ReggieCon returns to Normal this weekend.
The four-day celebration of creativity begins Saturday at Illinois State University, featuring creators and creative thinkers from campus and beyond. There’s a games and comics showcase, a digital music showcase, speakers galore, and panel discussions focused on video games, monsters, and apocalyptic writing, to name a few.
It’s like if a comic-book convention and an academic conference had a baby — and the public is invited.
“The idea is to create these contexts in which we have these long-winded, sophisticated, adult conversations about difficult topics,” said Scott Jordan, chair of ISU’s Department of Psychology and one of the lead organizers of ReggieCon. “Doing it with pop culture topics and artifacts makes it a little safer and less personal a bit for people to talk about these things. Modeling that for the world right now is a big thing for me.”
This is ReggieCon’s fourth year, born out of a monthly series of Zoom conversations. Some of the marquee events for 2024’s live installment include:
- Digital Music Showcase: Noon-3 p.m. Saturday, Bone Student Center [Old Main Room], featuring student audio creations like a sonic petting zoo and mesmerizing sound journeys.
- Games and Comic Showcase: Noon-3 p.m. Saturday, Bone Student Center [Circus Room], where you can play and experience board games, video games, comic books, animations and more, all produced by student gamers, designers, and artists.
- At The Ruins of Contemporary Culture: What Will Tomorrow’s Minds Say About Today’s Selves [conference]: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday, ISU, with a wide array of speakers, including comic artists, musicians, physicists, and cultural activists.
“It’s all free and open to the public. We’re looking to have a blast and, I dare say, be what a university is supposed to be, which is a place responsible for generating sophisticated, nuanced, adult conversations. We’re excited,” Jordan said.
One of the student-led panel discussions on Saturday [from 4-5 p.m.] focuses on video game research, called New Worlds, New Lives. Panelists will talk about gaming from the perspective of an autistic person, identity and representation in games, and games featuring worlds besieged by a mass extinction event.
They’ll “talk about the interdisciplinary importance of video games as not only crucial for understanding the medium itself, but also for exploring broader questions about human experience and creativity,” said organizer and panelist Edcel Cintron-Gonzalez, who is a Ph.D. student in English at ISU.
Cintron-Gonzalez described himself as a “proud Puerto Rican” who focuses on children and young-adult literature. During Saturday’s session, Cintron-Gonzalez will focus on the acclaimed Nintendo game Super Mario Sunshine — specifically on using tools and game mechanics through a cultural-historical activity theory, or CHAT.
In the game Super Mario Sunshine, Mario and friends are on an island called Isle Delfino, experiencing a major ecological disaster that needs to get cleaned up. The island’s villages are characters who describe how it’s impacting them — that they can’t grow crops and make a living as a result. It’s a climate change parable of sorts.
“I identify a lot with that as an islander because I feel like a lot of people see Puerto Rico in that same state," said Cintron-Gonzalez. "They want to visit the island, they want to enjoy a sense of paradise. But how can that happen when the entire land is being decimated by a lack of sunshine?”
