Chang, Edmond Y. 2024. “Gaming While Asian”. In Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us, edited by Tara Fickle and Christopher Patterson. Duke University Press.
Publications
2024
2023
Chang, Edmond Y., Patrick Jagoda, Julianne Grasso, Peter D. McDonald, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, et al. 2023. “Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Retrospective”. Configurations.
2022
Chang, Edmond Y., Ashlee Bird, and Kishonna L. Gray. (2022) 2022. “Playing Difference: Toward a Games of Color Pedagogy”. In Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media: Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education Teaching, edited by Susan Flynn and Melanie Marotta, 111-28. Routledge.
As gaming communities, industry, even scholars and teachers attempt to address the need for diversity and inclusion in games, how might we locate, include, theorise, and teach games of colour and games that embrace difference? Specifically, how might we look at the representation and algorithmic underpinnings of racialised and marginalised identities, narratives, bodies, and cultures in games? This chapter will offer practical interventions into these fraught languages, grammars, and algorithms in three parts: First, a definition and demonstration of close playing or critical ways of analysing, engaging, and teaching games to address race and difference in digital games; next, three different approaches and assignments to teaching games of colour; and finally, suggestions for developing a teaching with games philosophy. Kishonna L. Gray addresses Blackness and games through the example of Hair Nah (2017), a game about a Black woman tired of people touching her hair; Ashlee Bird discusses the importance of teaching the history of Indigenous representations in games and the teaching of the game Never Alone (2014); Edmond Y. Chang looks at games like Yellow Face (2019) to think through Asian American representation in games and Asian futurism.
2021
Chang, Edmond Y. (2021) 2021. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?”. In Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, 203-41. Punctum Books.
Building on Tara McPherson’s work on race, critical code studies, and feminist critiques of DH, which is provocatively condensed in her essay and question “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?,” this non-traditional essay hopes to ask and address, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” My essay and project, written as a BASIC program, will use the mediums of code and digital games to challenge the technonormativity of DH. In other words, is code “striaght” and is it possible to create a queer video game? Considering Kurt Squire’s argument that video games are “designed experiences,” this presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games. Code and games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. Alexander Galloway defines protocol as “a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms” in ways that is “not by nature horizontal or vertical, but that protocol is an algorithm, a proscription for structure whose form and appearance may be any number of different diagrams or shapes.” My essay/program explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness. Readers, coders, and players will be able to enter the BASIC essay/program in a BASIC emulator and run the essay/game.
Chang, Edmond Y. (2021) 2021. “Queer”. Edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers. Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. Modern Language Association.
2019
Chang, Edmond Y. (2019) 2019. “Drawing the Oankali: Imagining Race, Gender, and the Posthuman in Octavia Butler’s Dawn”. In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler, edited by Tarshia L. Stanley, 81-89. Modern Language Association.
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy imagines a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has been “saved” by the Oankali, an alien race with the ability to manipulate genetic material. Butler unflinchingly engages questions of race, gender, sexuality, power, and what it means to be human. Drawing on my courses that feature Butler’s trilogy, particularly Dawn, this chapter articulates the pedagogical opportunities raised by the Oankali. The essay focuses on a drawing assignment called “Imagining the Oankali” where students are asked to draw, represent, or create their idea of the aliens as a way to make visible how the novels dramatize difference, nonhumanness and posthumanness, and difficult identities and embodiments.
2018
Chang, Edmond Y. (2018) 2018. “Playing As Making”. In Disrupting Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, 365-77. Punctum Books.