It’s About How It Feels While We Are Together: Games as Radical Tools for Social Intervention2 min read

Elia Vargas
  • How do games operate as a platform for radical social intervention?
  • What role do race and gender play in game design?
  • What are speculative algorithms?
  • How might we foster inclusive spaces for game artists and game design students?

A.M. Darke says that being an associate professor in Digital Arts and New Media; Critical Race and Ethnic Studies; and Performance, Play & Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is just one part of who they are. Who is Darke? A recently tenured professor; an artist and scholar designing radical tools for social intervention; a queer Black femme-presenting person operating in a historically white male field of game design; a human trying to figure out what a human is.

Signals Podcast 4 features an uncut and intimate conversation between A.M. Darke and Elia Vargas that highlights Darke’s unfiltered methods and commitment to radical social intervention. From the Open Source Afro Hair Library to the Fairly Intelligent Algorithm, out-witting Snapchat’s facial recognition, and their game about controversial rapper Kanye West, Darke’s speculative games are full of snark, help us think in an abolitionist way, and challenge social norms through extraordinary game design and critiques of digital culture. 

Darke asks, “What did it feel like the last time you experienced pleasure? I don’t want to know what it was; I just want to know what it felt like. It feels like that there is an expectation, in the United States in particular, that there must be a base level of suffering. Suffering is a virtue and it is a requirement for society to function. It is presented to us as a necessity. It is imposed onto us without our consent… What is the opposite of suffering? As someone who has suffered a lot in my life, I just thought, I don’t want to suffer, or the absence of that, or being happy. The opposite of suffering is pleasure. And I think the solution to these structures in our world is getting back to pleasure.”

Podcast Music Credits: systemritual (Elia Vargas and Nathan Blaz)

Image Credits: A.M. Darke

Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a lecturer at CSU Monterey Bay and is co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.