Projects

Recovering Histories of Play is a project directed by The Studio for Mediating Play to investigate and foreground play technologies, gaming platforms, game design frameworks, play communities, and play practices often overlooked by or written out of dominant historical narratives of games and play. This project engages with historical approaches, archives, and conversations that push beyond dominant and conventional understandings of play and games–such as those that conceive of play as merely leisurely fun or understand games primarily as a simple chronicle of technological development. In particular, Recovering Histories of Play considers how the crafting and dissemination of histories of games–popular and academic–are situated within cultural politics, struggles over legitimacy and power, and socioeconomic and material conditions. And by centering experiences and accounts of historically marginalized classes of players, types of technologies, regions of play, and ways to play, this project orients toward what more just futures of play could be. Learn more.

Playing with Care, Laboring with Care is a project directed by The Studio for Mediating Play to examine care as an ethical, political, economic, aesthetic, and affective dimension of games and play. By engaging with lively and prescient discussions of care, this project explores what it means to care about and with games as well as to consider game design, gameplay, and game scholarship as acts of care. In particular, this project investigates the enduring socially constructed dichotomy between work and play that organizes contemporary life, such as the way that play elements and logics are used to encourage laborers to care about their work via gamification. Ultimately, this project fosters engagements with the work of scholars and artists at the intersection of feminist theory, political economy, and game studies to explore how care is mobilized and manifest as ideological construct, as social relation, and as embodied practice. Learn more.

Patching Default Settings: Radical Feminist Gameplay is a project directed by The Studio for Mediating to research and intervene in mainstream gaming through creative and critical practice informed by intersectional feminist theory and politically engaged art. Drawing on feminist research that interrogates sexist, racist, classist, heteronormative, and ableist logics common in commercial game titles and gaming practices, this project aims to develop original experimental artworks about games, gameplay, and gaming cultures that render and envision alternative ways of playing. As part of Patching Default Settings, The Studio for Mediating Play invites feminist game scholars and designers from other institutions across the US to visit UT Dallas for a series of workshops, presentations, critique sessions, author conversations, and other events in support of feminist research and praxis in games and gaming cultures. Learn more.