I study inequitable interactions enabled and enforced by mundane everyday systems that frame and regulate our experiences with digital games and media.
New Book!
Thresholds of Digital Gameplay
My new book with MIT Press is coming out December 2025. In it, I discuss "how a series of interfaces and other elements on the periphery of digital gameplay fundamentally alter the phenomena of gaming. This book examines non-gameplay-centered material or mechanical attachments that surround and enclose gameplay while directing or mediating our experience of it—for example, access controls, character configuration, and microtransactional storefronts." (From MIT Press blurb). Order from most places you an order books!
Recent Publication Highlights
iConference full paper about how participants perceived and interpreted the narrative introductions of women characters in a sample of best selling games. Sample was further divided by games with a woman protagonist and a man protagonist. Findings provide insights into how participants perceive and understand the cultural contexts of characters, and how they appear to understand them positioned along complementary axes of binary opposition (e.g., strong vs. weak, important vs. basic). We also provide methodological insights for how future researchers might reconsider their surveys or interviews to find deeper insights.
IEEE Transactions on Games article about a collaborative, participatory research-through-design project to explore how diverse perspectives may come together to reconfigure how diversity is constructed in digital games, or any virtual setting where bodies are put into play. You can find a companion site for this project at https://ptp-project.com/
Convergence article about about precisely how we and our data become legible to digital platforms and how these inescapable, sometimes inequitable, and often intentionally opaque processes can enforce more rigid, unchanging versions of ourselves in the systems they support.
Digital Games Research Association full conference paper about diverse impressions of representation on game covers, and how it influences the experiences of diverse players and potential players.