Category: gamergirl

One of my favourite conferences is about the study of video game music aka ludomusicology. Last month, it was held again and to my great joy, I got to be the first speaker. Here’s a little blog made out of my notes from the presentation with YouTube videos of the music.

In “Fan Studies Methodologies“, the 2020 special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, I described how, as an autistic gamer, I engage with games in a different way, showcasing how (dis)abled gaming, neurotypicality, fannishness, and sociopolitical responses are never independent from one another. All the examples I named in that “autiethnography” were from my adult life, but looking back, these differences in engagement were already very noticeable when I was a kid. Therefore, in the following essay, I would like to recreate my small piece of the history of the mid ‘90s Dutch video gaming culture, which was a sort of “produser community” avant la lettre.

From September 2018 to February 2019, the famous Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, a major exhibition on contemporary video game design and culture. Announced as “a unique insight into the design process behind a selection of groundbreaking contemporary videogames”, this immersive exhibition was the end presentation of a project that took four years to undertake. I went over the Channel to take a look and write down my experiences for the first issue of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games.

As a (ludo)musicologist, I was delighted to see today’s Google doodle: an ‘AI’ powered Bach simulator. But that is not the only Google product I am excited about, the American multinational made waves earlier this week when it unveiled its long-awaited console project, the Stadia. What is this Stadia thing and why are gamers so excited about it?