Writing
A Room to Play
2025 article Computers and CompositionTeaching students to conduct "collaborative close play" with video games depends on building the infrastructure for game pedagogy.
Games as Epistemic Mediators
2024 article ConfigurationsGames performed computation before there were computer games. Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Bateson show how game models shape knowledge in the human sciences.
Simema: The Aesthetics of Autoplay
2024 essay InterplayAI-driven video games we watch instead of play... don't we already have a name for non-interactive moving images? Instead of figuring it as a break from video game tradition, this essay argues that the self-playing game is best understood in continuity with cinema -- as Simema.
Exercises in Humility
2023 article LeonardoWhereas most games encourage prediction, reinforce norms, and furnish a sense of mastery, recursive games like the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the "fumblecore" video game Sumotori Dreams can frustrate calculation, unsettle habits, and humble players.
Playing at SLSA
2023 reflection ConfigurationsThe intellectual and emotional support provided by institutions like SLSA helps foster interdisciplinary inquiry by assuaging the anxiety that rises when we overflow the bounds of our research field -- what I call the anxiety of effluence.
Better Problems
2021 review essay Qui ParleIn this review of Patrick Jagoda's Experimental Games, I argue that past experiments with games can help us go beyond neoliberal solutionism by inventing "better problems."
Training for the Military?
2021 article EludamosA media philosophy of the computer game must grapple with its debt to the military-industrial complex.
Video Game Novels
2021 entry Encyclopedia of Video GamesProposes three categories for categorizing novels informed by video games: the Ludic Novel, the Gamer Novel, and the Video Game Novelization.
Reimagining Play with Lewis Carroll's Croquet
2020 curatorial note In Media ResBeyond games that derive formal paradigms from "normative ideologies" (Chang 19), Carroll's croquet suggests that non-binary, eventful play emerges from coupling "game" with the contingencies of life itself.
A More Realistic View
2020 article ExtrapolationIn her Parable series, Octavia E. Butler explores the consequences of felt interconnectivity through hyperempathy syndrome. Complicating affect theory and new materialism, she suggests that embodied entanglement is no panacea for human and non-human relations; it's a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.
The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane
2020 essay Post45Reworking Mark Fisher's articulation of hauntology to think the interpersonal, the authors explore how BoJack and Diane stage a common but difficult to parse experience: how it is sometimes the indeterminacy, not the certainty, of a relationship's future that sustains it.
Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator
2020 article Journal of Gaming and Virtual WorldsQWOP intervenes in the normalized grammar of video game walking. By making movement awkward, distributed, and failure-prone, it exposes how walking controls encode a normative bodymind and turns embodied literacy into a critical problem.
Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject
2019 chapter Playing the FieldThis chapter reads Ready Player One (2011) as didactic fiction for neoliberal subject formation, where developing gaming literacy drifts into obsessive self-optimization.