2024 Conference Round Up Review

Time is flying by at an excessive rate, and conference “season” (if such a thing exists) is coming firmly into view. I’m (co-)running two at Birmingham City University in 2025 – in May, Nick Webber and I are chairing the British chapter of the Digital Games Research Association’s (DiGRA) conference, and in June Matt Grimes are I are convening the Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities conference for the BCMCR theme. I was also Track Chair, with Renata Ntelia, for the Philosophy and Theory of Play track for DiGRA 2025, which will be held in Malta in July. It has been a fantastic experience to see the high quality submissions and original ideas circulating in the field.

I want, though, to reflect on my 2024 conference presentations, and share some of the ideas I’ve been developing. It goes without saying that these conferences all had excellent presentations from others, and offered fantastic networking opportunities.

I had many opportunities to share my research last year, across various conferences and invited talks – including my first keynote! Broadly, these presentations all covered my research specialisms of critical posthumanism and videogames, and I was able to talk about this work, and my 2023 book, Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers and Entangled Subjectivities, in my lecture for the Association for Cultural Studies, ‘Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements’. I discussed my research for that project, the way I work with critical posthumanism, and how I applied it to my autoethnography project exploring my relationship with my avatar, Etyme, in World of Warcraft.

I also reflected on Etyme in ‘Lifecycle of an Avatar: Shared Histories of Affective Experience’, at the History of Games 2024 conference here at BCU, chaired by me, Alex Wade and Nick Webber. Returning to my WoW autoethnography, I considered how the lifecycle I went through with my avatar, including moments of newness, noobness, “adolescence”, and feelings of pride in my growth, could be considered from a perspective of historical meaning-making.

Other conference opportunities allowed me to explore some of my newer work. ‘Playing like a (posthuman) girl: Gender, empathy, and issues of representation and performance’, my keynote for the University of Oxford’s inaugural Inclusive Gaming conference, brought together several different game experiences and publications exploring gendered experiences of play. Alongside a brief mention of my World of Warcraft days, I shared my analysis and experiences of Beyond Good and Evil (2003), and Control (2019). I’ve written about Beyond Good and Evil at length, and for this presentation I drew on my work on Jade, the protagonist, as a (posthuman) tomboy. Jade is a woman who has meaningful, non-romantic relationships with male (not always human!) characters, who fights (literally) for her friends and family, and who is generous with her affection and her wit. Control features Jesse Faden, another fantastic portrayal of a woman, and I’ve examined Jesse’s gender, the gendered expectations of the workplace, how these are evident in the Federal Bureau of Control, and how this affects her as Director of the Bureau. From malicious, gossipy NPCs to incompetent workers she has to assist, Jesse experiences some of the many issues contemporary women face in work today. Plus, she has to deal with an interdimensional invasion. My papers on these videogames argue for the importance of complex portrayals of gender, and the significance this has for those who play these games. However, I also urged caution in crafting these tales, given concerns over so-called empathy games, and the problems of identity tourism in play.

Staying with Control, over the summer I was invited to talk at The Digital Humanities Students Association at Shiraz University, Iran. My paper, ‘Jesse-Player-Polaris – posthuman subjectivities and postdualism in Control’ explore the posthumanism evident in the game in more depth, discussing intra-action, entanglement, and the instability of self. I extended this further at the Engaging the Contemporary conference in Turin, presenting ‘Who’s in Control?: Posthuman subjectivities and feminist resistance in videogaming’. These talks allowed me to build on my existing writing, and begin to shape a new chapter integrating further analysis.

From Control, we move to the realm of imagination and the (non-human) other. One of my favourite “recent” videogames is BlueTwelve Studio’s Stray, where you play as a cat, and it was a great pleasure to present twice on it last year. Imagining Extinction in Video Games: An International Symposium, hosted online by University of Porto, heard some early work on ‘Post-apocalyptic negotiations of Stray:  Imagining human extinction through the eyes of a cat’, ideas that I extended this into my  paper ‘A Stray Autoethnography: Becoming-animal, or Anthropomorphic Humanism?’ at DiGRA 2024, in Guadalajara, Mexico. This paper asked how posthuman a becoming-animal experience can be if it relies on the primacy of the human, and human emotions, for affective exploitation, arguing that Stray has both posthuman promise and problems. I’ll be picking up this work in future publications. I continued the non-human theme – this time with zombies – in my co-authored piece with Will McKeown, entitled ‘Playgrounds of Authority: Space, Power, and Agency in Dying Light’. Here we explored the rhizomatic and arborescent elements of space and power in the game, and how this related to the agency the in-game zombies carry with them to disrupt stability with their presence.

There was more on imagination at  British DiGRA 2024, held at Staffordshire University London Digital Institute, where I considered ‘The Posthumanism of Imagination in Videogaming’, and more on the non-human at Video Game Cultures 2024, hosted at BCU with Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber chairing, and myself forming part of the local organising committee. ‘Palatable vs. Poisonous Others: Aliens, AI, and mutants, oh my!’ was my first paper on SCARS Above, an enjoyable game that offers interesting provocations for a posthuman perspective on non-human relations. As protagonist Kate Ward, you demonstrate a consideration and care for alien creatures that extends beyond a humanist hierarchy; yet the affordances of acceptance seem limited to those that conform to certain humanist ideals.

Overall, 2024 was an excellent year for sharing and developing my research, gaining valuable feedback, and engaging with many excellent people and ideas at different events, Let’s hope this year is as good as the last!