Above Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop, Colin Marshall talks to Jaime Woo, writer, game designer, co-founder of the Toronto video game festival Gamercamp (the next edition of which happens this month), and author of Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect. They discuss taking the measure of a city by firing up Grindr and examining its men; things people have figured out how to use the app for other than hooking up and sending “a slew of dick pics”; how such apps have illustrated the decreased yet increase importance of living in particular places; the changing signifiers of queer culture, offline and on; how he views the must-touted “multiculturalism” of Toronto; what his 13-year-old self growing up in the suburbs would have thought about Grindr; the app’s stark limitations as advantages that counteract our impulse to too-narrowly define our desires; how to learn about Toronto by observing the couples in its advertisements; the ever-present “distance” in the city, which guards against trends that miss but also prevent the ones that make homeruns; Grindr as a video game, his history with gaming, and what let him to co-found Gamercamp; his mission to bring the novelty and “whimsy” back to gaming, included but not limited to his creation of a new physical game based on the idea of social distance”; how a set of rules forms a system, how that system makes an experience, and when we call that experience a game; and the strategies one can follow to better understand the “rules” of a system like Toronto.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
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