The Fable of Amatryx

Founded in the Department of Media Study at UB in 2022 in the memory of a deceased gaming friend, the Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio is a game studies research and game development space dedicated to social justice and intersectional values and weaving new, playful realities with community partners. This webinar explores the values and vision of Amatryx as a generous framework for innovative, interdisciplinary research and design, arguing that the critical hope generated by community-engaged arts and humanities work is needed now more than ever for imagining better futures. As examples of this vision, lab projects discussed will include a multimedia exhibition of pandemic artwork with several community partners, the development of a narrative anthology video game telling trans stories, archival work preserving the ephemeral history of LGBTQ video games, an edited collection examining the formation of game studies as a field of research, community game design youth workshops and summer camps, and a new project using meaningful gamification to improve worker quality of life with a local manufacturer. Through all of these projects and more, the Amatryx lab invites you to join us in playing toward generous futures.

About Cody Mejeur
Cody Mejeur is Assistant Professor of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY, and Director of the Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio there. Their work uses games to theorize narrative as an embodied and playful process that constructs how we understand ourselves, our realities, and our differences. They are currently the game director for Trans Folks Walking, a narrative game about trans experiences. They are editor of Historiographies of Game Studies (punctum 2025), editor of the special issue of the Narrative journal on trans narratives, and have published numerous articles and book chapters in Games & Culture, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, among others. They are currently Coordinator for the Ombuds Team of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), have served as an Executive Council member for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN), have served as Diversity Officer for DiGRA, and work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive on preserving and visualizing LGBTQ representation.