I’m happy to share I’ll be presenting work on games beyond representation at SCMS 2025 in Chicago, thanks to panel conveners Tara Fickle and Aaron Trammell. My abstract:
“On Video Games, Representation, and Pedagogy”
This contribution theorizes a method for framing an undergraduate experience of critical video game studies. I consider the stakes of how representational concerns are often advanced in academia, and the relationship between game culture, competing methodologies in game studies, and pedagogical strategies that can open up more inclusive dynamics in the classroom. Drawing on my personal experience of teaching critical game studies in a large lecture format, I show how identity-based struggles play out in classroom dynamics. Some of these dynamics are connected to proxy debates for how the still-young canon of critical game studies should be formulated. This is deeply connected to other conversations that are identitarian in nature, and involve larger struggles for recognition. Through thinking about the role of identity in shaping everything from notions of who possesses the authority to speak and what matters about games, I demonstrate that the largest interventions in game studies may reside in many small pedagogical decisions. By interrupting unspoken presumptions about who may speak and on what topic, this contribution proposes that with intentionality it is possible to utilize pedagogy as one effective tool for changing game culture. In a larger sense, I connect social imaginaries about technology and innovation to the classroom experience of understanding games as culture, to crack open new possibilities for how we think about games and representation.
SORAYA MURRAY 