Keywords in Play Episode 2: Emilie Reed

“Keywords in Play” is a monthly interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience.

Our goal is to highlight the work of graduate students, early career researchers and scholars from under-represented groups, backgrounds and regions. The primary inspiration comes from sociologist and critic Raymond Williams. In the Preface to his book Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Williams envisaged not a static dictionary but an interactive document, encouraging readers to populate blank pages with their own keywords, notes and amendments. “Keywords in Play” follows Williams in affirming that “The significance is in the selection”, and works towards diversifying the critical terms with which we describe games and game culture.

In this episode we speak to Emilie Reed. Emilie is a recent PhD graduate researching the history of displaying videogames in museums and other arts contexts. Her academic background includes art history, museum studies and creative writing. She is interested in creating exhibitions which highlight overlooked elements of the history and artistic practice behind videogames, and developing more experimental approaches to game criticism. https://emreed.net/

Emilie's paper "Exhibition Strategies for Videogames in Art Institutions: Blank Arcade 2016" is open access: http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/91

Please consider supporting Critical Distance at https://www.patreon.com/critdistance

Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Zoyander Street, Emilie Reed.

Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart

Double Bass: Aaron Stewart