was because of their ability to engage people with systems in new and playful ways. He writes: "As more people play more deeply in the Ludic Century, the lines will become more blurred between game player and game designer." Unfortunately, this gamified blurring of player/designer has been called upon to support systems of extraction, exclusion, and control. These problematics are not new as the formal cultures of digital and analog games have long participated in exclusions based on race and gender (Fickle, 2022; Trammell 2023), and monopolized ludic economics grounded in "precarious playbour" (Kucklich, 2005). These trends have been further intensified through reactionary technopolitics and platform power. We can see it in the troubling insertions of gamified and gamblified logics into news media through Polymarket. Elon Musk's consolidation of GamerGate's "toxic technoculture" (Massanari, 2014) and demand for visibility (Hewa & Tran, 2023) on Twitter/X into gamified, misogynistic harassment through its GrokAl. Simultaneously, digital workers, creators, and audiences alike are called to play games structured by capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other oppressive systems that overdetermine who has real agency or power. These problematic playsites have also emerged as fields of contestation and alterity, from trans and queer speedrunning leagues (Brewer, 2023) to multiplatform networks for Black feminist resistance to toxic technoculture that provides its own grammar of play (Gray, 2020; Fletcher, 2022). Thus, we ask how we can use games to speculate on or build better futures separate from systems
Our panel aims to encourage a multidisciplinary approach, and we will ask for contributions from STS, game studies, platform studies, media studies/media theory, political economy, creator studies, feminist media analysis, decolonizing play, and other critical approaches. Games are highly integrated into life, work, and leisure, and many are called upon, against their will, to become players. Rather than celebrating the masterful player/designer of games, our panel wants to aim to better critique how games move through, within, and are supported by technoscience and technopolitics. We will be conducting this session with a traditional academic panel format. However, our call will ask for shorter paper contributions to leave more room for question and answer sessions and dialogue with the audience. The contribution of our panel is to not only make visible how some of the more problematic logics of games and play support sociotechnical systems of control, but also how forms of resistance, refusal, disruption, and disentanglement from these systems could be enacted. It is not enough to study games as they are, but to push game (and game studies) into new questions and horizons. We want to focus on research that pushes the boundaries of how we conceptualize game studies as a field. Our panel aims to untangle the often messy relationships between players, designers, and systems to imagine better futures for people and communities rather than just a better future for games. GAME OVER More questions? Reach out to: Alexander Ross, University of British Columbia alexander.ross@ubc.ca Or Christine H. Tran, Alberta University of the Arts christine.tran@auarts.ca
CFP details below:
CFP poster featuring WarGames reference.
STS folks, @alexross73.bsky.social & I are leading an open panel for 4S 2026 (in Toronto!) on games vs./as reactionary politics 🎮 WarGames references & re-imaginations of gamer capital galore!
Submit your 250-word abstracts via the @4sweb.bsky.social system & message us with any burning questions 🔥
The UX of [insert anything here] is meant to enclose your usership 1st & aggregate more folks like you 2nd. If you happen to execute a task smoothly, that's a pleasant and tertiary little accident.
The UX of [insert anything here] is meant to enclose your usership 1st & aggregate more folks like you 2nd. If you happen to execute a task smoothly, that's a pleasant and tertiary little accident.
What's it like to envision yourself as a fleshy, asymmetrical conveyor belt waiting for the world to impress itself upon you, BUT ALSO smugly talk about that inertia as a superior form of lifehacking that elevates you above the busyworkers below?
"I'm an artist/creator, not a writer. So it's fine if ChatGPT finishes up for me." Hey, what's it like to disbelieve you're the protagonist of your own life?
Can't fuckin' believe I'm doing this but here goes: Twitter is a mind prison, a true jail of career advancement. I stopped posting on there and within months I became the CEO of The Onion and I'm not kidding. Went back on last year, felt worse, then left again.
The I abandoned my boy scene from There Will Be Blood.
Sidney Crosby rn:
Kent Brockman before a mugshot of the Queen: “The queen will be held without bail until the samples are returned.”
Kent Brockman before a mugshot of the Queen: “The queen will be held without bail until the samples are returned.”
How it sounds when someone says they can do a PhD in an afternoon with the power of AI
Data labeling is notoriously brutal and underpaid work. Workers sometimes earn as little as a few dollars a day, work under algorithmic management, and, because they’re sometimes trying to train AI what not to do or show, they are often shown graphic, violent, or sexual content for hours at a time.
Finishing the slides for next week. Meet the girls:
Homer Simpson’s with his brain poking out the back of his skull.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (1x05)
Gwin Ashford from A Knight of the Seven Kingdom, which everyone just calls Dunk & Egg.
She just wanted a Tayloress Swyft friendship bracelet weaving hangout for her birthday & her dad turned it into a province-bankrupting, three-person casualty networking event for his work colleagues.
Finishing the slides for next week. Meet the girls:
the computer storage freak has logged on
💾The Games & Storage special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication is officially out!
📚Thanks to editors @nickttaylor.bsky.social, @thechristinet.bsky.social, and Robyn Hope for putting this together.
📡Be sure to check out my article on Satellaview restoration, 𝘚𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘦𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘦𝘴!
From 2020, but @cfarivar.bsky.social did a great piece on the lack of evidence that these things cut down on crime. Note that this is what police said!
Dell has been on this beat since the very beginning and points out a thing often missed: the cost to all of us for Amazon’s loss prevention strategy is a nationwide surveillance network.
Anger is no longer working as a secondary emotion! There is only the incapacity of pain!! Oh noooooo
And may I once again echo something I wrote back in September following the death of Charlie Kirk
"Nothing good will come of this ... We now have to live in fear that this violent incident will further galvanize the wrong people."
xtramagazine.com/power/politi...
No Kings includes Draft Kings
Headline: My Favorite Actress Is Not Human Tilly Norwood doesn't need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That's because she's Al. By Tyler Cowen 10.02.25 - Tyler Cowen Must Know
Still haunted by this:
Tilly Norwood the AI "actress."
Has anybody followed up on this "gamechanging" technology? After all those headlines? How many film & TV roles has she signed so far? Is it So Joever for women actors yet?
