Kell n' Tell

A space for honesty.

From Wikipedia: "'The Slave Ship,' originally titled 'Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on,' is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake." Turner's painting demonstrates many of the themes represented in this project -- black (il)legibility, black (non)being as permanent sinking, a total climate of anti-blackness.

Blackness, Breath, and (Non)Being: Scenes of Illegibility

Kellen Aguilar July 12, 2019 Academia, Essay Leave a Comment

This project turns away from a positivistic discourse of black enfranchisement in order to attend to expressions of blackness as a condition of ontological death — that is, as an …

“Marking the manners of the times:” A Creative Simulation of Metagames in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Kellen Aguilar May 15, 2019 Essay, Humor, Video Games Leave a Comment

This simulation gamifies some of the thematic elements in Frances Burney’s Evelina, such as female delicacy and satire, women’s vulnerability to violence in the public sphere, and 18th century British …

Mountain is a simulation video game developed by David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions. It was released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android in July 2014. The game is an idle game in which the only influence the player can have on the game is at the start of the game where the player is tasked to draw objects. The game is designed to be played in the background while the player uses other applications. From Sean Wejebe's website: 'The Longest Couch is a game where two players have to complete a series of commands on a gampead to navigate their respective boy to the center of the couch. Once the gamepad commands are completed, the players move to a shared keyboard - as the boys on the screen get closer, so do the players. It is very romantic.'

Failing at Gaming: Queer Gameplay in Mountain and The Longest Couch

Kellen Aguilar March 27, 2019 Essay, Video Games Leave a Comment

How are video games queer? This question is central to recent game studies scholarship that attempts to bridge the rigor of queer theory with the playful possibilities of digital games. …

Excellent fanart by Mitch Alexander for Mattie Brice’s game, Mainichi. Brice describes Mainichi on her website as follows: This is an experiment in sharing a personal experience through a game system. It helps communicate daily occurances that happen in my life, exploring the difficulty in expressing these feelings in words. As well, it stands as a commentary of how we currently use game design for broad strokes of universal experiences instead of the hyper-personal, and often exclude minority voices. Mainichi was made in RPG Maker VX, an under-served program in terms of accessibility. My goal was to make a game on my own that didn’t require programming and used community resources. I want to make games that feasibly anyone can do on their own. The only special skill I needed for this project was simple graphic editing.

Queer Failure in Mattie Brice’s Mainichi

Kellen Aguilar March 25, 2019 Video Games Leave a Comment

Queerness in digital games can mean a few different things. In one sense, a queer game may challenge the dichotomies that traditionally structure digital games: narrative and gameplay, player control …

This essay draws on a gameplay glitch in merrit kopas's queer digital game Lim to argue that cross-cultural friendship in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is a form of glitch or failure that permits relations beyond the logics (the “code” or “script”) of the colonial system. The friendships in Passage -- namely, between Aziz, Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested -- develop as the product of accidental or unscripted encounters within the rigid stratifications of colonial Indian society: a chance meeting at a mosque between Aziz and Mrs. Moore or an intimate tea party hosted by Mr. Fielding. These encounters contrast with normative, scripted events such as the Turton’s “Bridge Party,” which reify the cultural, spatial, and temporal boundaries between colonizer and colonized.

Glitched Out Fiction Part II: Hacking the Colonial Script in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Kellen Aguilar March 19, 2019 Academia, Essay, Graduate School, Video Games Leave a Comment

In the first part of this series, “Glitched-Out Fiction Part I: Hermaphroditic Hackers in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature, I drew on Jack Halberstam’s theorization of “queer failure” …

This essay demonstrates how Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature and merritt k.’s Lim — a medieval poem and a contemporary queer video game, respectively — deconstruct the binaries of heteronormativity through the particular ways that each deploys allegory and enacts queer failure. By relying on Jack Halberstam’s theorization of “queer failure,” I read Plaint through Lim in order to argue that whether accidental or not, the contradictions/glitches inherent to Plaint and Lim perform queerness despite both works’ ostensible anti- or non-existent queer elements. Observing the contradictions/glitches in these works reveals fruitful avenues for comparative reading — that is, the contradictions of a medieval poem as “glitches” in the poem’s “code” and the glitches in a digital game as “contradictions” in the game’s binary (i.e. 1/0) “language.”

Glitched-Out Fiction Part I: Hermaphroditic Hackers in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature

Kellen Aguilar March 18, 2019 Academia, Essay, Graduate School, Video Games Leave a Comment

This post is the first of a two-part series in which I analogize the contradictions or elisions in works of literature to the glitches in video games. The series draws …

Video games have developed into a rich, growing field at many top universities, but they have rarely been considered from a queer perspective. Immersion in new worlds, video games seem to offer the perfect opportunity to explore the alterity that queer culture longs for, but often sexism and discrimination in gamer culture steal the spotlight. Queer Game Studies provides a welcome corrective, revealing the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games. These in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. Demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world, they establish an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture. Queer Game Studies covers important subjects such as the representation of queer bodies, the casual misogyny prevalent in video games, the need for greater diversity in gamer culture, and reading popular games like Bayonetta, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid from a queer perspective. Perfect for both everyday readers and instructors looking to add diversity to their courses, Queer Game Studies is the ideal introduction to the vast and vibrant realm of queer gaming. Contributors: Leigh Alexander; Gregory L. Bagnall, U of Rhode Island; Hanna Brady; Mattie Brice; Derek Burrill, U of California, Riverside; Edmond Y. Chang, U of Oregon; Naomi M. Clark; Katherine Cross, CUNY; Kim d’Amazing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Aubrey Gabel, U of California, Berkeley; Christopher Goetz, U of Iowa; Jack Halberstam, U of Southern California; Todd Harper, U of Baltimore; Larissa Hjorth, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Chelsea Howe; Jesper Juul, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; merritt kopas; Colleen Macklin, Parsons School of Design; Amanda Phillips, Georgetown U; Gabriela T. Richard, Pennsylvania State U; Toni Rocca; Sarah Schoemann, Georgia Institute of Technology; Kathryn Bond Stockton, U of Utah; Zoya Street, U of Lancaster; Peter Wonica; Robert Yang, Parsons School of Design; Jordan Youngblood, Eastern Connecticut State U.

Review of Queer Game Studies (2017)

Kellen Aguilar January 18, 2019 Reviews, Video Games Leave a Comment

2014’s Gamergate controversy — a concerted effort by ultra-conservative gamers and critics to attack what they perceived as the feminization of gaming culture — put a spotlight on the toxicity …

Being a graduate student isn't easy. You'll need a lot of time and energy to understand your lessons. You'll have to endure longer classes and more complicated requirements just to get over it. Most of the time, you'll feel overwhelmed and frustrated.

Protected: Some Very Candid Reflections on My First Quarter of Graduate School

Kellen Aguilar December 27, 2018 Academia, Graduate School, Humor, Personal Leave a Comment

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

A six-paneled comic that was part of a composition exercise I completed for the Spanish Language Diagnostic Exam at Northwestern University. Essentially, I had to write a narrative based on the comic. The result was equal parts cringeworthy and hilarious, but I still managed to pass the exam.

Una cuenta bien que escribí en español por un examen para evaluar cómo escribo en español (“An Okay Story that I Wrote in Spanish for an Exam to Evaluate How I Write in Spanish”)

Kellen Aguilar October 15, 2018 Family, Humor, Personal Leave a Comment

Some people get their kicks from going to the movies on a work night. Some people get their jimmies rustled by jumping out of an airplane at 18000ft without a …

The introductory image to the infographic entitled, "The Long and Winding Road to a Ph.D"

Protected: How I’m Feeling Right Now, At This Very Moment, About Going to Graduate School in English

Kellen Aguilar September 23, 2018 Academia, Career, Graduate School, Humor, Personal Leave a Comment

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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