Helen W. Kennedy

Game Jam as Feminist Methodology: The Affective Labors of Intervention in the Ludic Economy

This article examines the evidenced and the potential impact of all-female games jams as an element within a feminist interventionist approach to improving women’s equal participation within the ludic economies of the games industry. The article examines two specific projects—a single-site 24-hr event that took place in 2012 and a restaging of the format 4 years later across five different sites in the United Kingdom. These two case studies offer two critical contributions to the ongoing research regarding the wider challenges of diversifying games design, games development, and games culture more generally. The first is a consideration of the range of labors—free, hopeful, and affective—that underpins these endeavors and provides a significant contribution in general to the ludic economy. The second is valuable evidence of the impact and ongoing validity of these all-female initiatives as an effective and transformative methodology for feminist intervention.

Incremental speed increases excitement: bodies, space, movement, and televisual change.

The authors argue that both Pong in the mid-1970s and the Wii today have transformed the television set in dramatic ways that have captured the popular imagination. Through a series of case studies, the authors pay close attention to the continuities and “incremental” changes in everyday televisual culture. Informed by phenomenological approaches, they present a comparison between Breakout and Wii Sports to suggest that the short history of videogame “plesiovision” should be rethought. The Wii’s genuine novelties are worthy of analysis in their own right but also highlight the significance of kinaesthesia in popular technoculture, suggest ways of theorising and studying proprioceptive bodies (both human and nonhuman), across videogame culture and televisual history.