Bad Games will:

• Thematise games and play as a central yet ambivalent characteristic of digital culture
• Question influential assumptions of the liberatory potential of interactivity
• Reflect on, revise, reject, renovate or otherwise refresh critical modelings of ludic digital culture that assume it be an intrinsically positive, creative or subversive alternative to ‘old media’
• Complicate simplistic moral panics about bad games and their effects
• Consider bad games in the context and rubrics of other ‘bad’ media theory topics like paracinema, trash culture, and comics.

The colloquium will be structured so that participants share proposals and dialogue, discussion and responses rather than as a presenter/question time format.