56 min listen
S4E55: The Rules of the Game with Jaime Woo
S4E55: The Rules of the Game with Jaime Woo
ratings:
Length:
65 minutes
Released:
Oct 1, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Above Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop, Colin Marshall talks to Jaime Woo, writer, game designer, co-founder of the Toronto video game festival Gamercamp (the next edition of which happens this month), and author of Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect. They discuss taking the measure of a city by firing up Grindr and examining its men; things people have figured out how to use the app for other than hooking up and sending "a slew of dick pics"; how such apps have illustrated the decreased yet increase importance of living in particular places; the changing signifiers of queer culture, offline and on; how he views the must-touted "multiculturalism" of Toronto; what his 13-year-old self growing up in the suburbs would have thought about Grindr; the app's stark limitations as advantages that counteract our impulse to too-narrowly define our desires; how to learn about Toronto by observing the couples in its advertisements; the ever-present "distance" in the city, which guards against trends that miss but also prevent the ones that make homeruns; Grindr as a video game, his history with gaming, and what let him to co-found Gamercamp; his mission to bring the novelty and "whimsy" back to gaming, included but not limited to his creation of a new physical game based on the idea of social distance"; how a set of rules forms a system, how that system makes an experience, and when we call that experience a game; and the strategies one can follow to better understand the "rules" of a system like Toronto.
Released:
Oct 1, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Litblogger and novelist Mark Sarvas: A conversation about book criticism, the Los Angeles Literary scene and Michiko Kakutani with Mark Sarvas, author of popular weblog The Elegant Variation. Harry, Revised, his first novel, hits shelves in May 2008. by Notebook on Cities and Culture