A seminar series organised by Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores University),
Kellynn Wee (UCL) and the RAI
Wednesday 12 November 2025, 4.00-6.00pm GMT
This is an online event. Please register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bEzpeKBnTPS1cgvv3jYnMQ#/registration
Gaming the Anthropocene –
thinking with games
Dr Fiona P. McDonald (Assistant Professor, Visual Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Okanagan)
Moderated by Dr Aaron Trammell (Associate Professor, Informatics University of California, Irvine)
Games have appeared as part of anthropological fascination across many ethnographies, from American ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne’s comprehensive monograph on analog games with String Figures and How to Make Them: A Study of Cat’s Cradle in Many Lands (1906) to games in digital spaces such American anthropologist Bonni Nardi’s deep ethnography into the lives of players engaged in World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online role-playing video game, in My Life as a Night Elf Priest (2010), to American anthropologist Tom Bollsteroff’s ethnographic work Coming of Age in Second Life (2015) that looks at the affordances of games to situate changing ideas about identity and society through virtual worlds (Jayne, 1962; Boellstorff, 2005; Nardi, 2010). But what are the affordances of games when we are trying to work through something as unwieldy (and interdisciplinary) as climate anxiety and the lived experience of the Anthropocene? This seminar will unpack how games, when used in learning contexts, evoke the centrality of ludic play, connecting to a multimodal approach to collaboration that fosters dialogue and narrative as central game mechanics. This seminar will be presented through thinking with and about Anthropocenes—the game co-created by Fiona McDonald, Jason M. Kelly (British historian), in collaboration with Myron Campbell (artistic director) and Alex Custodio (queer games studies scholar and graphic designer).
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Bio Fiona P. McDonald
Fiona P. McDonald is an assistant professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, which exists on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx Okanagan People. She is the founder and director of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab (www.ce2lab.org), an innovative multimodal research space that supports research on material culture studies, sensory ethnography, accessibility, and climate justice.
Fiona’s deep commitment to collaboration and Open Access publishing has led to the co-creation of works such as BluePRINT: An Applied Approach to Accessibility Workbook, which helps non-profits in Canada achieve accessibility that responds to new legislation, her co-authored born-digital publication, An Anthropocene Primer, which is an interdisciplinary Open Educational Resource, and, more recently, the co-created tabletop board game, Anthropocenes—a game. Fiona’s commitment to innovation in anthropology stems back to when she was a graduate student at University College London as she is the co-founder of Ethnographic Terminalia Collective (ETC) (est.2009), an international curatorial collective that curated exhibitions (2009-2019) at the intersections of arts and anthropology across North America where they aimed to move academic research beyond the academy through public engagement.
Fiona’s current book project is a historical and contemporary visual and material ethnography of the material nature and transformations of woollen (trade) blankets produced in the United Kingdom since the seventeenth century. Her work addresses the ranging uses of woollen blankets through a direct examination of the pluralistic histories that things and objects have when re-worked and recycled by contemporary artists and customary makers in North America and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Bio Aaron Trammell
Aaron is an Associate Professor of Informatics and has affiliations with African American Studies and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has written about how Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and board games inform the lived experiences of their players. His work explores the military ideologies at the center of many games (both analog and digital) — and how those games shape identity. Specifically, his work is interested in how these games further the values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. He is also the author of two recent books: Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2023) looks critically at our notion of play—and how its deceptively wholesome image has harmed and erased people of color. His second book, The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture (NYU Press, 2023), looks at the story of white masculinity in geek culture through a history of hobby gaming.
Aaron is also the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia editor of Sounding Out!
Links to Aaron’s Books: