This week, we are introducing a first paper from the Geek Anthropology session Nick Mizer and myself put together for the 2013 American Anthropological Association annual meeting which took place in Chicago last November. You may remember Nick Mizer’s Connecting The Dots Towards A Geek Anthropology, introduction to this session, which he presented on TGA last March.
Errant Signal released a wonderful video yesterday about politics in video games and the importance of engaging in critical discourse about them.
Title ”Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games”, the video opens with a description of gamers’ attitudes towards critical discussions: on one hand, they want video games to be taken seriously and respected. They want their gaming knowledge and skills to be acknowledged. On the other hand, they can react rather aggressively to any form of critical analysis of, say, the representations of ethnic groups, women, LGBT or gender roles in games.
I suppose it’s my turn to introduce myself.
My name is Nick Mizer, and I’m a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Texas A&M University, where I’m working on a dissertation analyzing the historical relationships between story, play, and imagined spaces in Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been studying D&D since my senior year as an undergraduate, when I came to the topic by way of studies in folklore and mythology. The parallels between ritual and myth on the one hand and play and narrative on the other are the first thing that caught my interest in D&D. Gaining a better understanding of those relationships has been the driving force behind a lot of my research since then. Here on the blog I’ll probably be posting a lot about gaming, but also about other areas of geek culture too.
You can still submit your proposal for the panel Nick Mizer, myself and other colleagues are planning for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2013 annual meeting. Check here for more information on the panel about geek anthropology and send your proposal before April 10th!
We look forward to hearing from you!
– The Geek Anthropologist
The Geek Anthropologist 