Assistant Professor, Department of English
Course(s):
• Introduction to Video Game Studies (ENGL 4375: Topics in Digital Studies)
Alongside video game-centered courses, I plan to teach classes on critical theory, film studies, digital media, and the history of play. Currently, I’m working on an entry-level “Video Game Analysis” course that’s designed to bring undergraduates from the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts together to think critically about how video games are made.
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“I am looking forward to engaging the resources of The Basement to foster game-based research and learning at the intersection of the sciences and the arts here in Arlington."
Tell us a little about your story, what brought you to UTA?
My youth was dedicated to a dream: competing for England (where I’m from) in the decathlon. At 9 am on Friday, July 10th, 2015, I was about to begin pole vaulting when I got the call. My wish would be fulfilled by the end of the month. Now, the British reserve an idiom for exceptional displays: that’s all well and good, but can he do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke? As an athlete, I could only do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke. Fortunately for me, the competition was set to be in Hexham, three colder and rainier hours further north. Where others faltered, I set personal records. It was the performance of my sporting life, but it was also the beginning of the end of that life.
Next month, having traveled to Estonia, I could not do it on a hot, dry day in Rakvere. Sprinting down the back straight of the 400m, the final event of day one, my body was screaming at me to stop – no injury, only apathy; that’s all I can remember. I started decelerating – a run, a jog, a walk, a standstill. As I exited the track, other athletes asked me whether I was okay, worried I’d hurt myself. I hadn’t: no pain, just shame. Why did I do that? What was the point of coming out here just to… suck? There’s only one thing worse than a bad time, and that’s no time. The decathlon was over. The season was over. But it took me another, hard, hard year to realize that, truly, my career was over. I didn’t love it anymore. Sometimes the body knows more than we do.
If I hadn’t been an athlete, I wouldn’t have settled on some of the subjects that animate my research: gaming, playing, and training. If I hadn’t stopped being an athlete, I wouldn’t have become an academic, and I might have pursued a career in coaching instead (a profession that, in the UK at least, is remarkably even more precarious than higher education). I did my BA and MA in English at Loughborough University, which is known as a drinking college with a sporting problem. For where I am today, I must thank both those coaches who encouraged my exerholism and those professors who held the academic door open despite my best efforts to close it. I aspire to perform a similar function for our students at UTA.
It's a blessing to fall out of love with something before it ends. When I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) to start my PhD in English in 2017, I wasn’t missing track & field, and I had a lot of energy – there’s something invigorating about not training for forty hours a week – but I didn’t know how to direct it. Enter Gregory Flaxman: the director of my energy and, ultimately, dissertation. After working primarily with literature – my BA thesis was on Shakespeare, and my MA thesis on Thomas Pynchon – he encouraged me to grapple with other media too, so I completed graduate certificates in film studies and digital humanities at UNC-CH, focusing my research efforts on video games.
About halfway through my degree, I started working as the Game Research Coordinator for UNC-CH’s new NEH-funded Critical Gaming Program (2020-). The premise was that students should have the opportunity to study the video game in the same way they do film, literature, and fine art. Few faculty members at UNC-CH, however, had formal training in emerging media. My role involved running workshops that introduced instructors to games, inviting speakers who shared pedagogical insights, and creating various teaching resources, which now accompany the Greenlaw Gameroom, UNC-CH’s first game-based classroom. You can read press coverage here and here.
It took a lot of effort and funding to create this space that allows students to access video games for free. A great thing about UTA is that it already has such a space, and a rich Esports tradition to boot. I am looking forward to engaging the resources of The Basement to foster game-based research and learning at the intersection of the sciences and the arts here in Arlington.
What are your academic and research interests?
My research lies at the intersection of film and media studies, game and play studies, and science and technology studies, especially with respect to the history of play from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. I have published in journals including Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, and I frequent conferences like SCMS, DiGRA, and SLSA (which is conveniently in Dallas this year!).
My current project – Untimely Play: History, Habit, Games – takes an historical approach to our age in which games increasingly govern life. Traditionally, play has been considered an activity separate from any practical purpose, but now, as games infiltrate our smartphones, classrooms, and offices, turning labor into playbor, it clearly has purpose aplenty. What happened? In chapters that traverse colonial cricket, military training, workplace roleplay, and video gaming, Untimely Play retrieves neglected files from the archive of game history to argue that play has helped us adapt to our social, cultural, and technological conditions since the late nineteenth century. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that today’s play seems to approximate work, for it is a product of our neoliberal time. And yet, by drawing on the game-based art and criticism of “untimely” figures like C. L. R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Harun Farocki, and Bennett Foddy, I contend that play remains a means of introducing difference because, in play, we don’t just learn from “what is;” we learn from “what if.”
My turn to video games reflects my longstanding investment in science fiction, which produced an article on Afrofuturism, a chapter on Ready Player One (2011), and an entry on video game novels. More recently, I’ve published on both the perils and promises of digital play: my article, “Training for the Military,” employs media archaeology to grapple with the video game’s debt to the military-industrial complex; and my articles on “fumblecore” video games argue that their obstreperous control schemes prompt critical reflection by defamiliarizing human-computer interaction. Inspired by these experiments on the one hand, and the playful art of Fluxus on the other, I design games that unsettle the habits of interactive media. My video game Platform Orthographer (2021), for example, poses questions about the optical conventions of computational media by having players navigate a 3D world from a 2D perspective.
Furthermore, I have written about pre-twenty-first century game models, metaphors, and practices in non-entertainment domains – what I call gamification avant la lettre. Known as the “drosophila of artificial intelligence,” it’s widely accepted that chess has been central to twentieth-century AI research. My work reveals that various games have been used to transform activities into a series of discrete steps with explicit rules – into algorithms – for quite some time, which begs the question that forms the basis of my second project: Were games computational before there were computer games?
Ultimately, my scholarship on games stems from an abiding conviction that we need to think critically about popular media if we are to reckon with our digital age. Occasionally, that means writing about other cultural forms – like this fun, somewhat personal, essay on the TV show BoJack Horseman. But most of the time, it means embodying the phenomenon I study. For there are no surer symptoms of the convergence of labor and leisure than the academic who, when asked what they do for a living, answers: “I work on play.”
Any desired interdisciplinary collaborations?
Interdisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of my scholarly ethos because I believe that it is in bridging the gap between different domains of knowledge that we, suspended in the air, acquire a new perspective. At UNC-CH, I helped run various events that brought different fields of research together: a “Medieval Gaming” night, where we considered both board games from medieval times and representations of the medieval in video games today; a collaboration with the American Indian and Indigenous studies program that brought Western Abenaki game designer and scholar, Ashlee Bird, to speak; and a “Critical Smash Tournament” with the Esports Club that got e-athletes to think critically about the games they train for. I even used to facilitate a course run by a professor from the Classics department who used the “Discovery Tour” mode in Assassin’s Creed: Origins to immerse her students in Ancient Greek architecture. (You might have noted the Assassin’s Creed character in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. They used a model of the Notre Dame Cathedral from the video game to rebuild the real deal). The list could go on. In short, I’m keen to collaborate with anyone who wants to explore similar events or learn more about integrating games into their teaching or research, especially those already working with virtual worlds and simulation technologies.
Any news releases or publications that you are featured in that you’d like to share?
Auspiciously, Configurations recently published the article that served as my writing sample in my UTA application, “Games as Epistemic Mediators: Rethinking Gamification with Morgenstern, Von Neumann, and Bateson.” Drawing on the history of game theory and cybernetics, I argue that games served as a means of making knowledge long before our so-called “age of gamification.”
Anything else you’d like to share?
My first dog was called Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo. It was a hassle to call him inside. We grew up in my parents’ house, a thatched cottage built circa 1693. Living in the United States, I am seldom impressed by how old something is.
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