Claudia Lo @cwylo@octodon.social

Accidentally got suckered into a discussion of Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed", ended up fuming for another two hours >_>

I guess it's time to harness the anger to actually productive ends like writing these damned CFPs

today I wandered into the realm of Dark Souls Discourse and discovered a pure hell-vision of what happens when you leave games criticism to gamers

tfw you're trying to write an article based on your experiences as a mod but academia has instilled a "personal experience isn't a REAL source" anxiety in you 🙃

(and this is despite being a gender studies major!!)

Current #DarkSouls thoughts:

1) You need to "reverse Hollowing" i.e. apply makeup because it's embarrassing to greet strangers without, and Humanity is the strongest moisturiser known to man.
2) You ring two Bells of Awakening because, as with all wake-up alarms, the first immediately goes to snooze.
3) Capra Demon only hates you because you're basically interrupting a pleasant day out with the dogs. Damn door-to-door salesmen >:(

#gameing with headcanons is always better

Just beat Zelda #BotW and now moving to #DarkSouls. Summer is such a great time for going through yr backlog :) #gameing

Just beat Zelda #BotW and now moving to #DarkSouls. Summer is such a great time for going through yr backlog :) #gameing

whoo, back! at a conference in canada on games studies, and i love how you can tell who's a games studies scholar or not by the dress i.e. "wearing jeans and a tshirt? Probably games studies"

Got my Nintendo Switch and copy of #BotW :D

We were told, far too late to protest the invite, that a speaker with reprehensible views was invited to speak. What we ended up doing was showing up early, taking every seat around the speaker, and looking exactly as tired as we felt.

End result: every official publicity photo of that event ended up having a backdrop of students who clearly didn't give a single shit about what this asshole had to say, to the point of napping.

the thing that frustrates me, going through most of what I've found about online moderation, is that they focus so heavily on comment/user removals as the only form of moderation work they highlight, creating the false impression that moderation work IS comment removal. This, in turn, breeds a lot of very limited solutions to the "problem" of moderation, missing any other kinds of labour moderators perform.

the only good thing about VR and gaming is the possibility that we might trap Ian Bogost in there, and then the rest of us can get on with our lives

http://cmsw.mit.edu/spiciest-memelord-lilly-chin-jeopardy-podcast

A podcast with college Jeopardy! winner Lilly Chin, on "the surreality of becoming other people's media object."

ALSO we just explained to our prof what a circlejerk is, other than the, uh, most obvious definition

~*welcome to academia*~

...other forms of expertise: fans, dedicated players, different kinds of developers or practitioners.

And then there are hierarchies of who can criticize what in what ways; if, say, I made a criticism of a game for not being "fun" (whatever that means), I would not have gotten the same backlash as I would for criticising a game for being fun-but-reproducing-structures-of-sexism.

You know what? I *will* just write a blog post, this is silly.

Tension b/w academia, several classes of experts, players and fans;

- my read of the field is that academics are playing catchup and also all the interesting stuff is not in mainstream games studies (sorry y'all ludology vs narratology is just *boring*)
- there's a real tendency to more heavily weigh the words of practitioners in the space (not a knock on them! merely an observation).
^ And those two are set up in opposition to each other, broadly, but don't forget...

In class rn, topic is on being a public intellectual; interesting (and upsetting) to think about trying to stake a place as a public intellectual within my field of queer and feminist video game studies.

By which I mean: there's the tension b/w academia and what I'll call vernacular theory--from devs, players, writers--but also the field is so heavily politicized and charged, safety concerns are also brought up (tbc)

#gameing #feminism #queer

got a major egg tart craving rn tbqh

time for a chinatown run in the near future