This Spring term, I’m teaching “Media in the 21st Century” (60 students) and “Game Studies” (40 students). I am also directing UVic’s Media Studies program while running the Praxis Studio and Press Record project.

I am still pecking away at a book about “genre anarchy” and the ways genre constitutes play in video games. It articulates metagaming with activity theories of genre, and I am especially interested in the argument that video games don’t have rules (see, for instance, Boluk and LeMieux). Video games differ from tabletop games in this way. They forgo rules, which are voluntary, for mechanics, which are not. Genres fill the “participation gap” that emerges during this shift to mechanics. The genre set subsumes the rule set if you will, as video games rely on “uptake” to socialize not only narratives and mechanics but also play, platforms, and players. Of course, what unfolds in the world of a video game matters for discussions of genre, yet so, too, do the media produced by players and industry alike. My book attends to such media as I examine games from the last decade to better understand the play of genre as play today.

Feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to talk more about teaching and research, and I’m currently focusing my academic energy (including supervisions) on Game Studies.

Featured image by Danielle Morgan. Used and modified with permission. I created this page on 11 May 2021 and last updated it on 4 January 2026.

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