I’m writing a book, directing UVic’s Media Studies program, and teaching “Intro to Media Studies” (70 students) and “Game Studies” (38 students) this Spring. I’m also finishing an essay on Citizen Sleeper and supervising projects on fandom, livestreaming, and video essays about video games.

My book is 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 extradiegetic 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.

I started writing the book in the late 2010s as a monograph about video game audio. I still account for audio in some of my analysis. Now I treat it as a feature of genre.

Feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to talk more about teaching and research, and at the moment I’m focusing most of my academic energy 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 12 December 2024.

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