Howdy.
I'm an assistant professor at Texas Tech University where I teach introductory programming and design to students making digital and analog games and telling interactive stories.
My time is spent thinking about how people engage with spaces of imagination and entertainment.
I value computational literacy, creative expression, and iterative design. And I want to help other people do their best work.
Ideas Written Down
Condis Collabs
Collaborations with my writing partner Megan Condis
- A textbook about making games with Bitsy
- Attraction Adaptations of Ride Aesthetics in Disney Theme Park Board Games
(Submitted for review) - Trans-spatial Narratives and Disney's Society of Explorers and Adventurers
(Submitted for review)
Theme Parks
- Finding meaning in the many #homemadeDisney ride-recreation videos made during the pandemic Eludamos, 2022
- How enthusiasts historians and rogue preservationists use archives and incidental media
Forgotten Disney: Essays on the Lesser-Known Productions, 2023 - Theme park attraction recreations made with game tools
Virtual Interiorities, 2022 - Rob Peaslee and I reflect on twenty years of Hobbiton
Screen Tourism and Landscapes, 2023 - Localization and national identity in video games about Tokyo Disneyland Abstract in
Digital Games Research Association, 2022 - Rebecca Rouse and I look for games at World's Fairs
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How visitors of Evermore Park in Utah are introduced to interactive role-playing
Well Played Journal -
The "theme park for one" in video game theme parks, from the NES to the Xbox
Widescreen Journal - How games expand space in theme parks in "Pervasive Playing Epcot with Kim Possible.”
Media Commons – In Media Res -
Pirates of the Caribbean as an accidental transmedia phenomenon
A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces - Exploring
World's Fairs through artifacts and essays
Meet Me at the Fair
Games
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Replicating practices of tourism in games
Locating Imagination -
Video game cities before Grand Theft Auto
VGA Reader Journal -
Motility and embodiment while
Moving Through the Videogame City
+ archival link on the Wayback Machine because
Mediascape is no longer available) - How video games make meaning
through micro-rhetroics
Foundations of Digital Games '12 -
Using games to do journalism
Newsgames: Journalism at Play, MIT Press - Way back in 2015, I spoke at GDC about how teachers could use Twitch streaming with their students to analyze games.
Ideas Still in My Brain
I also have some neat projects in the works!
- "Somebody had to say it: 'close riding' as a form of 'close reading' theme park attractions as texts."
- Learning interactive design in workshop "camps" (as in backpacking in the wilderness)
- The role of animatronics as "The Animated Hosts that Inhabit Disney Parks" (Southwest PCA 2019)
- The History of Shooting Galleries (which I've been trying to write for seven years)