Videogames reading group and workshop, with Dr Rob Gallagher (KCL)

This workshop will explore videogames via discussion of three (very) short texts:

• David Sudnow (1983). ‘Memory’ from Pilgrim in the Microworld. New York: Warner Books.
• Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux (2017). ‘All the Categories are Arbitrary: Speedrunning The Legend of Zelda’ from Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis: Minnesota.
• Kathryn Bond Stockton (2017). ‘If Queer Children Were a Videogame’. In Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (eds.), Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis: Minnesota.

Links to these texts will be circulated by email. Read them in advance if you get a chance, but feel free to come along if you don't. If you do get through them, you might want to start thinking about these questions:

1. How do these texts frame the relationship between the player's body and the game?
2. How do videogames become vehicles for optimism and pessimism, anticipation, anxiety and nostalgia here?
3. How do the authors interweave the timeframe of the individual biography with other rhythms and durations (like the decades-long history of the videogame industry, the cyclical tempo of biological and technological generations, the millisecond-level pace of computation or the geological lifespan of non-biodegradable e-waste)?