MLA session: “Close Playing”

As the year winds down, I’m looking forward to participating next week (1/8/12) in a roundtable discussion at the MLA conference in Seattle on “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies.” The session’s chaired by the inimitable Mark Sample and includes a number of terrific game studies specialists–Edmond Chang, Jason Rhody, Anastasia Salter, Timothy Welsh, and Zach Whalen. My own brief introduction will focus on my coauthored book, Codename Revolution, as an example of a platform studies approach to video games, an approach I see as related to bibliography and book history in its close attention to the material technologies for the production, transmission, and reception of creative works. Here are the slides I plan to show, in a sort of truncated pecha kucha presentation.