Interviews & Media Appearances

See the links below for selected interviews with me in news articles, videos, podcasts, and radio documentaries.

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I was recently interviewed by Gregory Leporati at the Washington post in an article about academic interest in Animal Crossing. You can read the article here.

Excerpt

“Vossen’s contribution, titled “Tom Nook, Capitalist or Comrade?: On Nook Discourse and the Millennial Housing Crisis,” takes the oft-debated topic of whether Tom Nook, the series’ Tanooki landlord, is good or evil and examines what those types of conversations — what she calls “Nook Discourse” — mean.

“My argument is that it doesn’t really matter whether Tom Nook is good or evil,” she said. “What matters is that ‘Animal Crossing’ has created this very productive space for people to have conversations about wealth and labour. In day-to-day life, this isn’t something people are normally talking about, but they’re more comfortable calling out Tom Nook as evil than they are calling out their own landlord or Jeff Bezos.””

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I was interviewed by James Bigley II for the Electronic Gaming Monthly article “How The Legend of Zelda Prepared Us to Play the Princess.” We discuss how Zelda’s character has changed throughout the past 35 years and what that means about upcoming Zelda titles. You can read the article here.

Excerpt

“Ocarina of Time was groundbreaking in that it further built off of Miyamoto and Aonuma’s history of incorporating nontraditional gameplay mechanics like music and song into a game without it feeling forced, and those gameplay mechanics drove a fresh new narrative. But, given all of its successes and its place in the series, it was still a game that relied heavily on traditional gender stereotypes, as pointed out by Emma Vossen, co-editor and co-author of the anthology Feminism in Play.

“The trailer for Ocarina of Time really sort of puts into place the idea of how Nintendo is imagining it and how they’re framing this game in games culture,” Vossen says.

The commercial Vossen is referring to alternates between gameplay, cutscenes, and old-timey narration that aggressively genders its audience by asking the question: “Willst thou get the girl? Or play like one?””

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The Dangerous Game: Gamergate and the
"alt-right"

In 2016 I was chosen by the CBC to make an hour long documentary about my research with CBC Ideas that was broadcast nationally on multiple occasions. The accessible documentary is perfect for the classroom as it starts with questions as simple as ”what is online gaming?” and builds up to complicated questions about games culture such as: “how did games scholars predict the election of Donald Trump?”

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First Person Scholar: Publish with Purpose

In 2016 I was chosen as one of 25 finalists in the 2016 SSHRC Storytellers contest for my three minute video about First Person Scholar and academic publishing. I then went on to give a live presentation of the same talk at Congress in 2016 winning the second level of the competition as well. This video asks: what is the purpose of publishing? Is it to share research? Or is it simply to not perish?

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Crisis of the Toxic Nerds: How Men Ruined Nerd Culture and Made Gaming
a Toxic Place for Everyone Else

A 2018 podcast/radio documentary by Built to Play CJRU 1280 AM that looks at toxic “nerd” cultures with two episodes focusing on gaming specifically. I am interviewed at length in these two episodes which ask “what does toxic masculinity in games look like and what can we do about it?”