Keywords in Play Episode 31 - Brendan Keogh

Critical Distance: Keywords in Play

This episode we speak with Dr Brendan Keogh, discussing his new book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545402/the-videogame-industry-does-not-exist/). It is the final part of a special 6-episode Season of Keywords in Play, exploring intersections and exchanges between Chinese and Australian game studies scholarship. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Dr Brendan Keogh (he/him) is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and a Chief Investigator of the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology. He is the co-author of The Unity Game Engine and The Circuits of Cultural Software (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; with Benjamin Nicoll), and is the author of The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (MIT Press, 2023), A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (MIT Press, 2018), and Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line (Stolen Projects, 2012). He has written extensively about the cultures and development practices of videogames in journals such as Games and Culture, Creative Industries, and Covergence, and for outlets such as Overland, The Conversation, Polygon, Edge, and Vice. You can check out more of Brendan’s work and games on his website: https://brkeogh.com/, and follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brkeogh.

The podcast series is part of the Engaging Influencers initiative. This initiative is curated by the Australia Council for the Arts and funded by the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations.

As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience.

Our goal is to highlight the work of graduate students, early career researchers and scholars from under-represented groups, backgrounds and regions. The primary inspiration comes from sociologist and critic Raymond Williams. In the Preface to his book Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Williams envisaged not a static dictionary but an interactive document, encouraging readers to populate blank pages with their own keywords, notes and amendments. “Keywords in Play” follows Williams in affirming that “The significance is in the selection”, and works towards diversifying the critical terms with which we describe games and game culture.”

Interviewer: Mahli-Ann Butt

Production Team: Darshana Jayemanne, Emilie Reed, Zoyander Street

Audio Direction and Engineering: Damian Stewart

Double Bass: Aaron Stewart

Special Thanks: Hugh Davies, Chloe Yan Li