The Critical Gaming Project (CGP) at the UW is the brainchild of CHID instructor and English doctoral candidate Terry Schenold. Since 2007, Terry has collaborated with faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students at UW (as well as the larger Seattle community, including the Wing Luke Museum) to push the developing field of game studies into new areas of critical engagement. The CGP describes itself as “a collaborative, interdisciplinary working group and community of players at UW dedicated to the critical study and teaching of games. We are committed to the idea that games occupy an important part of the contemporary media ecology, and that they are necessary objects of analysis. We hope to foster game research and pedagogy in universities and develop productive interactions between disciplines, scholars, players, and general public.”
This quarter, the CGP will be featuring articles about the better game culture: how and where it is emerging, strategies for advancing it, and tools for contributing. For an overview of how conversations within critical game studies have shifted over recent years, as well as a potentially prophetic view of where they may be headed, read Terry’s article “Better Game Culture,” the first in this new series.