This Spring term I am teaching Media Studies 200: “Media in the 21st Century” at UVic while directing our new Media Studies program.

I am also writing a book about how genres constitute play in video games. It articulates media theories of 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 board and 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; however, I now treat it as a feature of genre.

Feel free to get in touch. I’m always happy to talk more about teaching and research.

Featured image by Danielle Morgan. Used and modified with permission. I created this page on 11 May 2021 and last updated it on 7 January 2024.