Games and Literary Theory Conference, Krakow Keynote
The jet-lag has not yet left me and although I’ve been jostling crowds in the overly busy Calcutta streets and ‘invigilating’ at exams in my university, I still keep seeing the beautiful disproportionate spires of the St. Mary’s Church in Krakow and waiting in anticipation for the trumpeter to emerge from the tower windows to announce the hour with his melodious but incomplete notes. The story goes that one of his ancestors was shot in the throat by Tatar invaders as he was announcing the arrival of the enemy. The interrupted note is what tells Krakow the time each hour. There’s something about this city, I thought, as I headed towards my conference venue with my hands full of gifts for home. A brisk walk took me to Golembia Street and the Department of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. On the way, plaques announced illustrious alumni such as Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) and Nicholas Copernicus. Once inside the medieval-looking gate, I was in the welcoming zone of the Games and Literary Theory Conference 2016, organised ably by the inimitable Tomasz Majkowski and his sterling group of students. I am quite tired of fighting old battles in Game Studies all over again but mark my words, this generation of Polish game scholars are going to change the field.
The welcome (further accentuated by a delectable spread of Polish food) was lavish and in stark contrast to the extremely cavalier treatment that I received from the Polish embassy in New Delhi who wouldn’t deign to respond to my emails or take my calls. Anyway my getting to Poland was a major victory for both Tomasz and me in that I had never faced so much trouble in getting a visa to a European country before. I haven’t said why I was there in the first place: I was one of the two keynote speakers at the conference. The other keynote did not have as many problems in getting there as I did but when she did get to the venue, I met one of the most sensible Game Studies scholars in my career. Joyce Goggin left us spellbound and simultaneously tickled by bringing up questions of the literary and ludic yet again. No, the other disciplines aren’t out to colonise us (they often don’t even know we exist) and if you throw me a ball, then that it doesn’t tell a story. But then there are different ways of looking at colonisation, throwing balls and telling stories. Now that’s not exactly what Joyce said - her keynote was much more erudite, with references to Finnegan’s Wake (by another Joyce), stories with multiple endings and close readings of Huizinga.
Other highlights for me were the discussion of a herstorical (yeah, you read right: Her Story as opposed to HiStory) board game by Piotr Szerwinscki, another one on an environmental board game, one on the quotidian and commonplace occurrences in videogames, Daniel Vella’s romantic analogy for (some) videogames, Sebastian Moering’s introduction to his upcoming work on existentialism and care in videogames and Darshana’s brilliant reading of Pynchon vis-a-vis videogames. I loved hearing about games and ecology; a brilliant analysis of the quotidian in games and a survey of videogame periodicals in the U.S.A and Canada. Daniel Vella brought back memories of my Romanticism lectures (I had to teach Shelley not so long ago) with his references to M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp.
My own keynote was on post colonialist themes in videogames (or rather the lack of these). After having thanked the British, our former colonial masters, for giving me the language to present academic papers in (some members of the audience got the Caliban reference) and compared my visa-predicament to Papers, Please! , I managed to bring to the table postcolonial theory and the discomfort many of us have with the insensitively colonial approach of the global games. My position is not a popular one and the problem is that such an obviously glaring issue has been hitherto ignored. One of the interesting takeaways for me was that many members of the audience started debating the role of Poland as coloniser/colonised; the other was a comment that Sebastian (who has been a friend since 2008) made: he said he thought this was my most personal talk ever and I was gratified. I think I spoke my mind and people listened with sympathy - nay, empathy. With the world changing as it is now, all this needed to be said.
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