Home > Writing Portfolio

Jump to: Fiction | Articles | Blog Posts

I post a lot of writing on my site for free, but my goal is to do writing, curation and research full time! If you find my writing useful, or use it in a class or syllabus, please consider a paid subscription to my newsletter or a donation so I can spend more time on it.

Fiction

For Domino Club: "perverseoverride" (2022) - Sci fi interactive fiction
For Red Futures Mag: "Scrap Heap" (2022) - Sci fi short fiction
For Red Futures Mag: "Feasibility Report" (2022) - Sci fi short fiction
For Domino Club: "Vault 819, Underground" (2022) - Sci fi interactive fiction
For Red Futures Mag: "Long Haul" (2022) - Sci fi short fiction
Self Published: FLESH/CIRCUIT (2021) - Sci fi visual novel

Articles Published Elsewhere (2014-2022)

In The Arcade Review: "Into the Dive" on RPGMaker and Indie Horror
In The Arcade Review: "Gingiva" game review
In The Arcade Review: "Eidolon" game review
In The Arcade Review: "A Personal Archaeology of 'Girls' Games': On Rhizome's Theresa Duncan Conservation Efforts"
In The Arcade Review: "Homesickened" game review
For Storycade: "Hatoful Boyfriend" game review
In Critical Hits: An Indie Anthology: "Mouse Power!"
In The Blank Arcade 2016 catalog: "The Sensuous Possibilities of Play" [PDF]
For Critical Distance: "Visual Essay Jam Roundup 2017"
For In Media Res: "Transgressive Games: SimCopter"
For Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "90s CD-ROM Games Still Have a Lot to Teach Us"
In ToDIGRA: "Exhibition Strategies for Videogames in Art Institutions: Blank Arcade 2016"
In Now Play This! 2018 catalog: "Looms Will Be Around Long After We Are Dead: On Pattern in Videogames"
For The British Council: Games Storytelling Project
- "Under the Hood of Small Games"
- Interview with Natalie Clayton
- Interview with Jack King-Spooner
- Interview with Niall Moody
For Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "Occupy White Walls Removes the Dark Cloud Hanging Over All Art Exhibitions"
For EGM: "Animal Crossing, SimCity, and the Long History of City Planning in Games"
In Indie Games in the Digital Age (Ed. Clarke and Wang, Bloomsbury 2020): "From tool to community to style: The influence of software tools on game development communities and aesthetics"
In The Journal of Games Criticism, Book Review: Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity
For Critical Distance: "The List Jam Roundup"
For Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "Returning to The Catacombs Of Solaris, perspective maze and nascent 'artsport'"
For REAL LIFE: Play to Lose
In Science Fiction Film and Television: "‘I find this disgusting but I can’t help myself’: Videogame panics and sinister origins in 1990s sf media"
In The Serving Library Annual 2022/23: "Snake Head, Snake Tail"
In Replay. The Polish Journal of Game Studies: "The aesthetics of speedrunning: Performances in neo-baroque space"
In Murdered Futures: A Cronenberg Fanzine: Flesh Only Transforms

Additionally, I also occasionally host interviews on Game Studies research through Keywords in Play, and host writing jams and activities on Critical Distance

Blog Posts

FEB-20-2022: The Handheld is Dead! - For UNDO! Jam, about the potential and loss of handheld computing.
JAN-05-2022: The Museum of Unspeakable Games - In response to the Game Jolt controversy and Oma Keeling's Who Plays Unspeakable Games?
SEP-29-2021: Shell Game - On fictions of automation in theory and automation as theme in my own work.
JUL-23-2021: Hidden in the Walls of this House: Perspective, Absorption and Direct Address in The House in Fata Morgana - Don't be afraid darling, it's only another visual novel review!
MAR-27-2021: Statements Towards the Establishment of a Proof-of-Rest Protocol - for the Alternative Ecologies Jam at Now Play This
MAR-02-2021: A Dark Matter Reading List - on free culture and mainstream culture, organizing together and dreaming bigger dreams
FEB-21-2021: LIST JAM entry - two lists
FEB-15-2021: Provenance is a Technology! - On technologies we already have and the conscripted horizon of the new.
NOV-11-2020: What Have We Gotten From Four Years of Politically Engaged Games Commentary?
OCT-31-2020: Car Fantasia - About videogame cars, cars that can jump, real life cars, and The Last Car
OCT-07-2020: Loving in a World Already Written: moon: Remix RPG Adventure - Review of the cult classic PSX RPG
SEP-05-2020: Videogame Engines as Tools for Mass Art - Transcript of a talk I tried to give at the Game Engines Beyond Games symposium (VOD here!)
AUG-06-2020: Videogames and Arts Funding - about videogames entering the public arts funding arena, ways this can be good, and ways this can be bad
JUL-10-2020: Considering Your Non-Options: Lee Lozano - about refusal, withdrawal, doing things "because you're mentally ill"
APR-10-2020: VN Review: Hashihime of the Old Book Town - about formal concerns when evaluating VNs as videogames
APR-04-2020: New Futures: Speculation Jam 2020 - yet another annual writing jam roundup!
MAR-19-2020: Citygames: New Horizons, Sim City, and The Silver Case - essay about infrastructure and PPP hell
FEB-22-2020: POST-OWNERSHIP: Videogame History from 2024 - Essay for #SpeculationJam
DEC-21-2019: 2019 in Games Writing - Annual writing wrap-up
DEC-20-2019: Games to Remember (20 to take into the 2020s) - Decade list
NOV-12-2019: It's Disgusting But I Can’t Help Myself: eXistenZ’s Unhappy Consciousness for Videogames - I wrote a 3.5k word review of a movie from 1999 because I'm insane.
OCT-28-2019: The One Where I Try to be Funny - violence, ethics, goose game
SEP-16-2019: On Kissing the Cop in Chulip - what it says on the tin
AUG-15-2019: Bridget Riley - review of her retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland
AUG-04-2019: Be Realistic! - about discussions around indie and small games' viability
JUN-24-2019: Statement for "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Digital Play" at King's College London - "Provocation" for an experimental conference format
JUN-11-2019: Love Letters From Eye to Screen - Review/process post for 10 Beautiful Postcards
MAY-29-2019: Feral Vector: Zine Library Talk - A written version of a talk on zine libraries I gave at Feral Vector 2019
MAY-09-2019: Thinking/Game-Gardening Ruderally - Pondering Hito Steyerl's ruderal plants and sustainable game making
APR-20-2019: Do Your Dailies - Time, chance, outcome! Also Kara Stone's Ritual of the Moon
APR-16-2019: Dispatch from the Speculation Zone - London trip recap, review of Hito Steyerl at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
MAR-08-2019: Flappy Bird Will Have Its Revenge On Indie Games - More on IP, ownership, and who can make "creative" videogames.
FEB-28-2019: The Writing Jam Rolls On! What we found in the Lost Histories jam - another writing jam roundup!
FEB-17-2019: Anything a Maze - Essay for #LostHistoriesJam
JAN-15-2019: 2018 in Videogame Blogging - A roundup of my favorite posts from 2018, in defense of blogging.
JAN-02-2019: Three Modernisms! - A Three-Part Essay on the phrase "Modern Videogames"
DEC-29-2018: Review: Videogames: Design, Play, Disrupt (V&A, 2018)
OCT-26-2018: 9/10 Best New Latest Example - On RDR2 controversies, videogame industry labor issues, and how writers approach these topics.

Blog Re-posts (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)

These are all pieces migrated from my old medium and wordpress blogs. Blogs will be added in reverse order as I take them down.

SEP-10-2018: SPEAKING MY TRUTH [real] [NOT clickbait]
JUL-26-2018: Against Playability
JUN-07-2018: How to Desire Videogames
APR-30-2018: The Dream and Promise of Multimedia, Regained...
APR-02-2018: Notes in the Absence of Camp
FEB-18-2018: No Winners, No Ends: Why have a Writing Jam?
NOV-05-2017: Bad Images
OCT-31-2017: Halloween Special: Close-Reading the Godzilla NES Creepypasta
OCT-18-2017: Only You
SEP-01-2017: walk in soda cave story
JUN-27-2017: About "Real UFO Stories" and more broadly, typologies
MAY-15-2017: A MAZE. 2017
APR-17-2017: Now Play This 2017
APR-05-2017: Attention Please:
APR-01-2017: History is the Golden Ticket
MAR-20-2017: If you meet prince charming on the road, kill him
MAR-10-2017: Cosmology of Perpetual Snake Machine
FEB-08-2017: Looking at Girls
FEB-06-2017: Ear Canal Simulator 3000 postmortem
JAN-28-2017: Catching frogs
JAN-18-2017: Consumer History/Language of Advertising
JAN-15-2017: On fanwork and what is "outsider"
JAN-08-2017: Depicting Vulgar Profligacy
NOV-18-2016: On Decay
SEP-26-2016: Ms. Game History?
JUN-18-2016: From Showcase to Scriptorium: Two Encounters with ZX Spectrum Games
JAN-18-2016: On Going Fast
NOV-17-2015: Everything Digit-al: Touching New Media at NEoN 2015
OCT-31-2015: What do we mean by "accessibility?"
OCT-14-2015: Don't play to win
JUN-12-2015: Art, Game, Both, Neither
MAY-15-2015: Art and Purpose Objects
MAR-22-2015: Curation and Games- Forking Paths
MAR-10-2015: Post-Cutscene and other "post-s"
FEB-13-2015: Life after Permadeath
FEB-06-2015: Some cutting room floor thoughts on collage
DEC-10-2014: Needing room to breathe: moving forward with game exhibitions
OCT-11-2014: It never fails
JUL-26-2014: Emulation Generation
JUL-15-2014: Nuts and Bolts, Variables and Functions - Formalism in a Digital Context
MAY-28-2014: A Girl and Her Chopper
APR-20-2014: I've been published!
APR-10-2014: Gender and UI
MAR-02-2014: Art Worlds in Game Worlds
FEB-19-2014: Who's Afraid of a Little Twine?

HOME