Author: jordan

The Game Studies Reading Group will be meeting Tuesday, Feb. 20 from 4:30 P.M. to 6 P.M. in 234 Cruess Hall. Our theme for next week will be “Power at Play: Spacial Utilization and Power Dynamics in Mortal Kombat X.” In addition to discussing Pau Waelder’s “An Enhanced Duelling Artefact: PainStation and the Role of Competition in Video Games” and… Read more →

ModLab was featured in an article in a recent issue of The California Aggie, “Video Games Provide Opportunities for Varied Research” by Gabriel Mulcaire. Professors Patrick LeMieux, Colin Milburn, and Jorge Peña were interviewed about their work on games. Read more →

We’re excited to invite you to The Play’s the Thing, an exhibition of new games at 4:30PM and discussion of new books at 5:30PM in the UC Davis ModLab in 234 Cruess Hall on Thursday, December 7. From the stage to the screen to the street, embodied forms of performance and protest are changing the way we play in the… Read more →

The Infrastructural Listening Initiative is an interdisciplinary project based at UC Davis, meant to encourage critical sonic engagements with our built environments. Susan Leigh Star has used the term “structural inversion” to describe a practice of figure-ground reversal wherein the taken-for-granted aspects of our sociotechnical worlds are foregrounded and attended to in their particularities. The ILI is dedicated to exploring… Read more →

The Critical Wearables Group exhibited “The Future Past of Wearable Tech” at HASTAC 2017, the annual meeting of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. The exhibit offered a satirical look on neoliberalism and wearable technologies in the form of a parody of a SkyMall catalog. Read more →

Game Studies Reading Group is meeting Wednesday 11/15 from 4 to 6 p.m. in 234 Cruess Hall. The topic will be “Franchise and Fan Service: Exploring Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.” In addition to playing and discussing the Middle-Earth games, members will discuss future directions for the group. Snacks and lembas bread will be served. Read more →

The ModLab will be hosting a workshop on “Games as Teaching Tools” in 234 Cruess on Wednesday, November 8th at 3:30p.m. In this workshop, Prof. Gina Bloom, NAS grad students Ashlee Bird and Lynette Haberman, and Native Language and History Program Developer, Todd Gettleman, will offer instructors practical advice on utilizing games as effective teaching tools, as well as some… Read more →

Gerardo Con Díaz is a receipient of the Thomas Edison Innovation Fellowship from the law school at George Mason University. This is a year-long non-resident research fellowship to support his research on intellectual property law. In addition, Díaz also won the Bernard S. Finn Prize for best article on the history of electrical technologies from the Society for the History… Read more →

The Game Studies Group will meet Thursday, Oct. 26 in 234 Cruess Hall at 4 p.m. to play Job Simulator on the HTC Vive. Snacks will be served. If you have any questions, please contact Jordan Carroll at jscarroll at ucdavis dot edu. Read more →

ModLab will hold a meeting on Thursday, October 19th at noon in 234 Cruess Hall. The RSVP form is available here. Lunch will be served. Please contact Jordan Carroll (jscarroll at ucdavis dot edu) if you have any questions or concerns. Read more →

UC Davis Professor of American Studies Caren Kaplan has published Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke University 2017), a collection co-edited with Lisa Parks. The volume explores and assess the historical, juridical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology and warfare. Read more →

Teaching Game Studies The ModLab will be hosting a workshop on “Teaching Games Studies” in 234 Cruess on Thursday, Oct. 26th from 5 to 7 p.m. In this workshop, Profs. Colin Milburn and Kris Fallon will offer instructors practical advice on teaching students to interpret games through a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Faculty, graduate students, and anyone else interested in… Read more →

The UCHRI Working Group is hosting a symposium on “War, Security, and Digital Media” on the weekend of October 14-15 to be held in the Hart Hall Conference Room 3201 on Saturday the 14th and in ModLab in 234 Cruess Hall on Sunday the 15th. Lunch will be provided on both days. This two-day symposium, co-sponsored by the UC Humanities… Read more →

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux have published Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Drawing on examples from electronic espionage in EVE Online to speedruns of Legend of Zelda, Metagaming shows how gamer practices often break the rules and disrupt the boundaries of videogames. In addition to videogame criticism, the book offers… Read more →

Proffesor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli has published Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (Columbia University, 2017). Mythopoetic Cinema explores how contemporary European filmmakers treat mythopoetics as a critical practice that questions the constant need to provide new identities, a new Europe, and with it a new European cinema after the fall of the Soviet Union. Read more →

The UC Davis Humanities Institute newsletter published an article by Nicholas Garcia about Play the Knave, ModLab’s Shakespearean video game. The article, “Analyzing Data from a Shakespeare Video Game,” can be found here. Read more →

ModLab was featured in a story in The California Aggie about the intersections of the humanities and STEM fields. In the piece, titled “The UC Davis ModLab,” Reporter Meral Basit explored the lab’s interdisciplinary collaborations. Read more →