My research as of late most prominently focuses on videogames and their arguably queer relationships to analog texts and objects in post-digital environs. I posit “post-digital” (for my purposes, the condition of tension in contemporary technocultures between near total ubiquity of digital media and counter-cultural resurgence of interest in analog media) as a generatively queer concept at the heart of my ongoing project combining game studies with approaches from electronic literature, embodied rhetorics, and media archaeology. Post-digital as a concept calls into question the binaries defining computational techniques and technologies as completely unique markers of unquestioned progress in order to ask what and who gets left out and left behind by this neoliberal narrative of colonialist productivity above all else. I consider queer videogames, analyzed alongside the representational technologies that precede and influence them, as the best kinds of art for venturing possible answers to these queries. Arriving at this current articulation of my research agenda took me through forays into several different fields and comparative media forms from print to film to digital and back again that still inform my work today.
I am currently completing a short monograph called Novel Media: Post-digital Literature Beyond the Book for Cambridge University Press as part of its new Elements in Digital Fiction series. In this work, I explore the shifting relationship between the novel and emerging media technologies and propose novel media as a conceptual framework for theorizing the novel outside of just the traditionally bookbound and into post-digital modes of delivery. Upon finishing work on this project, I plan to begin my next one, a full-length monograph I call Lectoral Gaymes: The Presence of Print in Queering Digital Play. In this second book, I will analyze the representation of printed artifacts in digital games, from outside of them as paratexts and paraphernalia to inside as remediated items, interfaces, and/or aesthetics constructing the play experiences of certain titles, in order to reread videogame history through a queerly affective focus that will help us understand what this past may tell us about games’ post-digital future. In addition to this research, I have interests in future work on the rhetoric of videogame emulators, itch.io as a games distribution platform, and a case study of game designer Porpentine.
