The Graduate Student Association (GSA) and the Graduate College welcome the Drexel community to join us for our next Scholars Share: Conversations on Graduate Research to hear from current graduate students about their research endeavors and a faculty moderator who will facilitate questions and discussion from the audience. Lunch is provided to attendees.

Friday, September 28, 2018
12:00 - 1:00PM
Graduate Student Lounge
Main Building, Lower Level, Room 010A

View the Recording [YouTube]

Featured Speakers:

Greg Loring-Albright

Communication, Culture & Media PhD Program
College of Arts and Sciences

Critical Games: Board Games for Fun & Social Change

Greg Loring-Albright is a designer and scholar of non-digital games. His writing has been published multiple times in the Journal of Analog Game Studies, and he has presented at the 2017 Let's Play PA conference. He marries an academic investigation of games with practical game design experience. His real-world games have run in Rittenhouse Square Park, the Carnival de Resistance, and the art museums of Philadelphia and Chicago. His first published tabletop game, Leviathan (inspired by Moby Dick), will be available in October 2018.

Greg's presentation will synthesize a few disparate pieces of his work dealing with the medium of hobby board games. While these games are often viewed as simple pastimes or banal commercial products, Greg sees them as a medium similar to other entertainment media, and uses a Media Studies lenses to analyze them as such. This presentation focuses on close-reading a few games that advance critical messages. Anti-war, anti-state, anti-misogynist, and anti-capitalist messages are all present in games that are both critically and commercially successful (as defined by the limited market of hobby games, anyway). His presentation will highlight two or three of these games as time allows, and propose theoretical frameworks for both creating and “reading” these games as media entities.

Jennifer Villareale

Digital Media Masters Program
Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design

Collaborative Games: Motivating Cooperative Play By Design

Jennifer is just beginning to develop her thesis and hopes this presentation will help her lay the foundation for understanding cooperative and collaborative play and inspire discussion that will help her define her research path. Jennifer is studying the development of cooperative play in collaborative video games. The intent is to find out how to motivate balanced cooperative play by creating experimental mechanics and gameplay for players. Jennifer also just released her first title on Xbox One and she will also talk about her development process and show a short video.

Faculty Moderator:

Alexander Jenkins, PhD

Assistant Teaching Professor
Communication, Culture & Media
College of Arts and Sciences