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.

Last week was a regular and normal week for me. I had my rehearsals, my work at the library, my trainings, a meeting for the Phd. I went out with friends, had a party where I shared glasses and cutlery, grappled with my senpai & kohai, hugged with sensei. But we live in a different world now. A world in which we are told to “maintain social distancing” to “flatten the curve”. This change of routine is unpleasant for me, as I am attached to my schedule, my structure. But being at home is no problem at all, on the contrary, my home is my castle, an Aspergirls’ Paradise. My experience of lockdown is a very privileged one and I am aware of it. Still, I hope …

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A ‘90’s schoolyard, somewhere in Suburbia. The children are happily playing soccer, with their teachers as referees. But one chubby girl sits aside. She is not joining at all, not even looking. She is playing with a stick, quite monotonously and repetitively trying to draw perfect straight lines in the air. “You see, we just cannot have her join…” – the teacher explained to the girl’s father. “She doesn’t understand the rules and will just try to get the ball in order to bounce it and roll around with it, refusing to let go. Then of course, the other children will get annoyed and start kicking her. So that is why we as teachers decided that she should be on the side, so that the other kids …

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For living on this planet, I pay “rent” – I contribute to the world with my music, my research, my arts+crafts, my love & friendship, and my writing. Although my name literally means “Little Warrior”, due to my autism, I cannot join my friends on the barricades. Therefore, I raise my voice through my own – soft & quiet – forms of resistance, to empower the misfits. On my blog and for BiWomenQuarterly, I write academic essays, auti-ethnographies and various forms of poetry, such as #biku . This piece tells more about the traditions of poetry in which I place myself, to conclude with a short poem about the current situation in Poland – where the Prides meet many prejudices, and where dehumanizing language is dehumanizing us.

As you can imagine, the transmedial storytelling around Wiedźmin [The Witcher] combines many of my interests. Therefore, one of my resolutions for 2020 is to contribute to this phenomenon by means of a new translation (from Polish to English). Every month, I translate one of the short stories from the collection Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish) by Andrzej Sapkowski. This was my work from February. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. (Chapter 12, paragraph 9) According to Dr. Frankenstein’s “monster” (Mary Shelley). Communication is complex and does not come naturally for everyone. Personally, I often feel as though I am a misfit, someone described by Temple Grandin & Oliver Sacks as “an anthropologist from Mars”, and by me as a misplaced alien. That feeling comes mostly during communication.

Deciding on topics for the assignments of my studies in neuropsychology are an easy task for me. I took up this learning because I wanted to understand the autistic brain. Now that we are in the modules regarding aural processing, it feels only natural that I – as an autistic musicologist and musician – write about the autistic brain on music. Hashtag “cognitive music science” or “psychology of music” or “neuromusicology”. But what exactly do those terms mean?