Some of you don’t yet know Graham Candy. Graham is an MA student in Cultural Anthropology at Concordia who was active in gamecode but headed off the China to do fieldwork when TAG was getting off the ground. He’s been back for a while and working hard on his MA thesis and we are pleased to announce the thesis defense will take place on Wednesday, April 7th at 10am in H-1120 in the Sociology and Anthropology Dept.
We like a rowdy crowd for game studies theses so everyone is invited. Graham will give a brief presentation of his research and then try to survive an onslaught of questions from three committee members. The abstract for the thesis follows…
ABSTRACT
Mapping Gaming Infrastructures
Graham Candy
This thesis works through a series of arguments emphasizing the ways in which gaming practices are shaped by unique intersections of gamers’ desires, game designs and material infrastructures. This work consists of three main parts. First, I argue that by viewing online games as sites of contrived contingency we can better understand why diverse social forms have so quickly developed in online gaming environments. Secondly, I suggest a new method to approach studying these technosocial environments through developing what I call ethnography of gaming infrastructure. Lastly, through focusing on one technological artefact – ping, I equip my ethnography of gaming infrastructure to demonstrate how uniquely game related manifestations of technology are re-mapping the geographies of both local and global social forms.