If you missed it – and let’s be honest, most everyone did – you can catch up with the episode we recorded live on the eve of the SCMS 2025 conference in Chicago. Hear about the labor of the Graduate Student Organization from Kristina Brüning, the power of finding joy in play from Matt Payne, and the importance of building local community from AJ Christian. (With usual apologies that the sound isn’t great.)

SUBSCRIBE IN APPLE PODCASTS
SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS

TRANSCRIPT: DOWNLOAD OR READ BELOW

SHOW NOTES
Watch this episode on YouTube

Kristina Brüning’s UT-Austin page
SCMS Graduate Student Organization
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism
Brooke Erin Duffy, “The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries”
Stephanie Brown’s diss on authenticity in standup comedy

Matthew Payne’s Notre Dame page
Eugene Jarvis: King of the Arcade
Eugene Jarvis
Bloomsbury Publishing’s Influential Game Designers series
The Oregon Trail Game; play online
The Strong National Museum of Play
Learning Games Initiative
Before Your Eyes game

AJ Christian’s Northwestern page
OTV: Open Television
AJ’s 2018 book on Open TV
Forthcoming: Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
Chani Nicholas
Soul! TV show
Black&Sexy TV, Revry, Kweli TV
Alexandra Juhasz
AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video

EPISODE 79 TRANSCRIPT

[Opening theme music]

Christine Becker 00:10 Welcome to Aca-Media After Dark from Chicago, Illinois and the Fairmont something or other hotel. We are in the Ambassador Room, which took us a long time to find, but we're very happy to be here. So I am Christine Becker, and Michael kachman, my usual co-host is in Germany right now. He's giving a talk or something like that. So he's asleep right now, probably not on the livestream, I wouldn't think so. We've got a voice you are familiar with, Stephanie Brown, who is our co-host.

Stephanie Brown 00:45

Hello, I'm Stephanie Brown

Christine Becker 00:47

And so she's gonna be filling in for Michael. And then we've got three guests for you, and we're just gonna revive with it, yeah, but we're just gonna go ahead and start then with our first guest, and we have here at the end of the table, and I want to make sure I pronounce your name correctly, so please say your name.

Kristina Bruening 01:06

Yeah. My name is Kristina Bruening.

Christine Becker 01:11

Okay, yeah, you have the nice, the nice like the German, yes, yeah. So she is a media studies PhD student in the Radio, Television, Film department at University of Texas at Austin, and Graduate Student Organization representative on the SCMS board. And so we're going to talk. I could read her bio, but we're just going to talk about it, so let's jump right into it. So first of all, one reason we really want to have you on was to talk about the SCMS board and being, first of all, just a member of the board and what it's like to be in those meetings, and then secondly, specifically representing graduate students, and the kind of importance of graduate students having a voice on that body. So what's the experience been like?

Kristina Bruening 01:51

Yeah, it's been a great experience. It's, I had no concept of what it would be like going into this, really. And I mean, we've been in the room together? Yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's an interesting concept, because you go to a hotel together and spend two days there or four, but the travel days, but you spend two days locked in a room, essentially talking about things which, yeah, I hadn't done anything like this ever before. I think it's super important that grad students have a voice in that room. I felt like, you know, I could share my thoughts and feelings in that room. And I think we should continue to do that so that people know what's going on on our end of things. Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend to everyone who's considering a career in the academy, or, you know, wants to continue working in a university context, to try and do something like that, if they can, because it's just, yeah, amazing insight into how things actually work. And yeah, yeah, the politics how things get decided.

Christine Becker 03:02

Yeah, that's the thing I learned so much about why so many things happen or don't happen, both at the conference, what, what SCMS does. The other thing is really eye-opening for me is because we, especially someone like me, I've been at my institution for 24 years, and it's, you know, it's its own unique little thing. And so I knew how everything works in my world, but there's a lot of other worlds out there. And so being in that room and having, especially, what's really important, a diverse body that's going to give you different types of institutions, different types of scholars, different areas of interest. Because that was to me, you know, I would think about like, Oh, why don't we do it this way? And like that would work here, but not there. And that's where precarious labor on their graduate student representatives. All of those voices are really important, and that's why I found it. The most gratifying part was just I learned so much about how things work. I'm curious, if you because you didn't know what to expect, what made you want to run to that position?

Kristina Bruening 04:00

That's a great question. Mostly the curiosity. I wanted to see what actually happens and how the process works. I also wanted to, you know, change the world, as we all do, I think, when we're young. And for me, something that's been really exciting about being a part of the board is getting to know the people on the board and people you know, from a grad student perspective, of course, all the people who are going to be in the room, or people you read in class, and then you get to meet them, and it's really cool to see that you're all real people. And that's kind of exciting. And to just be a part of that,

Stephanie Brown 04:34

I think, when you're outside [unclear] here, I mean, there's so much of like, even I, of course, I am Severance-pilled, because I've been watching Severance so much. But I mean, like, the board is like, such a thing that it becomes a joke on so many shows. When you're outside of any sort of, like, organizing body, it's so easy to be like, Why are they making these decisions? Like, why is this happening? Like, this is ridiculous. It feels like a little bit of a black box. So it must be really nice and interesting and give you just such an interesting perspective, to be able to actually see what is going on that is actually like deliberations, and not just people making random decisions.

Christine Becker 05:08

Now I totally want an SCMS version of Severance. Let's make it. Yeah, let's do it. Well. I also want to talk about your panel, or the workshop. So the GSO has a workshop, and for those of you who are at the conference, this is Friday, 11am the title is Cruel Productivity, 2.0: Imagining alternatives. So tell us about this. How did this idea come about? What are you all going to talk about?

Kristina Bruening 05:31

Yeah, so I'm super excited about this workshop, and we actually have Jamie here in the audience as well, who's one of our GSO co-chairs. We're doing this workshop together. This is the second iteration, kind of part two of Cruel Productivity, part one from last year, which the title is kind of a play on Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism. And I was -- this is a very long story -- I was reading for my comms. I was reading, you know, that kind of stuff, Lauren Berlant, I was reading Brooke Erin Duffy's work on aspirational labor, all that stuff. And meanwhile, you know, a lot of things were going on in the world. A lot of stuff was going on for me financially, that was really hard. And I kept reading and thinking like, Oh, those poor workers that I'm reading about, and thinking about my dissertation topic, which is on actors and their working conditions, and reading all of this theoretical work, thinking about them, but then also thinking about my situation as a grad student and thinking like, Oh, they're actually this is kind of, there's a lot that applies to our situation as well, and how can we use that theory that we engage in the classroom all the time and engage in our work in order to think about our own situations and try to make those better, rather than just reading things and then talking about it in theory as it relates to something outside of what we're actually living. So that was the first idea for that. And what happened in that first year was mostly people getting a chance to just unburden themselves and talk about their lives. So it was a nice community spirit situation where everyone just shared what was going on for them, the things that they feel like need to change, and that was how far we got in that first round, which was really productive in that sense. And so the 2.0 part of this is that this year in the Part Two, we're hoping to actually brainstorm alternatives, right? Because part of what Berlant is talking about is that people stick with what they're trying to do, even though it's not it's an obstacle to their flourishing because they can't imagine alternatives. So this is us, you know, trying to think, Okay, what? What could an alternative be? And what can we do to make things better for ourselves. So now that we have the GSO co-chairs, now we have actually a team for the GSO. It's not just me as a GSO representative, but we have me who is the liaison to the board, and we have three co-chairs who are chairing the GSO. And so as a team of four, we can do so much more. And so the plan is to have brainstorm session on Friday to talk about ways that we can foster community among the GSO members, ways that we can make communication better among GSO members, and ways that we can liaise with the board better.

Stephanie Brown 08:42

Yeah, it's impressive that you, that you managed to go from venting to, let's do this, put this into action. [crosstalk] But it's, it's so hard to pivot from the like, because venting is so important too, because it's just connecting with other people and being able to air just like, get it out, yeah. But the like, turning it into, like, what can we actually do? That is such a hard part of that.

Kristina Bruening 09:07

Yeah, fingers crossed we can do that on Friday.

Christine Becker 09:12

Well, and then you mentioned the idea of the co-chairs. Was that an attempt to, you know, one person can volunteer to do something. It's really tough to actually do that. And so is co-chairs then a way to kind of spread that labor around a little bit?

Kristina Bruening 09:21

Yeah, so this is built on emulating the structure of the PLO, which is organized exactly this way. They have three co-chairs and the PLO representative who is a board member. And so now that we have that same structure, hopefully we can do just as much. I mean, the PLO is amazing, yeah, that's,

Christine Becker 09:39

Yeah. that's you know, there's an irony that they're like one of the most productive SCMS bodies.

09:44

[crosstalk]

Kristina Bruening 09:47

Because, I mean, yeah, they live that reality, and know how crucial it is to do that work. So, yeah, hopefully, if we can even do, you know, past that, that would be amazing, right? So. That's the goal. But yeah, this has been a long time in the making. And Joe Roskos, who was the GSO rep before me, actually started the thinking process of this. So it takes years to make something happen.

Christine Becker 10:13

Yeah. Any organization takes a while to make change, but especially when you have committed people, then you can have, you know, something produced from it. We also want to plug your panel, so you are, wow. You're doing back to back. So you got your your panel, your paper, at 9am and then heading to the workshop. So your panel at 9am is called Of Dreamers and Screamers; Entry Level and Early Career Media Production Workers and the Cost of Cheap Labor. So you're delivering a paper titled "Just Shut Pp and Say Your Lines: Early Career Actors, Professional Conduct and Agency as Privilege. So you want to offer us a tease about what that's at and then any thoughts about, you know, if this fits into a larger work, this is part of your dissertation. What is this, this work about?

Kristina Bruening 10:53

Yeah, it's pretty much what the title suggests. So "shut up and say your lines." Doesn't really work, right? Because you have say lines, but you're also not supposed to make any stirs. So my paper is about the experiences of entry level or early career actors and their attempt to balance professionalism and the expectations around that on set, especially with also being able to advocate for themselves when they need to, and how that is a really hard thing to do in the attempts of more established female actors in supporting them. So my dissertation research is based on ethnograph ethnographic research in LA, so I've interviewed a lot of actors at different career stages, and I'm basically presenting a bunch of quotes of what people have told me.

Christine Becker 11:51

I love that.

Stephanie Brown 11:52

As someone who also has done papers that are a bunch of quotes, I'm very excited.

Christine Becker 11:57

I'm writing a book that's mainly a bunch of quotes. It's a TV history project. And the thing is, the people I'm interviewing are, they're just really smart and funny and witty and, like, I can't say what they've said any better, so I'll just, I'll quote them.

Kristina Bruening 12:12

So that's how I feel too. Like, throw out a quote and feel the feelings that are in it. I mean, hopefully people will feel it. I feel it.

Stephanie Brown 12:19

Oh yeah. The best is when they say something, you're like, Oh, this is just the theory I just read, but you just said it, like, yeah. Like, how do I do it?

Christine Becker 12:27

Yeah, and it's especially hard to like when you're interviewing them. You don't want to be like, Oh my God, you just said it, Yeah, great. But when they deliver you something like that, it's like, just a golden moment. And especially like I when I have an experience where I'm writing it in my head then, because, actually, the paper I'm giving here is totally different project than what I was just referring to, but the paper I'm delivering here was, is based on an interview with a director. And there are moments where, you know, he'd say something, and in my head. I'm like, Oh, that's perfect for, you know, the second main point, like, I'm writing it in my head, and I've not done prior to this, not too many projects based on interviews. And I just found it so fun. And you know, it can be difficult with interview where you're relying on people's own frame of reference and their memories and things like that, like you always have to put that in context and all that. But I just found it it's really enriching to take what someone says and try to make, you know, a larger point out of it. It's really a gratifying process, I found.

Kristina Bruening 13:20

Yeah, the interviews are my favorite part of this by far, but I also I feel a lot of pressure to do them justice, yeah, you know, because at the end, everyone always says, Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to read this. Oh, hopefully this gives you something in return, yeah, telling me all of this.

Christine Becker 13:38

Yeah, but I think it's so, you know, back to my book project, I'm having that kind of experience these people is just like the greatest experience of their lives. When they were, like, 15, 16, it was these high school kids making a TV show, and so that, like having to deliver that, like something that lives up to their experience. But I feel like honored, because I'm the one lucky enough to get to tell their story. It's, you know, and so it's a lot of pressure, but you know. And same to then the folks you've interviewed, this is what we're good at, right? Because a lot of them can articulate what their experience was, but they can't always say what it adds up to, sort of like what Steph is saying, like what this means in a larger scope, or what you know theoretically that points to and that's why I feel like, that's what I can bring to it. And so that's, and I think the same for you. Then that's like, that's, that's what we're here for, that's what we're good for, doing that kind of work. So it's great that you're doing that.

Kristina Bruening 14:30

Especially once you get to that point where you actually can tell them something to validate their feelings, oftentimes they'll be like, Oh, I don't know if I should share this or this might sound weird, and then I can say, no, it doesn't, because every one has said the same thing. And yeah, you're not the only one feeling that way.

Stephanie Brown 14:50

Yes, I had a like a random author, a woman author, find my dissertation, just like from looking, she accidentally found it, looking for something else, from somebody who has the same name as me. Really, she sent me an email like, Oh my God. Like, I read your dissertation, and I'm not a comic, but like, I've had this exact same experience of, like, being a woman in a male dominated field, and like, I feel really validated that, like I'm feeling experiencing this. That's, like, the best part about doing, like, ethnographic work,

Christine Becker 15:16

Yeah, especially, like ordinary people might read it, right? So it doesn't happen very often. Yeah, that's an amazing story. Besides, then your own work that you're presenting in your workshop, anything else you're looking forward to this, this weekend, this next four days?

Kristina Bruening 15:31

So much. I've been away from UT for a while because I've been doing my research in LA. So I mean, this doesn't help anyone else. I'm not plugging anything. I'm just saying, I'm excited to see my friends, so, yeah, everyone I haven't seen in a while. Yeah, I am excited for the PLO roundtable that is happening on Saturday, I believe, which I think will be really cool too.

Christine Becker 15:53

And this is, you know, it's an important time to gather in community, and as you talked about with the GSO workshop, and the evolution to come up with practical ways to deal with things that we have to deal with things that are on our plate. And so this is one of you know, hopefully going to be one of the things we can take away from this weekend is gathering community, coming up with ideas to all, whether it is therapy and coping things or actual practical things that we can actually do. So I think that's really important. All right. Well, thank you so much for taking time out, especially like before the conference has even started, you already sounded smart and all in here, so we appreciate your time.

Kristina Bruening 16:28

Thank you. [applause]

Christine Becker 16:29

All right, thank you our next guest. All right, so we've got Matthew Payne here, and partly, I guess this is because we, you know, Michael Kackman is in Germany, and we have to have at least two Notre Dame people on the panel at any given time. And so we got Matthew Payne here, and let me give his bio. So Associate Professor at Notre Dame, has taught a range of Media Studies and Film TV production courses at the university level, and has also -- speaking of liaisons with the industry -- has conducted industry research for Warner Bros. He's also a regional director for the Learning Games Initiative, a multi-institute research collective dedicated to archiving games and gaming ephemera. Well, another reason we wanted you on here was because you have a book out, and so it's always exciting to have someone who just has a book out, and then gets to come to SCMS, you'll get to see your book on display. Picture next to the display.

Matt Payne 17:23

I don't actually know if it's on the carousel right now. But if it does appear...

Christine Becker 17:30

Yeah. So tell us about the book, and I'm also, because I've got a little bit of insight, we both took a writing workshop at the same time, so I know a little bit about what you had to go through for it. So tell us about the book, the process of writing it, how it feels. I know that sort of it's always a bittersweet feeling. Well, I've written one, but at least thatone time, has a bittersweet feeling. So tell us, tell us a little bit about that.

Matt Payne 17:51

Sure, the book is Eugene Jarvis: King of the Arcade. It's part of Bloomsbury Academic's influential Game Designer Series. So it's a series of books that looks at video game designers and tries to make the case that we should think about them as being obviously fairly integral to the game development process, but also trying to think through like, are there authorship issues? Like, how do we think about game design as a style of production? And so I focused on Eugene Jarvis, who actually lives just north of here in the Greater Chicagoland area. He's in his 70s, and he is still making video games. And what makes Eugene Jarvis really interesting, I think, is that he's only made arcade games. So he's only made coin-operated games. So whereas other game designers might float between consoles or personal computers or mobile devices, Jarvis has only made those big, you know, those ostentatiously large video games. And he started with in 1980 with Defender and, you know, makes Stargate, Robotron. Years later he if anybody remembers playing Cruisin' USA, he's the Cruisin' USA guy. So he's made a ton of these really influential arcade games. And so what's really interesting about following him is that the arcade, of course, has changed dramatically over our lifetimes, you know, sort of having their golden era in the 70s and 80s, kind of disappearing from the American landscape and then coming back in the form of a family entertainment center. So you think of like Dave and Busters or Round One. You know, there's places that have mostly like redemption machines, but they might also have like bowling and like axe throwing and, you know, overpriced pizza and beer. And so Jarvis has continued to make video games specifically for public play spaces. There's an interesting person that's only operated in that space.

Christine Becker 19:51

So what was your starting point for that book? I mean, there's just so much fascinating information there, like, how do you where do you start with that?

Matt Payne 19:57

Well, I started there because I was stuck with a different project. The other project is the Oregon Trail, which is a really fascinating cultural history that needs to be told. I hope I'm the one that tells it.

Stephanie Brown 20:09

That's a part of my childhood.

Matt Payne 20:13

[crosstalk] For Gen Xers, for millennials, it occupied a lot of our, kind of our first introduction to computers in the classroom. And actually it's like my experience with The Oregon Trail. I don't know about other people's, but it was the 1985 version. But actually the first iteration of it was 1971 And fun fact, through so my archival digging, it was demoed at Bryan Junior High in Minneapolis in 1971 which is also the same year when Prince was in middle school. At that middle school, really.

Christine Becker 20:49

[laughter and cross-talk]

Matt Payne 20:50

So Prince might have played the first version of Oregon Trail. I don't know. So I love, I love I love that game. I think it's really interesting. I think it's interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is like thinking about games as education, right? Like, can games teach us stuff? So anyway, I've been wrestling with that project. It's like, oh, this is too much. And I was talking to Jennifer deWinter and Carly Kocurek, who both are the editors of Bloomsbury's Influential Game Design Series, and they're like, we're looking for ideas. And I'm like, Oh, this other book idea is just too much. I want something that's a little bit more, something I can I can pick up and sort of think about more immediately. And, you know, Eugene Jarvis is still making games, and he's sort of, you know, we're both from South Bend, so he's sort of here in our backyard in Chicago, and I reached out to just some of my contacts at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, which is an amazing video, just game archive, generally. And I was like, Hey, do you do you know anybody who knows Eugene Jarvis? And just so happens that one of their, one of their collection specialist did put me into contact, and so that's where the project started.

Christine Becker 22:05

Well, speaking, we were just talking about interviewing people. What was it like talking to him then? And what's he think about someone trying to summarize his life's work in an academic book?

Matt Payne 22:14

Yeah, he's, he's a really colorful character. He's sort of like a carnival barker, you know? And you think about the games that you make for an arcade space are always trying to interpolate, hail, yell at, you know, kind of grab your attention. And so it makes sense on some level, that the person who would make these games also has a bit of that showmanship and personality as well. But he sat down for two very, very long interviews with me. So I have a chapter in the book that is a shorter version of what ended up being about 12 to 13 hours of interviews. So there were two very long days, but the fuller version of that edited transcript I will be giving to the Strong Museum as part of their oral history collection. So it'll be there for other people if they need it. But there's a shorter, a little, you know, so pithier, more digestible version of it in the book.

Christine Becker 23:12

Speaking about games and education, tell us about the Learning Games Initiative. What's the mission of that?

Matt Payne 23:17

And yeah, so it's a constellation of game scholars, not just in the States, but all over the globe. It's housed primarily at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Judd Riggell and Ken McAllister run the LGI. And it is really aimed at equipping educators with materials to help them teach. And so I should say it has two, two missions. One, they're archived with the and they consider themselves to be gonzo collectors. So they they do not have the same kind of training that you might expect for other museum folks, or even other kinds of more traditionally trained librarians. So they collect everything that has anything to do, that might have to do with video games. So they have arcade machines. They have, I think they have, like, Mario branded fish sticks, like they have everything. I think they have over 50,000 pieces of ephemera. So it's part of an archive. But if you're an educator and you're interested about using an older, particularly an older game platform, in your class, you can reach out to them and they will send it to you. It's part of, part of what LGI does, they equip educators with games and platforms to use them, and so the things in their collection are not precious. They're meant to be used. And you know, partly under the rationale that these things were never produced to really, like, possess and hold on to as anything precious, but rather to be experienced, and that's, that's a lot of what motivates the LGI.

Christine Becker 24:53

And it's also, you know, an important mission for any archive in general, like making this, as you say, then also like contributing your interview, something someone else can look at and learn from. That's great, great mission. What can one learn from video games? Like, if you want to proselytize a little bit here about the educational value of video games, what would you say?

25:10

That makes me think of comedy too, to point to Steph, because she does work in comedy that, you know, not to be too grand about it, but like things that make us human, right, like comedy finding meaning and like through play, these things are very poignant concepts I think.

Matt Payne 25:10

Well, I try to, I remind my students of this, is that I actually don't care about games that much. Where I think games are useful, though, is that they bring forth human play. And play is something that we don't think about. We all do it, but we don't think about it intentionally enough. And play gives us license to imagine the world as it might otherwise be. And I don't know about y'all [chuckles] but I would like to imagine the world otherwise. And so playing allows us, it gives us the freedom, it gives us license to to make those leaps and to imagine and to maybe try something and then say, Oh, I don't like that. Let's roll it again. Let's do it again. And so we play, I think we play when we obviously, when we play games, but we play when we are scribbling marginalia in in in a book that speaks to us. We play when we are recording a little YouTube video with our friends, we're playing with each other. When we sit down and we reconnect with family members that we haven't seen in a while. I play with my kids all the time, and it's just, it's, it's a way that sort of for me, anyway, like I it renews me, it fills me back up. And so I think games are good because they give us permission to do something that we should be doing anyway.

Stephanie Brown 26:43

I don't play a lot of video games, but my husband does, and I remember, like, sitting down, he wanted me to play The Last of Us 2, because we'd watched The Last of Us first season. He was like, I don't want you to spoil for the second season, so I want you to play through it. And I was like, I don't know how to play video games. Like I can't do it. And then, like learning, like playing the beginning of the game. I never realized that video games teach you how to play them as you do them. Like this is such a good lesson for how to like teach in our classrooms, like how to build failure in and repetition into our own learning. I don't know about, like it like helped something click in my mind for learning.

Christine Becker 27:17

And especially related to that not getting frustrated and quitting within five seconds, because that's my experience with a lot of video, with a lot of video games. I get mad and, like, throw the controller and so especially, like, for kids, for learning to have it, how to deal with failure and how to deal with frustration, that's really important.

Matt Payne 27:34

Also, something that the Organ Trail does really well. [laughter]

Christine Becker 27:40

Well, let's also plug your panel, so you are Sunday 11am, The Politics and Possibilities of Game Time, and your paper, "Blink and You'll Miss It: Feeling and Fighting Time in 'Before Your Eyes.'" So you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Matt Payne 27:53

Sure. So John Vanderhoef, my co-author, approached me about this game, which I hadn't heard of. It's called Before Your Eyes. I don't know if anybody's played it. The part of what makes it interesting, it's a narrative game. It's a narrative experience. It's about two hours long. The interface is the camera, and so it it does, actually, it does a pretty good job of tracking your blinks. And so as you're watching a vignette play out, if you blink, it advances the narrative. So you find yourself wanting desperately to have all the narrative information, even as like your eyes are dry now. And it's a story of -- I won't give any spoilers. Definitely you should check it out. It's a beautiful game. There's also one that if you have someone in your life who's like "video games can't make you cry," you might offer this one as an example. It's about a young boy who's growing up, and you see portions of his life, and then something happens that then makes you reevaluate all the stories that you have up to that point. Yeah, it's about memory. It's about loss. It's about our relationship to our own bodies and a desire to, like, see something play out, but then also, like, fighting against your own inability to, like, just your own human needs, including, like, the need to blink. And so it's a, it's a very, it's a very simple interface, but just done so masterfully in this, in this particular game. And it gets us also, you know, sort of why we proposed this paper, which is part of a larger special journal issue around time and video games. But it's, it gets you to think about, oh, these games are also fun because they can model time in different ways as well.

Christine Becker 29:45

What a fascinating game? What platforms is it on?

Matt Payne 29:49

Any, any basic computer with a webcam.

Christine Becker 29:52

Okay, so, yeah. Oh, so you're saying yeah, the cameras, the interface, so that's how it...

Matt Payne 29:56

Yeah, you can play with a with a button, but it's, then there's no there's no stakes. Yeah, it's easy just to click forward, yeah, harder to keep your eyes on it.

Christine Becker 30:06

Yeah. Well, I'm fascinated then that by that idea of like a physical commitment. So it's not just like a mental one that we think of when you're trying to stay attentive to a story, but like, physically, you have to think about your own body. It sounds like a story as well involves notions of thinking about your own body.

Matt Payne 30:11

So yeah, and it's like I said, as I get older, I love shorter games more and more, and a two hour long experience is like, that's totally up my alley. Yes, sign me up.

Christine Becker 30:35

Right. Anything you're looking forward to the next four days?

Matt Payne 30:40

I'm looking forward to seeing grad school friends that I haven't seen since last year. I'm always inspired, always rejuvenated by the conference. It's both like equal parts like, because I think I'm more introvert than extrovert. So it takes a little bit more effort for me, and I'm sure as I'm on the South Shore Line headed back to South Bend, I will be completely exhausted, but until then, I'm looking forward to reconnecting and being reminded of why we do the things we do and why we ask the questions we ask them.

Christine Becker 31:15

Yeah, it's helpful to get that annual reminder. Or however often, you know, you go to conferences, it's really important to and now more than ever, given the state of the world, feeling like, you know that I, you know my paper's about what a TV director does with a comedy, and it's like, Who gives a shit, really? But why it is important, why it's about, and especially I love what you talked about, that notion of, it's not so much games, it's play, and why that matters. And thinking about this director, that he directed a couple of episodes of Freaks and Geeks, which is my, one of my all time favorite TV shows, like that show just means so much to me. That matters. That's important to figure out why people care about these stories, what these stories feed back to us and the person who directed them, and putting the camera there, giving us that message, that matters. And so it can be easy to lose a sense of why that matters when the world's on fire so.

Matt Payne 32:06

And I think there's probably also an argument to be made for also saying, like, I won't let you take that from me, right? Like, I know this, this meant something, but in the Before Times; it should meet something now, and sort of like planning your flag and saying, No, this is still really important. I will, I will fight other fronts, as they have to be, but this is still important.

Christine Becker 32:32

All right. Well, thank you so much, Matt for taking time out. I feel this is perfect to have done this before the conference is even started, because I'm like, I'm all fired up. Now, all right, we've got one more guest, so AJ Christian will come to the table, and he is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and director of the Media and Data Equity Lab. So he is a scholar and producer exploring power and media and technology through creative R & D, uses media, art and research and development as a tool for community building, cultural critique and experimentation, and we have an anniversary happening now. So for 10 years, he's explored how new technologies have transformed the artist, storytelling, production and distribution, and that is through, he co-founded OTV, Open Television, a platform for intersectional television, 10 years ago. So congratulations on the 10th anniversary of Open Television. So tell us about Open Television and how it evolved, and where is it at right now?

32:36

[applause]

Stephanie Brown 33:30

You get to marvel this thing that you built.

AJ Christian 33:30

Well, it obviously, 10 years is my entire 30s at this point, but it is now its own kind of app. It's like you can download it on your phone or TV all your devices. It's a little mini indie Netflix for intersectionality. For me, it came from just a need to kind of get out of my office honestly. And I was new to Chicago, and I wanted community, and so I was connecting with people, and I wanted to keep connecting with them. And so I was just like, let's make stuff. And then other people who are already making stuff found me. And so I was like, well, it's not just the stuff I'm making. It's the stuff you're making too. This stuff being beautiful stories, and it just really evolved organically, and it became very much the source of sustenance on tenure track for me, where I could not obsess over the publication, because I knew that I was doing the work for like other people as well, and that people were getting meaning out of it beyond just like what I thought about the stories that they were making. But now I now I don't want it. It's run by Elijah McKinnon, who's my co-founder. Five years ago, they took over and hired a full time staff, and so now they just do this, and I just sit on the board and sometimes give advice, but honestly, they don't even really need me that much. I get to show up to the events. I didn't have to plan them, just to enjoy myself. So it's really great, but the full story is going to be in my next book, Reparative Media, which will be out in December on MIT Press. So next SCMS, you'll see it on the stands. MIT, do they have a stand here? I don't know. Maybe not. Well, let me know [laughter and crosstalk]because it really was like a completely all-encompassing experience, like it just took all my energy and my heart and my mind and my time to do it, but, like, I wouldn't do it any other way.

Stephanie Brown 35:28

I don't understand how you have time to do this huge other project, while also professor.

AJ Christian 35:35

As most things do, it started small, and then it just kind of got out of hand. Because, you know, the people I was working with, Black people, queer people, women, trans people, especially in Chicago, no one was giving them opportunities, resources for connection. And so when they realized that there was a space that not for me, but for to like, support each other, because I could only give them, like, max $2,000 and a lot of times not even that much, you know, and these things cost more than that. So they ended up, like realizing that this was a way for them to co-create their own form of television. And so just like, it's just kind of like became a thing that was not what I intentionally become.

Stephanie Brown 36:20

Well that's especially amazing to have an idea and it becomes a thing, and then it explodes into something amazing and lasts for 10 years. It's just like this idea of like, coming up with a good idea and being able to see it through is relatively rare, because it's hard, right? And you run into difficulties of time, and you run into obstacles, and you run into doubt and people saying, oh, no, one's gonna watch those shows, right? How did you deal with that along the way? Is it just it just like having faith in the idea and the creators?

AJ Christian 36:45

Oh goodness, the doubt every day, like every, pretty much every day, I was like, Okay, how do I plan this next thing? And also, like, how do I end this project? Because, you know, you're running out of money and you're getting interesting stress. So I mean, if I'm gonna be honest, I really got very into astrology at this year. Chani Nicholas, feminist astrologer, Chani Nicholas, like, counseled me through this. Like I took all her courses. She asked me questions. I was processing and I was honestly like healing through it. You know, when you're dealing with artists who are oftentimes telling very vulnerable stories, like all of their shit comes out and it brings out all of your shit as well. And I was really processing like childhood trauma through this, like coming into my own as a Black queer person through other people coming into their own queerness and blackness and brownness. So I think that's really what kept me going. It's like, every time I'd be over it, we would like, screen someone's work and like, they just see that this little story that they made, like it touched someone and people cared. And like that is a drug that will keep you through the hardest times, for sure. And I think it's a really important lesson for now. I'm really happy the book is coming out now, because, as you were talking about, we need community. We need these moments of recognition of our little work that we're doing, even if it's just you're writing your academic article on whatever you know, just someone saying, hey, that actually helped me see the world differently in the small ways, like so gratifying, and it's why we do it. We do this work to connect.

Stephanie Brown 38:17

Yeah, I've always found your work to be very inspiring. I've used it in lots of my classes ... fan girl moment. I love the work that you do, but I feel like, I don't know when, maybe a panel that you did at one point, but I feel like somebody asked you about, like, how it contributed to, like, your like, 10-year portfolio or something, and you're like, it doesn't, like they don't. I feel like you said it was a hard thing to balance.

AJ Christian 38:42

Yeah, the book has my tenure story in it, because it became part of how the project, in a weird way, sustained itself. But it did threaten my tenure. And so I talk about in the book, it's a bit of a cautionary tale in a lot of ways, like to junior scholars, like, yes, do this work, but do it super strategically and consciously, and like, I was battling a lot of my own demons at that time. I was, like, really depressed and very much an imposter syndrome. So I was having trouble publishing. And that was the problem. I was pouring my heart into this work because it was feeding me. And my academic work was like the source of all this anxiety. And so it, you know, all that I say, worked out, and it can work out, and I think that's the ultimate lesson of the story. But absolutely, we as an as a field, as a discipline, of just professor, the professoriate, we need to figure out how to value creative and community based work, like the work that you're doing on this podcast, the work that you've done through News for TV Majors and stuff like that is intellectually rigorous work, and scholars should be incentivized to do that work. So I don't know, there's some things happening through some other associations that might be releasing tenure standards for this in the near future. Because you know you and in my department, we have, we're recruiting scholars. We're like, I want to do community based work. I'm going to do creative work. And I think at this time where people are questioning the value of academic work...

Stephanie Brown 40:04

Yeah, it seems like it'd be like, this is an advertisement for, like, what we can do.

AJ Christian 40:08

Right? Like, show people what we do. Do it with people outside of academia, and then we can actually build power in society, so people fight for higher education.

Christine Becker 40:16

And I think there's something so important about Open Television, too, the platform it gives to people, like a voice. And as you were saying, people seeing their stories, you know, including the notion of independent television as a space for that. It's so important, and, you know, it's really inspiring. How Open TV has been a trailblazer for that. And I would hope there be, you know, others who want to create that kind of model. Because I think just that idea of a voice for people who would be marginalized within the normative system of television is just immensely important.

AJ Christian 40:44

Yeah, and people are doing it, and there were people doing it before me, you know? I mean, obviously this is you can go back and back and back, right? There's like, long histories of community-based television and scholarship on community-based work around the world. I was really inspired by public access TV and public TV, the show Soul that ran from 1968 to 1973 was like a huge eye opening moment for me. And when you think about like interdisciplinary television, like every episode was like dance, theater, poetry, music, conversation and like the earliest OTV stuff, we became very known for, like, scripted comedies and dramas. But the earliest stuff I was collaborating with, like performance artists and dancers and people who wouldn't be asked to make TV shows, like, what's your TV show, right? And I think that's really the value of indie TV. And of course, like Issa Rae and Numa Perrier Black&Sexy TV and Revry, the queer TV network, and which is still around and going strong, Kweli TV, black indie TV networks. So there is this movement that just is always in US, where we're just like, Hollywood is just, it's it's exclusive, yeah, and that's part of it's allure. But there's always going to be people who are like, but there's got to be more than that. And thank you for teaching it, because I just think we as media professors, it's our job to kind of give our students these other models.

Christine Becker 40:50

And especially the notion of local models, because this is another really important thing in our times, the entire journalism industrial complex is broken at this point, and so much we're going to need independent media, local media, and that's the media we can trust, because we interact with with people who create it and consume it. And so I think the localism, and I love that you bring up, you know, as a TV historian who loves preserving local television history, I think that's really important to know what people were able to do with much fewer resources than we have now. And it's really inspiring to know when people care about it, when people want to share a story. It's really important. And to, you know, be able to find ways to to continue to express that is so important historically now.

AJ Christian 42:41

Yeah, I have to shout out Alex Juhasz, who, you know, wrote AIDS TV and has been producing Lego television since the 80s, in community, in activist ways. I just screened some of her newest films at my house, actually, before.

Christine Becker 42:54

Yes, thank you for coming here after.

AJ Christian 42:57

Yeah, and we're screening it tomorrow again at Northwestern at 6pm because, yeah, I think that we've been talking a lot about how in these times, there is so much more power, even in a screening of like 10 people, because those are 10 people in your city who you now have a shared point of reference. And so much of what's happening right now is hyperlocal, right like, literally, postdocs and grad students are getting grabbed off the street, you know, and just like the more that we know each other in our spaces, the safer we are. And so community media has never been more important.

Christine Becker 43:31

Yeah. Well, let's see your panel Friday, 11am Centering Black Narratives Across Media and Across Time, and your paper, "How Do Black Lives Matter to Hollywood: Marketing Black Trauma and Joy on Streaming Platforms." So what can you tell us about that?

AJ Christian 43:45

So this is interesting. It's very much a one-off kind of side project for me. You know people who know me, I'm just always talking about community and indie stuff. I write about Hollywood, but only as like a critique and then to pivot to indie. But this is a paper that's about Hollywood, which is maybe the only one I will write. It came out of this discourse that really got amplified in the pandemic and after of creatives in Hollywood, Black creatives in Hollywood, complaining that there's, like, too much trauma on TV, and how they wanted to sell TV shows and films that were about like Black joy or just every day, or complexity. And so I started to think, I was talking to grad students, and I was just like, is that actually true? Is there lots of Black trauma on TV? So we tried to figure out, how do you tackle this question? And we decided to just look at all of the Black Lives Matter playlists that emerged after 2020, which was the way that, like these streaming companies turned the largest process protest movement in history to, like a marketing opportunity, right?

Stephanie Brown 44:51

Hulu. And it's like the yeah.

AJ Christian 44:53

Yeah, some of them were like, Celebrate Black Stories. Netflix's was bBack Lives Matter. I think HBO had like a Juneteenth playlist. And so we just went through the playlists, we cataloged all the shows and films on there. There were like 250 or so of them across most of the major platforms. And we analyzed the trailers, and we just decided, like, what's the overall valence of the trailer? Is it mostly focusing on trauma? Is it mostly focusing on joy, or is it kind of in between, which we called just life. Is it the complexity of life, joy, or trauma? And then what we realized, actually, my undergraduate research assistant Chiara Hill realized that the ones that were could not easily be categorized as trauma or joy, were either about really, really famous people or everyday people. But there were a lot about really famous people and like, so the narrative was like, if you were famous, you could have complexity in your story, right? Like you could have the highs and the lows. But there were a lot of trauma stories. I think 40% of the sample were trailers that were just clearly trauma forward and like, that was it. It was like, violence of all kinds, domestic violence, fictional violence, actual violence, police violence, slavery, etc. Which is interesting, because when you look at the '90s, Black TV was very joyous, right? It was mostly sitcoms. They were, it was on broadcast TV, right? So you couldn't be too edgy. And the after effect of streaming, where you can tell any kind of story, you lean into the edginess of it, you know? So anyway, we'll talk about all the other codes and what we found.

Christine Becker 46:24

Interesting. That's fascinating work. So we've asked the other two, so we'll ask you also, what are you looking forward to coming in the next few days?

AJ Christian 46:32

I'm looking forward to the Book Expo. Yeah, because I live in Chicago, so I can finally just buy the books and take them home. Right? Yes, I'm gonna go crazy.

Christine Becker 46:45

Awesome. All right, that's great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you coming out here, and your work is so amazing, and thank you for it,

AJ Christian 46:54

Yeah, thank you for having me, and thank you for continuing to do this podcast. It's an incredible service to the field.

Christine Becker 46:58

Thank you. Well, that's a really good point to end on, because we are just about out of time. This has been such a really fascinating conversation with all three of our guests. [applause] So thank you to them. Thank you to Stephanie for stepping in for Michael. Sorry, Michael you missed a really great episode. And have a good night. And those here at the conference have an amazing time over the next four days in Chicago. All right. End session for all. [Ending music]