Nerd Nite will return Sept. 8th at the legendary Stardust Video & Coffee.
PRESENTATION #1: “How Pokémon Helps Us Learn to Be Our Very Best Selves” by Daniel Kaufmann, Ph.D. (@DrGameology)
DESCRIPTION: Video games provide an amazing opportunity for us to learn about ourselves and what motivates us to pursue various kinds of goals in life. The Pokémon series of games is no exception to this. With each new region, players around the world explore far and wide to assemble a Pokémon party that feels special to them. This talk will review a few basic insights these games offer from a psychological perspective, and will share some models a person can explore to better understand what makes the play of video games become a fulfilling activity for them from a psychological perspective.
BIO: Dr. Kaufmann, PHD is an Assistant Professor, researcher, licensed counselor, Twitch streamer, and podcaster who focuses on using insights from video games and other fandom properties to aid our mental health journey and discover our strengths. His research on the psychology of player types has been presented internationally and continues to evolve with each new world players can inhabit across PC’s and consoles. He also continues to share a never-ending analysis on who we become when we play games at fan conventions, in published books, and through collaborations with other professional who share a passion for video games and the messages they offer each of us who play!
PRESENTATION #2: “A brief taxonomy of ‘Speculative Fiction’ SUBGENRES… major historical variations, evolutions＆innovations” by Ben Forbes Griffith
DESCRIPTION: “Science-Fiction”＆“Fantasy” are merely the most obvious, oversimplified for “genre” fiction bookstore cataloguing, and recently increasingly mainstream tip of a very deep＆broad “iceberg” of imaginative worldbuilding by a plethora of significantly diverse authors!Learn how to tell if your Sci-Fi is 
“hard” or 
“soft” or if your Fantasy is “high” or “low” or grimdark, and so much more! If your awareness of “punk” style speculative fiction subgenres is limited to Cyberpunk 2020 or some Steampunk cosplay you saw at a festival with some dapper mustaches＆top hats, elaborately customized goggles, and elegant Victorian clothes, then this is precisely the talk you need to seriously punk up your fiction intake!
BIO: Ben Forbes Griffith is just another middle-aged nerdy intellectual with too many hobbies and never enough time for them all… His day job paying the bills in recent years is as a web-developer, but he is a former history teacher and lifelong learner who spends much of his free time happily dwelling in the past (or in fantastical worlds of his own imagining); toward that end, he is an insatiably curious bibliophile, experienced tabletop-roleplaying gamer, and aspiring creative writer.
Twitter = @BFGriffith