Edmond Y. Chang is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. His areas of interest include technoculture, race, gender, and sexuality, cultural studies, video game studies, popular culture, and 20/21C American literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is completing his first book on queerness and digital games. Supervisors: Dr. Eva Cherniavsky, Dr. Kate Cummings, and Dr. Thomas Foster Address: Department of English 1 Ohio University Athens, OH 45701
In Gaming (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that "video games are actions" (p. 2), that video ga... more In Gaming (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that "video games are actions" (p. 2), that video games "come into being when the machine is powered up and the software is executed; they exist when enacted" (p. 2). Might then this provide an opportunity to formulate a homology between gaming and writing? Might writing, in a sense, function as a kind of algorithm? The mind is powered up, critical thinking and language routines executed; writing only exists when enacted, when pen is put to paper, idea turned into word. For Galloway, gaming, playing, and acting invoke the language of writing: process, "grammars of action" (p. 4), diegetic and nondiegetic, and culture as acted document (p. 14). Moreover, gaming (like our students' writing) does have stakes: "video games render social realities into playable form" (p. 17). Therefore, this webtext is a meditation, an exploration, and a invitation to understand the contours and ways gaming is like writing and depends on usable and teachable logics: narrative, close reading, critical analysis, and ultimately, play. Using the globally popular World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, this paper will render how gaming and writing are intellectual, analytical, and critical actions.
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of... more This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations. These are a few of their stories.
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of... more This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations. These are a few of their stories.
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: These brief assignments ask students to ... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: These brief assignments ask students to keep and maintain a weekly "identity log," or "iLog," recording, detailing, and thinking about their own identities and identifications. These "iLogs" will function as a kind of identity workbook, an analytical and metacognitive journal, connecting students' observations and experiences to the texts, theories, and ideas of an Introduction to LGBT Studies class. Prompts include thinking about identities, sexuality, queer space, and popular culture, which are shared with the class via the class's Tumblr Web site. The overall course syllabus and reading list are included as well. Though the "iLogs" are not formally graded (except on timeliness and completion), they generate a portfolio, an archive of ideas, objects, and occasions for discussion, study, and reflection. Once these are collected together, students can see the breadth and depth of...
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Edmond Chang's game play log, or plo... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Edmond Chang's game play log, or plog, assignment asks students to perform critical analysis of games in the manner of a close reading. Chang explains that close playing is a cyborg analytical practice that holds multiple threads and viewing angles in tension. In Chang's words, close playing lays at "the intersection of form, function, meaning, and action"—an important formulation to keep in mind when students are frequently tempted to linger on representation while academics might emphasize form ("Close Playing"). His reflection and this assignment are reminders that the best game studies work can deftly shift between different registers of analysis to provide a comprehensive understanding of these complicated multimedia texts. Such exercises in the classroom can bridge the gap between traditional literary studies and the study of video games, promoting the attention to detail that is the hallmark ...
How might we think about ways to play games and make games that take advantage of the affordances... more How might we think about ways to play games and make games that take advantage of the affordances of digital computers as well as the happy accidents, workarounds, and transformations that provide alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames? How might we think about what Alexander Galloway calls countergaming, which does not simply identify “alternate formal strategies” of gaming but actively employs and gleefully explores those strategies (Gaming 111). By extension, how might we imagine queergaming, ways of playing against the grain, against normative design, and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well. Queergaming embraces the possibilities of nonproductive play, the uncertainty of glitches and exploits, and the desire for queer worlds as opportunities for exploration, for different rules and goals, and even for the radical potential of failure. Looking at a range of games, from mainstream bestsellers to independent titles, this paper hopes to define the need for more than queer content or window dressing in games but for queer(er) design, practices, and play.
This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as... more This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as raced, gendered, and queered as co-constituted through and by technology. Given technoculture's appropriation of queerness as yet another identity category subject to individualist manipulation and the near invisibility or silence of technology in queer theory, this dissertation theorizes the "technoqueer," building on the pioneering work of Donna Haraway's cyborg, Roseanne Allucquere Stone definition of the technosocial subject, Nina Wakeford's cyberqueer, Lisa Nakamura's cybertype, and N. Katherine Hayles on the posthuman. This project looks at cyberspace and bodyhacking technologies--real or imagined--to show how technology is never neutral or simply a tool. On the one hand, the metaphor of cyberspace and the reality of online "synthetic worlds" rely on ideologies of configurable identities, disembodiment, and freedom of exploration and expression. On the other hand, bodyhacking or the ability to shape, manipulate, enhance, and transform the body offers similar promises of escaping biological destiny, of self-improvement and self-fashioning, and possessive individuality. Given the popular narratives of technologies like the Internet, bionics, and gamification as liberating humanity from the prison of the "meat," this dissertation deploys a comparative study of literature, video games, and body modification technologies in order to articulate alternative readings of technologically-mediated race, gender, and sexuality foreclosed or overlooked by contemporary posthumanism. Looking to figures like Alan Turing or the Bionic Woman and looking at texts like William Gibson's Neuromancer, George Schuyler's Black No More, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Irrational Games's Bioshock, and Zynga's Facebook game Frontierville, this project demonstrates the ways technology is imbricated with race, gender, and sexuality and how liberation from one set of embodiments or identities often means the stabilization or policing of others. The technoqueer then reveals and challenges the structures of the near ubiquity of technological mediation and penetration into twenty-first century life--the technonormative matrix--in order to theorize alternative futurities and embrace technoqueer worldmaking. It is through these technoqueer utopias that both queer theory and technoculture theory can continue to revitalize the intersectional formation of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and technology.
In Gaming (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that "video games are actions" (p. 2), that video ga... more In Gaming (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that "video games are actions" (p. 2), that video games "come into being when the machine is powered up and the software is executed; they exist when enacted" (p. 2). Might then this provide an opportunity to formulate a homology between gaming and writing? Might writing, in a sense, function as a kind of algorithm? The mind is powered up, critical thinking and language routines executed; writing only exists when enacted, when pen is put to paper, idea turned into word. For Galloway, gaming, playing, and acting invoke the language of writing: process, "grammars of action" (p. 4), diegetic and nondiegetic, and culture as acted document (p. 14). Moreover, gaming (like our students' writing) does have stakes: "video games render social realities into playable form" (p. 17). Therefore, this webtext is a meditation, an exploration, and a invitation to understand the contours and ways gaming is like writing and depends on usable and teachable logics: narrative, close reading, critical analysis, and ultimately, play. Using the globally popular World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, this paper will render how gaming and writing are intellectual, analytical, and critical actions.
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of... more This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations. These are a few of their stories.
This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of... more This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations. These are a few of their stories.
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: These brief assignments ask students to ... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: These brief assignments ask students to keep and maintain a weekly "identity log," or "iLog," recording, detailing, and thinking about their own identities and identifications. These "iLogs" will function as a kind of identity workbook, an analytical and metacognitive journal, connecting students' observations and experiences to the texts, theories, and ideas of an Introduction to LGBT Studies class. Prompts include thinking about identities, sexuality, queer space, and popular culture, which are shared with the class via the class's Tumblr Web site. The overall course syllabus and reading list are included as well. Though the "iLogs" are not formally graded (except on timeliness and completion), they generate a portfolio, an archive of ideas, objects, and occasions for discussion, study, and reflection. Once these are collected together, students can see the breadth and depth of...
Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Edmond Chang's game play log, or plo... more Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Edmond Chang's game play log, or plog, assignment asks students to perform critical analysis of games in the manner of a close reading. Chang explains that close playing is a cyborg analytical practice that holds multiple threads and viewing angles in tension. In Chang's words, close playing lays at "the intersection of form, function, meaning, and action"—an important formulation to keep in mind when students are frequently tempted to linger on representation while academics might emphasize form ("Close Playing"). His reflection and this assignment are reminders that the best game studies work can deftly shift between different registers of analysis to provide a comprehensive understanding of these complicated multimedia texts. Such exercises in the classroom can bridge the gap between traditional literary studies and the study of video games, promoting the attention to detail that is the hallmark ...
How might we think about ways to play games and make games that take advantage of the affordances... more How might we think about ways to play games and make games that take advantage of the affordances of digital computers as well as the happy accidents, workarounds, and transformations that provide alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames? How might we think about what Alexander Galloway calls countergaming, which does not simply identify “alternate formal strategies” of gaming but actively employs and gleefully explores those strategies (Gaming 111). By extension, how might we imagine queergaming, ways of playing against the grain, against normative design, and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well. Queergaming embraces the possibilities of nonproductive play, the uncertainty of glitches and exploits, and the desire for queer worlds as opportunities for exploration, for different rules and goals, and even for the radical potential of failure. Looking at a range of games, from mainstream bestsellers to independent titles, this paper hopes to define the need for more than queer content or window dressing in games but for queer(er) design, practices, and play.
This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as... more This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as raced, gendered, and queered as co-constituted through and by technology. Given technoculture's appropriation of queerness as yet another identity category subject to individualist manipulation and the near invisibility or silence of technology in queer theory, this dissertation theorizes the "technoqueer," building on the pioneering work of Donna Haraway's cyborg, Roseanne Allucquere Stone definition of the technosocial subject, Nina Wakeford's cyberqueer, Lisa Nakamura's cybertype, and N. Katherine Hayles on the posthuman. This project looks at cyberspace and bodyhacking technologies--real or imagined--to show how technology is never neutral or simply a tool. On the one hand, the metaphor of cyberspace and the reality of online "synthetic worlds" rely on ideologies of configurable identities, disembodiment, and freedom of exploration and expression. On the other hand, bodyhacking or the ability to shape, manipulate, enhance, and transform the body offers similar promises of escaping biological destiny, of self-improvement and self-fashioning, and possessive individuality. Given the popular narratives of technologies like the Internet, bionics, and gamification as liberating humanity from the prison of the "meat," this dissertation deploys a comparative study of literature, video games, and body modification technologies in order to articulate alternative readings of technologically-mediated race, gender, and sexuality foreclosed or overlooked by contemporary posthumanism. Looking to figures like Alan Turing or the Bionic Woman and looking at texts like William Gibson's Neuromancer, George Schuyler's Black No More, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Irrational Games's Bioshock, and Zynga's Facebook game Frontierville, this project demonstrates the ways technology is imbricated with race, gender, and sexuality and how liberation from one set of embodiments or identities often means the stabilization or policing of others. The technoqueer then reveals and challenges the structures of the near ubiquity of technological mediation and penetration into twenty-first century life--the technonormative matrix--in order to theorize alternative futurities and embrace technoqueer worldmaking. It is through these technoqueer utopias that both queer theory and technoculture theory can continue to revitalize the intersectional formation of sex, gender, sexuality, race, and technology.
Uploads
Other Writing & Web-Based Scholarship by Edmond Y Chang
Papers by Edmond Y Chang