Website and Portfolio for Cody Mejeur, PhD

Category: Uncategorized

Website Updates In Progress!

It’s been a very long time coming, but updates to this website and my projects are finally happening! Stay tuned for more as content is updated. Things have been out of date for quite a while now, there’s a lot to get to!

In particular, here’s what to expect:

  1. A new section of the site for Trans Folks Walking, the first-person, narrative game anthology centering trans stories and experiences that me and the team have been working on, now with support from a Mellon Foundation grant!
  2. Updates to Queer Intersections, the visualizations of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive I started a couple years ago. Together with Xavier Ho at Monash University, we’re working on updating and expanding the visualizations with new data and theorizing what it means to quantify and visualize in queer ways.
  3. A publications section with links to articles and book chapters I’ve published, some of which have free copies available through Humanities Commons.
  4. A new CV, already live!

And I’ll be trying to post updates here more frequently about upcoming conferences and events. Definitely check out Palah Light Lab too, the queer, feminist, and trans new media lab at UB I co-direct with the brilliant Margaret Rhee: https://ubwp.buffalo.edu/palahlight/

Updated Project Plan: The Archive of Player Experience

For this week I’m updating the project plan for the Archive of Player Experience. As I laid out in the last proposal post, for this semester I plan to complete the initial stage of the Archive using ImagePlots of the games I’ll be using in my dissertation on queering game narrative: Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, SOMA, and The Talos Principle. I have completed a worksheet planner for the project, and am including the link here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WPp7bWWVDTpwqXUIp3msAjq8X50aDPYn7lRRS2m3T4o/edit?usp=sharing

As I worked on a separate project in the past week (on Pokémon GO and narrative construction of reality), I realized a way to frame my argument for the Archive. My interest in using ImagePlot with games has always been to establish a better handle on narrative variance in games–how each player has a different experience of the game, and to what extent. By comparing different players’ playthroughs of the game, we can get a sense of the general form of a game’s narrative, including the critical mass of similarities that players’ experiences generally share. What I’m measuring, then, is how games cohere as a narrative while still allowing players to have different and emergent experiences. Ultimately this determines how a game shapes its reality for the player, including how much variance and possibility that reality has built into it. This allows us to account for difference while still acknowledging commonalities.

In Defense of Catch-Alls

I had planned on blogging on a different topic this week, but yesterday’s reading, specifically New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2006, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan), presented a really interesting connection to a number of fields and concepts that I work with. In the introduction to the reader, Chun unpacks the etymology of the term “new media,” and reveals how it came to its current usage. New media refers to a wide variety of media objects, ranging from hypertext fiction to software studies to video games, and at times applying the term new media to all of them seems too reductive to describe such variety. Chun comments on this and a number of other limitations with the term, claiming that it is not accommodating:

“it portrayed other media as old or dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favor of a happy if redundant plurality” (1).

Add to this the problem of the “new” part of the phrase—how long are we going to call video games “new” media?—and it seems there are more issues with the term than benefits. One of the only unifying descriptions it offers, at least at first glance, is the general effects that new media has: “It was fluid, individualized connectivity, a medium to distribute control and freedom” (1). Consider how easily that description could apply to language itself!

Yet I argue, as Chun does later in her introduction, that the benefit of a term like “new media” is not in establishing a discrete set of objects for study, or a unified methodology, or a single theory that guides the whole enterprise. New media is something of a catch-all for its many objects, methodologies, and theories, and while that frustrates projects of definition, it also presents a rich, living, evolving toolbox for the study of media broadly construed. New media brings together a plethora of differing perspectives based on the relative closeness of their interests—it is not that they share the same objects, etc., but rather that they have some relationship to each other. They exist in the same constellation, or on the same “map” of new media studies, even if there’s a lot of ground between them (4). There’s a lot to be gained if the places on that map are in dialogue with each other, trading concepts and perspectives that build up their projects, often in unexpected ways. And, as our current political moment makes abundantly clear, there’s a lot to be lost by a sort of intellectual isolationism, looking only to a specific object, methodology, or theory while ignoring the wide-ranging relations that they have.

Of course one also needs specificity in order to have clarity and understanding. If our terms are too amorphous and fuzzy, then we can never get a conceptual grip on the things we study. This is where a catch-all like new media needs further contextualization and historicization, but one can readily see that in the field’s subdivisions—in the case of New Media Old Media, new media archaeology and new media cultural critique (4). The term new media has many referents, but it is not so difficult to identify which one is in question at a given moment.

A number of other fields and concepts enjoy the same benefits and limitations of catch-all status, such as Digital Humanities, electronic literature, and game studies. Indeed, it seems that any field title is something of a catch-all. However in each case I think we can see the same process sketched out above. A blanket term brings together a lot of meaning, but also demands further inquiry and context. For example, last week was the Global Digital Humanities Symposium at MSU, and afterward my colleague, Laura McGrath, tweeted the following:

“I find the label “DH” to be empty/meaningless, but also utilitarian.”

There’s an interesting dynamic at play here, where something that encompasses everything means nothing. Where meaning becomes overloaded and loses all meaning. So I share Laura’s frustration—I often joke that studying games makes me a digital humanist simply because games are often digital. But I also see the “utilitarian” aspect of the term. DH, like new media, brings together many scholars from many areas around a set of interests and questions—what does it mean to do humanities in a digital age? How does one make meaning with digital tools and objects? What can the humanities do to critique and foster newer and better uses for the digital? “Digital” is doing a lot of work here, and its apparent emptiness reflects how it creates a space for work–for generating meaning. I think there is a lot of work to be done, and where there’s a lot of work, one needs plenty of hands. So let’s use our catch-alls, all the while maintaining a critical eye to what they mean, what they include, and what they exclude.

Avatars, Narrative, and Absent Minds

My post for this week is going to be something a little different from previous weeks. I’ll be using this opportunity to introduce everyone to a particular game that relates to some of the questions we have been pursuing this semester–Gone Home (2013, PC/Mac) by indie game company Fullbright.

Gone Home is a first-person exploration game that tells the story of Kaitlin, a college student who returns home to find her family curiously missing. gonehome_titlescreen.pngKaitlin explores the house trying to find out what has happened to her family, and discovers quite a bit about them while doing so. Without revealing too much, the game has become noteworthy for its endearing portrayal of LGBTQ characters and their struggles.

What makes Gone Home so interesting in regards to our course is its focus on discovering and encountering the minds of other characters through the objects they have left behind. As we read in Bailenson’s “The Virtual Laboratory” for this week, “virtual behavior is, in fact, ‘real'” (94). Through a series of experiments with virtual reality, Bailenson and his team were able to show that “agents” and avatars encountered in virtual spaces are perceived in much the same way actual people are in actual space. I use the term actual space quite intentionally–as anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has noted with his studies in Second Life, it is not very apt to call it “real” space when what happens in both actual and digital spaces is “real”. Bailenson and Boellstorff (amongst many others) have thus shown us that our cognitive processes in virtual/digital realities are not so different from such processes in the actual world.

But Gone Home presents a different case. So we encounter avatars similar to how we encounter real people, but what happens when there are no avatars to encounter? What happens when those avatars are absent, and all we have is whatever they have left behind (or, to complicate things, what the designers created and made to look left behind)? We still get a sense of character in GoGone-Home-3.jpgne Home, but that character must be discovered as part of an emergent narrative found and created by the player. I suggest that we use similar theory of mind processes to construct and interpret characters in Gone Home, but that these processes have been broken up. In other words, we are still encountering minds, but minds that have been fragmented into different objects that can be discovered or ignored by the player. This necessarily requires space–space for the objects to dwell in, and for the player to move in.

A further point to consider in Gone Home is that every act becomes a narrative one (a significant point in the game narrative study our group is designing). Unified character has been removed, and in its absence character must be recovered through interaction with objects. Because of this,  even the simple act of moving within the game world has narrative import by virtue of navigating the space and objects that comprise the entirety of the game’s story. Play in Gone Home is narrative, exactly what our group is trying to prove in other games.

These are just a few threads to pursue as an introduction to the game. We will play Gone Home together in class on Tuesday–I look forward to seeing what everyone has to say about it!

Welcome to my portfolio website!

Thanks for taking the time to view my portfolio. This website is constantly growing and evolving, and will eventually include my projects, publications, and blog posts. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions regarding my work–I am always happy to hear from others interested in games and narrative!

E-mail: cmejeur@gmail.com

mejeurco@msu.edu

Important note: the banner image used above does not belong to me. It is an image of Rapture from the game Bioshock, and the artwork belongs to 2K Games/2K Boston.

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