Carly A. Kocurek, PhD - Games, Scholarship, Media

Casual Thinking. Serious Gaming.



Elizabeth Swaney deserves a gold medal in trifling

Category : Gaming · No Comments Apr 17th, 2019
Elizabeth Swaney deserves a gold medal in trifling

In the fifth or seventh or twenty-third yoga class I ever took, I fell on my face. Flat. Full length. On the floor. I laughed. The fall hadn’t hurt me, and how often do you fail so spectacularly that you fall on your face?Read the rest

Professors don’t know how to behave

Category : Miscellaneous · No Comments Apr 3rd, 2019
Professors don’t know how to behave

In response to a recent kerfuffle on an academic listserv (unnamed, because it could be any list), I sent an email suggesting the list’s moderation policies are inadequate. The responses were underwhelming.… Read the rest

What I’m playing: Lily’s Garden

Category : Gaming, Gender · No Comments Apr 2nd, 2019
What I’m playing: Lily’s Garden

Lily’s Garden is a cute, well-made mobile game that takes its audience seriously. While I play games in a variety of formats (and just dropped more than I meant to on RPGs at Cape Fear Games), most of my gaming these days is by phone.… Read the rest

Something has happened

Category : Gaming, Representations of Gaming, Research · No Comments Mar 25th, 2019
Something has happened

This blog post is an expansion of some thoughts I wrote up for a journalist covering the invocation and position of video games in the horrific shooting in New Zealand. The journalist ultimately didn’t use them.… Read the rest

An Encyclopedia of Women Who Have Died

Category : Digital Media, Gender, Research · No Comments Mar 21st, 2019
An Encyclopedia of Women Who Have Died

I have been trying for several days to write an encyclopedia entry about Theresa Duncan, who I did not know and whose legacy is so snarled up with her tragic, spectacular death.… Read the rest

Service Work as High Magic

Category : Miscellaneous · (1) Comment Feb 13th, 2019
Service Work as High Magic

A few weeks back, in the midst of year-end summary posts, Aileen McHarg, Professor of Public Law at Strathclyde University, tweeted, “Proposal: any academics boasting on social media about how productive they’ve been in 2018 to be required to add a report on the state of their personal life.”… Read the rest

Screen Time Symposium September 9, 2016

Category : Digital Media, Research · No Comments Jul 6th, 2016
Screen Time Symposium September 9, 2016

Jennifer Miller and I are hosting a symposium here in Chicago this fall as part of our work with our Nayar Prize Finalist project on learning games for young children. Please consider submitting and circulate widely.

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Announcing Feeling Games Symposium

Category : Gaming, Research · No Comments Sep 14th, 2015
Announcing Feeling Games Symposium

 

A few months ago, I started putting together a symposium on the intersection of games and emotions. That symposium, now titled “Feeling Games,” is happening in a couple weeks here at Illinois Tech.… Read the rest

Syllabus for History of Video Games

Category : Pedagogy · (2) Comments Aug 20th, 2015

This fall, for the third time, I will be teaching a course on the History of Video Games. This is an upper level class offered to undergraduates across the university here at the Illinois Institute of Technology.… Read the rest

Archives I Have Loved: Video Game Research in the Dustbin of History

Category : Research · No Comments May 29th, 2015
Archives I Have Loved: Video Game Research in the Dustbin of History

The discussion on Twitter yesterday about video game archives and archive-based historical work stirred up some memories about the work I’ve done in archives myself. While I tend to fall between disciplines and currently work primarily in media and game studies and digital humanities, my real training is as an American cultural historian.… Read the rest