My latest book chapter is now available in the edited collection: Masculinities in Play . The chapter which I co-authored with Dr. Gerald Voorheese focuses on neoliberal masculinities at play in Counter Strike: GO esports:
The entire collection is essential for up to date scholarship on gender and gaming and features incredible work from leaders in the field.
I wrote a blog post on the Warframe website on Fashion Frame and my community. This is but a stepping stone for exploring the gaming fashion world as a whole.
You can read the whole post on the Warframe website here: https://www.warframe.com/news/fashion-frame-not-just-end-game
A brief history and look into the future of kpop’s complex relationship with eSports in Korea and around the world. I discuss the hallyu wave, kpop performances at esports events, games with kpop elements and kpop songs about gaming.
What makes Canada an ideal setting for horror stories? Tax benefits aside, Canadian narratives have a long history of depicting ghosts, body horror and the human struggle against nature. Ghosts and the spectral are a particularly important part of Canadian literature in that they bring buried and repressed (and sometimes unknown) wounds to the forefront. What is interesting about all this is that despite the very few games fully set in Canada, they all similarly aligned with narratives of Canadian literature canon.
Some of you may be aware that I have recently expanded my Youtube content for more than just short form let’s plays. Here is the first of many planned Warframe videos I plan on releasing in the next few weeks. I took care with this video to summarize and condense the assault of information out there on starting this addicting F2P game. I hope to take the same approach in upcoming video essays and other tutorials for this kind of complex content.
Stay tuned for more tutorials and fun videos and catch my streams for more Warframe action.
First and foremost: Did you know I’ve been working on a video series dedicated to Deus Ex?
No?
Well then stop reading here and check it out right now
And for the rest of you: Part 8 Hong Kong is out now!
First presented at CGSA 2016 Calgary on June 3rd 2016.
I’m going to be talking about the proliferation and boyband-ification of all-male professional gaming, or, esports teams. And in the sentiment of our keynote this week, I am not going to bother explaining why people who play video games professionally or the esports industry is worth studying. I will be speaking not only from the research of esports scholars but also my own personal experience in the esports industry as a player.
Firstly, I’d like to make it clear that there is a huge challenge when discussing esports teams when thinking about what we consider to be an “average” or “textbook” example what an esports team looks or behaves like. While there can be some generalizations that can be made about particular scenes based on genre, teams and even more so, individual players are surprisingly diverse (minus gender of course).
Graduate students want to get paid for their work. It should be as simple as that, but it isn’t.
It’s been several months of streaming on Twitch. I’ve hit just over 1000 views and 250 followers which is, quite frankly, not that many is the grand scheme of Twitch progression but yet significant to me and my efforts thus far. I hope to take some time in this post to reflect critically on streaming on Twitch and the community of people I’ve met along the way.
Update for the update: I have officially migrated streams to a new account: twitch.tv/AlexandraLive
Hey blogosphere, been a long time! I’ve been studying for my comprehensive exams and honestly miss the feeling of low stakes writing and something I highly recommend doing when one is immersed in a lot of reading. Let’s be honest, PhD students have to do a whole lot of writing after comps (a dissertation or something) and it just makes sense to keep up the habit now.
Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about figure collecting.
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Alexandra Orlando 