Queering games, questionable ice cream, and (not) quitting when the gaming gets tough.
What’s a prediction you have for the future? I’ll fall for fool’s spring again next year, and likely the year after that.
Last game you played? Split Fiction!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A task you’ll finally get around to this week? Turning some bullet points into an abstract for a TIPC submission (thank you, deadline extensions <3).
Quote from a reading you’d recommend? “…some players said that quitting the game abruptly might have felt worse than playing it through; they wanted to endure through the game to not be denied the feelings of completion and triumph of surviving through it. These logics make it difficult to walk out of the game, and make safeword techniques an unreliable safety valve…” p. 6; from Markus Montola’s The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing (2010), discussing player behavior in a role-playing game that simulates sexual assault.
Something the team is working on? Going out to dinner together soon, because a cold/allergies combo knocked our last attempt off the calendar.
What’s a great bad movie you’d recommend? Madame Web. Must a movie be good? Is it not enough to witness the worst ADR work in human history? Or the driest line delivery? Or Chekhov’s unopened Pepsi can?
What is an ice cream flavor you haven’t ever had yet but want to try? I’ve been really loving Mei Liao’s forays into “unusual” ice cream flavors, with this black pepper version being the most enticing thus far. Honorable mention to the Nabulsi cheese and olive oil variant, of course.
Quote from something you’ve written? “In specific, we seek to demonstrate the limitations and absences of “queerness” as an atmospheric and narrative consideration rather than a mechanical one […] If finishing a game and fulfilling its hegemonic futurity is oriented as a straightening act, is the queerest thing to stop playing? How, then, do we reconstruct the nature of queer play?” from a work in progress with Logan Davis on queer futures and the player’s role in straightening.
What’s something you used to be good at but can’t do now? Cartwheels, French, Desdemona’s monologue from act 4 of Othello. For by this light of heaven, I know not how I lost them. </3
What question should be swapped out for another? Let’s retire “What’s a great bad movie you’d recommend?” and instead ask “What’s one of your favorite albums?“
Keerthi Sridharan is a PhD candidate in the Playful Time Machines project. Their research is centered around games and play as spaces that facilitate and complicate processes of identification, identity construction, and relationality. Previous work has examined emotional play in TTRPGs, perspective in player-character interaction, and language as a playful resource in conversational interaction. They are a sociolinguist by trade, and a gamer by choice. Their spare time is spent stress-baking, making music, and drafting Twine games.
