Zach Whalen Gives Scholarly Presentations at Two Conferences

Zach Whalen, assistant professor in the Department of English, Linguistics and Communication, recently gave presentations at major conferences. First, at the 2012 convention of the Modern Language Association, Whalen contributed his paper to a session on “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies.” Whalen’s paper, “Close Enough,” adopts the literary model of close reading toward understanding the physical technology of videogame screens.

And at the 2012 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Whalen chaired a session on “Code Studies and Videogames” and presented his own paper, “‘//create magnetic children’: Videogame Code as Critical Paratext,” a comparative analysis of the source code of two art games.