Rainforest Scully-Blaker (he/him)

@rainforestsb.bsky.social

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Assistant Teaching Professor in Digital Media 👾🧑‍🏫 Northeastern University Vancouver 🇨🇦 Critical Games + Tech Researcher 🖥️✒️ New book out Spring 2027: https://dukeupress.edu/gaming-exhaustion Find me at https://www.rainforestsb.me/

Northeastern University's Downtown Vancouver Campus
Screenshot from the game Unpacking that features a bedroom filled with carefully placed furnishings and decorations,
The abstract for my paper: This paper discusses truckers who play games (including Truck Simulator) while on the road. Inspired by the concept of “container technologies” and more recent work which distinguishes between containers and containment I ask how these trucker-simulators and their assemblage of concentric machines variously hold, filter, and leak the logics of neoliberal capitalism. To do so, I explore the work and play of the trucker-simulator through three relations of containment that increase in scale from one to the next. I begin with American Truck Simulator (ATS) itself, a game that I argue is designed to be a container of neoliberal, capitalist ideology. Next, I move from the game to the truck cab, which I frame as a physical site of containment for both the trucker-simulator and their gaming battlestation. Finally, I discuss the wider trucking industry as one arm of the organizational network known as logistics. This represents a return to containment-as-ideology, but instead of examining how a game like ATS is informed by culture, I show that is also an artifact that informs culture. I conclude with a discussion of capitalist realism and the ideal of convenience to ask whether we can conceive of other relations to work and play.
Screenshot of my bio from the Intersectional Tech Lab website. It reads: Rainforest Scully-Blaker (he/him) is a Research Affiliate in the Intersectional Tech Lab. He earned his PhD in Informatics from UC Irvine in 2022. He has since worked as a Lecturer in Game Design at Uppsala University and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University. His research concerns critical approaches to the study of games and those who play them, and he is interested in exploring how play can both uphold and dismantle hegemony. His current book project is about exhaustion as a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism and how video games enable and may yet work against the exhausting status quo.
A picture of me!
Games Capitalism and Fear by Rainforest Scully-Blaker, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Tampere University The background image is a spooky yawning face with some pink flowers crudely pasted around it to cute effect.
A screenshot of a slide from the presentation. It features my face crudely photoshopped over a cartoon office lady's head. In one panel, Andreas Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" says, "I want to change the world" to which I respond "Awww you're sweet". In the other, Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" says the same thing and I am on the phone saying "HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?!" implying that version of the message is more distressing and so on. This is a joke of course and in no way reflects my feelings about Jane McGonigal as a person but rather is my way of asking if we can do games research that threatens to change the world in lasting ways as Malm suggests.
Title slide from the talk titled "Critical Game Studies" and the Politics of Hope? by me and Sabine Harrer
K2 The Comforts of Play: Cozy Games and Gaming FAIRMONT Royal B2 LEVEL CHAIR Andrea Braithwaite • Ontario Tech University TALKS Andrea Braithwaite • Ontario Tech University •  “Supercute Crimes and Cozy Mystery Games” Adrianna Burton • University of California, Irvine •  “Reimagining Typical Adventures: Narratives and Aesthetics in Popular ‘Cozy’ TRPGs” Christina Fawcett • University ofWinnipeg • “Death’s Cozy Embrace: Death and the Afterlife in Cozy Gaming” Rainforest Scully-Blaker • Tampere University •  “Happiness is a Warm Mug? Coziness as Late Capitalist Power Fantasy” sponsored by Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group