This academic year, I’m teaching two sections of “Media in the 21st Century” as well as a section of “Game Studies.” I am also directing the Media Studies program, wrapping up an essay on Citizen Sleeper, and supervising projects on fandom, pedagogy, and cheating and affect in games.

I am still pecking away at a book about 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 September 2025.

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