By Margaret Koss
On Sunday, April 26, members of Gaming Club will be will be putting on their annual Women and Identity in Gaming Symposium (WIGS) with speakers, a panel discussion, a game expo and student presentations centered around identity in gaming.
Reference and Web Services Librarian and Assistant Professor, Angela Vanden Elzen who serves as the group’s advisor, says the symposium “provides a place to talk about women and identity in gaming in a safe space and in an academic setting.” Vanden Elzen taught a tutorial last term that centered on these issues, and some of her students will be giving presentations that they prepared in the tutorial.
Sophomore Megan Davidson says her presentation is about “casual gaming and how it affects the dichotomy of the industry as opposed to hardcore gaming.”
Senior Bryan Cebulski created his presentation as a continuation of the class Masculinity in Film. “I wanted to adapt his class into video games,” Cebulski says. “My capstone was about representations of masculinity in 90’s parody films. I like breaking down the underlying themes in movies – or any form of video, really – and what they tell us about what the stereotypes or standards are in that culture that surrounds it.”
WIGS will be bringing keynote speaker Jamin Warren, host of the PBS Game/Show web series and founder of Kill Screen videogame arts & culture magazine, to speak on Sunday at 11 a.m. in the Warch Campus Center cinema, followed by a panel discussion with University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Caroline Hardin.