The American Studies Consortium presents: a public lecture by Patrick Jagoda (UChicago)

Videogames serve as a form for staging, processing, and testing reality and our experience of the historical present. In particular, games belong to and complicate the experimental economy of the early twenty-first century. A central aspect of this economy has been the mobilization of forethought and forms of nonconscious cognition. How then can the non-conscious affects of games help us change conscious levels of human life, such as critical thought, judgment, and ultimately action? In their interplay between rationality and affect, videogames have a formidable concept-generating capacity. To demonstrate the possibilities and limits of this medium, this talk ultimately turns to the case study of Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia: an autobiographical piece that uses game-specific elements such as unfair rules, unsatisfying mechanics, unattainable objectives, and diverse avatars to convey the difficulties of transgender experience within heteronormative culture.

Patrick Jagoda is associate professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. Two of his books have been published in 2016: Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press) and The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (co-authored with Michael Maizels, MIT Press). Jagoda has also worked on several projects related to digital storytelling, transmedia game design, and new media learning. For more information, see: http://patrickjagoda.com/.