One of my favorite aspects of live-streaming myself playing video games on Twitch was interacting with the viewers. On Twitch, there is a chat feature where the viewers can send messages in a group chat that the live-streamer can read. Before streams, Mindy and I would announce our streams on social media and share the …
My experiences streaming and the potential of Twitch as a public platform During this past summer I had the opportunity to be a Research Assistant for the Digital Iran project, funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Part of my responsibilities included me live-streaming myself playing and analyzing video games about Iran, all while …
*Published and peer-reviewed article available at DOI: 10.21428/f1f23564.3d7610e0 With nearly 3 billion gamers worldwide, online games and streaming have become a pivotal part of everyday life for people across the globe, leading to new conceptions and constructions of identity, virtually (Hruska). While games have transcended national boundaries, gender, social class, and age, Iranian video games …
Digital Iran: Soft Power and Affect in Video Games Read More »
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) invokes a nostalgia among its player base. As a gamer who never played the POP series prior to the Digital Iran project, I found POP: SOT to be a perplexing challenge. As an avid WoW gamer and Mario fan, I only had a minute experience games that …
Battlefield 3 is a first person shooter (FPS) set in the fictional War of 2014 that takes place in the Iraqi-Kurdistan region and Tehran, Iran. The game is created by EA Games and has the intention of placing the player in Middle Eastern-like spaces virtually. For the majority of the game, the player plays as …
Battlefield 3: The Affective Dimensions of A Virtual Middle East Read More »
Accuracy and nuance 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is an intriguing video game that attracted our attention as soon as we learned about it. The game is created by Navid Khonsari, an Iranian-Canadian video-game creator and producer. As an Iranian in the diaspora, Khonsari offers a kind of neutrality to the revolutionary narrative in his creation. …
