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.