Cameron Kunzelman: The World is Born From Zero

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Please join us for a CoFutures Friday afternoon seminar with videogame scholar Cameron Kunzelman, who will be talking about his recent book The World is Born From Zero: Understanding Speculation and Videogames. Cameron is a prolific writer of games criticism, for both academic and popular outlets like Waypoint and Polygon. He is also part of the critical podcasting network Ranged Touch for which he produces longform shows on topics like Stephen King's oeuvre, as well as Game Studies Study Buddies in which he and his co-host Michael Lutz critically assess academic works of game studies. 

The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.

WU Yan: Chinese Science Fiction Futurism

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WU Yan is professor and director of the Science and Human Imagination Center of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. He is a science fiction writer and scholar, a Vice Chair of China Science Writers’ Association, a winner of Chinese Nebula Award and the Galaxy Award, as well as Thomas D. Clareson Award by Science Fiction Research Association for Distinguished Service.

He is the leading scholar of Chinese Science Fiction studies inside China. He has co-edited the special issue on Chinese Science Fiction for Science Fiction Studies back in 2013: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a119.html#yan

His recent works include Meditations on Chinese Science Fiction Literature: Wu Yan’s Self-selected Academic Works. You can find a review here in English. The key essay we are going to discuss is only available in Chinese for now, but DeepL provides a good result of Chinese-English translation for academic essays (better than Google Translate)! You can find the copiable Chinese version here.

The talk will be in Chinese.