Made in Asia/America: Designer and Scholar Workshop: public talk "Nanoscale: Visions of Smallness-Centered Games Practices"

Made in Asia/America: Designer and Scholar Workshop

Nanoscale: Visions of Smallness-Centered Games Practices, public talk by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka

By de-centering game studies’ discourse from Western perceptions of games to the intersections of Asia and Asian America, Made in Asia/America: Designer and Scholar Workshop aims to provide 1) a transpacific take on gaming that makes room for nuanced questions about the places and cultures where production and reception occur; 2) frameworks that can account for the imperial circulation of games while also attending to minority and queer experience, practice, and methods; and 3) a genre-expanding approach that incorporates conversations among scholars and Asian/Asian American game designers. The first public talk of the series will explore how institutional scale and centralization facilitate the relationship in which marginalized and small-scale creators expend energy towards the benefit of monied and powerful interests. In this talk, Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani, the co-founders of the small independent game company "Analgesic Productions", will discuss potential avenues of divestment and refusal, with an eye towards challenging conventional wisdom regarding size and money. They will then build off of these ideas to imagine how that reclaimed power might be put to good use, e.g. with proportionally impactful microgrants to artists and the preservation of non-English language games.

This event is organized by Dr. Christopher B. Patterson (UBC) and Interdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster.

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