HWS News
6 June 2024 • Faculty Zulkarnain Presents on Interactive Media and Games
During the international CIVIC Interactive Media and Games Symposium, Assistant Professor of Media and Society Iskandar Zulkarnain discussed Atari, Dingdong and the New Order Regime.
This spring, Assistant Professor of Media and Society Iskandar Zulkarnain was invited to present a talk at the CIVIC Interactive Media and Games, Spring Symposium at Cornell University along with faculty from Chinese University of Hong Kong and Texas A&M. The symposium was the culmination of the CIVIC Interactive Media and Games Initiatives’ three-year program in which they invited an array of international scholars from various backgrounds to present their work on interactive media and games.
At the symposium, Zulkarnain delivered a talk titled, “Atari, dingdong, and the New Order Regime: Tracing the Emergence of Indonesian Video Game Cultures.” The talk explored the development of video game culture in Indonesia under the New Order regime during the early 1980s, by examining two case studies: the introduction of the Atari VCS console to the Indonesian market in 1981 and the popularity of Dingdong, a local term for coin-operated video game arcades during the same period. The topic of the talk itself is part of Zulkarnain’s book-length project tentatively titled “Traces of Play: Indonesian Video Game Cultures from the New Order Regime to the Reformasi Period.”
Other invited speakers included Elmo Gonzaga of Chinese University of Hong Kong and Regina Marie Mills of Texas A&M University.
Zulkarnain, who re-joined the HWS faculty last fall, teaches courses on global digital media, including “Intro to Global Animation” and “Global Video Games.” He is also one of the co-founders of the Global Digital Humanities Working Group, one of the longest-running working groups under the Central New York Humanities Corridor. The Global Digital Humanities Working Group organizes discussions, workshops and art events that critique and remedy Digital Humanities’ exclusion of minoritized scholarships, particularly those in critical race, postcolonial and feminist studies. Zulkarnain holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, his M.A. in English from Florida State University, and a B.A. in English Literature from Universitas Padjadjaran.
