General Research Interests

My research interests comprise of game, fandom, authorship, and circulation studies. While these are diverse in themselves, I see them intersecting in a critical line of inquiry: how artifacts and audiences evolve through ongoing interaction in a variety of seings and through a variety of participants–and what the implications of this are. I have long been interested in how something, whether a game or a news story, can manifest different rhetorical experiences as it circulates and how different participants, from the author and beyond, construct, modify, and interact over an artifact. This began in my masters program, where I looked at fanfiction, and has continued into my current work, including the dissertation.

Immediate Research Projects

My primary research work is my PhD dissertation “Games Beyond Titles: Game Circulation & Fandom,” which looks at the unique quality of gameplay and how its uncertain, interactive, and emergent modality allows various participants and platforms to interact and compose new experiences and stand-alone compositions. The work brings together different sites of inquiry, particularly the composing power of games in works like machinima and the rhetorical and inventive power games have as emergent, interactive systems. It also builds on this with the inclusion of modding and social media uses.

In particular, my first chapter articulates the tension between a static unenacted game and the emergent, interactive quality of gameplay but builds off this distinction through scholarship on invention and fandom. In particular, I argue for an expansive view of the invention work that transpires through play and related activities surrounding play, like streaming, modding, and machinima. The next three chapters apply this model to three case studies: The Sims, Skyrim, and City Skylines. These chapters focus on the games and the interactions between developers and the broader game fandom, using a range of primary documents from the Internet Archive and other digital sources, as well as archival work from the Strong Museum of Play. Collectively, these case studies show the dynamic, uncertain, sometimes productive or sometimes exploitative and fraught relationship between various participants and the platforms where these interactionstake place. I have also presented on this general topic at a variety of conferences, including Watson, Computers and Writing, and CCCC.

Future Research Agenda

While the majority of my work has tended to be at conferences and lower-level publications like blog carnivals and conference proceedings, I am in the process of polishing up past work from these presentations as well as a chapter on transmedia storytelling through DnD to send out for publication.
In terms of other directions, while I will likely continue my current interest in game studies, fandom, authorship, and circulation, my current work has produced two future tracks of interest. First, I have long been interested in the role of leisure and “play” as it may overlap with work, like how the Latin word for leisure informs our word for school and the root of leisure in the liberal arts. Relatedly, my dissertation work has exposed me more to streaming and other forms of “playbor” that have informed our current economy, and I wish to explore this research further.

Second, my interest on circulation studies increased my already latent interest in misinformation, fake news, post-truth rhetoric, etc., at both a research-oriented and practical level. For example, considering Laurie Gries’ “Swastika Monitor,” how does hate circulate, subvert, infiltrate, and dominate spaces online and in the world? How does misinformation, authored by humans and nonhumans, affect the ethos and reliability of authorship, especially when media can be retextualized by savvy textual poachers? This issue of circulation and media literacy has especially informed my teaching since the 2016 election, and some of my own research has touched on similar issues of online hate like the toxic fandoms around certain games. Gamergate, for example, was one of the progenitors of the alt-Right and the subsequent spreaders of current far-Right, destructive hate.

In conclusion, I find that the emergent, interactive, systems-oriented nature of games along with our high-circulation and fan-oriented world provides many fascinating sites of interest, ranging from the joyful and creative to the dark and controversial.