[SIGCIS-Members] NEXT FRIDAY July 18 @ 1PM // ROMchip Presents: Carly Kocurek on "Dolly Ludens: American Girl Dolls Playing Games"

[Laine Nooney]

Join us Friday, July 18, as *ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal> *hosts cultural historian
Carly A. Kocurek for a talk titled "Dolly Ludens: American Girl Dolls
Playing Games*."* The event will be at 1PM ET on the ROMchip Twitch channel
<https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal>. Sign up for our newsletter
<https://romchip.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=27c1594af9abf2dc80455091b&id=caaf5790a7>
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These tickets serve as calendar reminders for the event. Head to
https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal join the talk on July 18.

*About the Talk*
When American Girl launched their totally 1980s historical character
Courtney Moore, fans and critics alike fixated on the doll's flashiest
accessory: A doll-sized Pac-Man arcade cabinet. To some, the integration of
video games into a doll line that often frames itself as a producer of
modern heirlooms seemed a departure from the brand's well-established
ethos. But, ever since Pleasant Company first launched the American Girl
doll brand in 1986, the historical characters have come with their own
doll-sized games, signaling clear ideas about how girls--both today and in
the past--should spend their time. Join video game historian Carly A.
Kocurek for a discussion of American Girl's history of doll playthings and
what they tell us about how historical girlhood and girl's play is
recrafted for contemporary consumers.

*About the Speaker*
Carly A. Kocurek is a cultural historian specializing in the study of new
media technologies and video gaming whose research has been funded by the
National Science Foundation. She is the author of two books, *Coin-Operated
Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade*
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816691838/coin-operated-americans/> (Minnesota,
2015); and *Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls*
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/brenda-laurel-9781501319778/> (Bloomsbury,
2017); co-author of *Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing
Game* <https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/vh53wz85d> (Amherst,
2024); and co-editor of *Historiographies of Game Studies: What it Has
Been, What it Could Be*
<https://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies/> (Punctum,
2025). Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals,
including* Game
Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly,*
 and *Visual Studies,* among others. With Jennifer deWinter, she co-founded
and co-edits the Influential Game Designers book series for Bloomsbury.

Her games have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Paste
Magazine called her game Choice: Texas “one of the best games of 2014.” She
has won awards from the Golden Cobra Challenge and Indiecade Climate Jam
and successfully crowdfunded multiple games and creative projects,
including the solo tabletop role-playing game Golden Mart
<https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-mart/golden-mart>.

As Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at Illinois Tech, she
teaches courses on digital culture, interactive storytelling, game design,
and media history. She also works with both undergraduate and graduate
students on collaborative research and design projects and founded the
gamebIITes annual festival of student games.

*About **ROMchip*
*ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories <https://www.romchip.org/>* is a
free, online scholarly journal for game history. *ROMchip *develops, edits,
and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of
audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of
games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game
history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced.
*ROMchip* is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by The Hack
Foundation <https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/> (d.b.a. Hack Club), a
501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).


Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/>

Associate Professor |  MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU
<http://www.nyu.edu/>  | they/them
Managing Editor  |  ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories
<https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal>  |  Join our Newsletter
<http://eepurl.com/crCul1>

-Need to make an appt? Click, don't email:
https://calendar.app.google/V9ZuMRWEKnnUBdQ56
-Probably typed by voice recognition, so please cherish typos
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