Tag: Sartre

Out Now: Gaming and the “Parergodic” Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments

Recently, at long last, the 2020 edition of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, a special issue “On the Philosophy of Computer Games,” came out — followed immediately by the 2021 issue, so you might have missed it!

Included, among other things, is my article “Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments,” which begins the work of reading seriality in a double register, as both a medial and a social phenomenon (following Sartre’s late work in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, among others).

Be sure also to check out Doug Stark’s excellent “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy”!

Gender, Seriality, Mediality

I have had the good fortune to be a Faculty Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research over the past academic year, which has given me an opportunity to work on a new project that thinks about serialization in digital cultures as a vector of change. The larger project takes off from Sartre’s concept of “seriality” (as developed in his late Critique of Dialectical Reason) and connects it to forms of serialized media in order to think about reconfigurations of class, gender, and race. Back in March, I presented some of the work pertaining to gender and embodiment to my colleagues at the Clayman, and they have now posted a short write-up about it. Here’s the (controversial) crux:

Also enjoy this image that I used to illustrate my talk!