Get your quarters ready! Dust off your Super Nintendo!  Perfect your avatar’s hairstyle! In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of secret and hidden childhoods by talking about video games. While video games have long been at the center of adult anxieties about childhood, they also invite young people into vibrant virtual spaces. In a conversation with Professors Derritt Mason and Angel Matos we ask how these digital worlds might invite children, teens (and even adults!) to imagine new environments — or re-imagine the world around them? Together we consider how video games make new stories and new modes of storytelling available to young people.

Derritt Mason, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Educational Leader in Residence at the University of Calgary, teaches and researches at the intersection of children’s and young adult literature, media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality. They are the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture and co-editor with Kenneth Kidd of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality, which won the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award in 2021.

Angel Matos, an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, is an expert in youth literatures, queer studies, and screen cultures, with interests in queer young adult literature and culture, teen cinema, video games, Latinx cultures, and theorizations of time and space. His work primarily explores the queer possibilities and limitations in texts and media created for teen audiences. He is the coeditor, with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula Massood, of the book Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures.

For a reading list and associated images, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

Correction:  This conversation mistakenly describes the protagonist of the game Spiritfarer as nonbinary. However, the character, a young woman named Stella, does not identify as nonbinary, We regret the error.