MIT | Polygamer

Polygamer #113: Maia Weinstock of LEGO Women of Computing

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Ken Gagne

Maia Weinstock is the creator of LEGO Women of NASA, a kit she proposed on the LEGO Ideas site that won approval to be made into a real product. Now she’s pitching the Women of Computing, a set that pays homage to Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and other women who were instrumental in the early days of computers.

In this podcast, Maia and I talk about how she got into LEGO as an adult; the value of representation in LEGO; how the brick manufacturer itself has come around to including different skin tones; the opportunities Maia’s had to meet her heroes, including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and present them with custom minifigs; the lessons Maia learned from previous pitches to promote judges and bioengineers with LEGO; her work by day at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and her upcoming book about Mildred Dresselhaus.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for a transcript and links to resources mentioned in this episode.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 58:55 — 34.6MB) | Embed

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Polygamer #105: T.L. Taylor on Twitch streaming

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Ken Gagne

Dr. T.L. Taylor is a professor at M.I.T. and the author of several books, including Watch Me Play – Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming. Her ethnographic research into esports and online game streaming have led her to co-found AnyKey, an advocacy organization that supports diversity, inclusion, and equity in competitive gaming; and to be one of the founding members of Twitch’s Safety Advisory Council.

In this episode, I ask T.L. how esports led to Twitch and vice versa; how an external advisory council can sway an organization as large as Twitch; how one can write a book about a medium that is so quickly evolving; the AnyKey pledge that over 750,000 million streamers have taken; whether esports could survive without Twitch, or vice versa; what gaming can tell us about the future of our country’s culture and politics; and about her current research into amusement parks as commercialized play spaces.

Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:07 — 27.1MB) | Embed

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Polygamer #65: MIT’s Prof. Kishonna Gray on justice studies

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Ken Gagne

Kishonna Gray is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, where she teaches Women & Gender Studies. She comes from Eastern Kentucky University, where she founded the Critical Gaming Lab; and from Arizona State University, where earned her Ph.D. in justice studies. She is the author of Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live, in which she examines deviant behavior in online gaming.

In this episode of Polygamer, I ask Kishonna about the correlation between justice studies and media studies; how her relationship with gaming evolved from being a gamer to an academic; why games became less diverse after the 1990s; whether entertainment media shows a rise in violence toward women, and the ways in which that is paralleled in online harassment and offline violence; her goal in founding EKU’s Critical Gaming Lab; what her time at MIT has allowed her to do that she couldn’t do at EKU; and the hope to be found in indie game development.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 51:43 — 24.5MB) | Embed