ICFA

This week I was at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. It's a fairly small conference that happens every year in mid-March in Orlando, FL. While the conference is primarily for humanities scholars, and literature scholars in particular, they have a Visual and Performing Arts category which gladly takes submissions from game studies scholars. And as I entered into all of this scholarship as an English major with aspirations to teach videogames like one would teach books, I use this conference to flex those muscles.

This year they had a Frankenstein theme, so I did a paper on Undertale, read through a Frankensteinian lens. It was a bit of a rush job, but it worked and the crowd seemed to engage with it. I also heard papers on The Legend of Zelda by my friend Chris Schmersahl (Trump is Ganondorf !), Hearthstone by another friend, Taylor Howard, and a litany of some of my favorite games, like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. And then we held the first ever state of the medium panel on videogames and discussed where we thought things were academically and beyond. All in all, it was a great conference.

As with every year, I was joined by these jokers, from left to right, Kyle Bishop, the eminent zombie scholar, Charles Cuthbertson, the insatiable audiophile, and Chris Schmersah, the burgeoning games scholar.