Research and Experience

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Games and Esports in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University where I also co-lead the XP Lab. I was previously a postdoctoral researcher with the SDU Metaverse Lab in the Game Development and Learning Technologies program at the University of Southern Denmark and am continuing work with the lab as a consultant on the Games Globally project. I was also a games studies specialist with the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and the UX/UI lead with Activision’s User Research team. I also worked as a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine where I developed three courses on video games for a new program focused on games for the school.

My research is interdisciplinary, but informed by my training in Sociology and centers on:

  • Video game design, aesthetics, and genre
  • Video game player interactions and experiences
  • Gaming culture
  • Identity, gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity
  • Game development
  • Sociotechnical analytics
  • Game analytics

Teaching

My teaching experience and course offerings have covered a wide range of topics and approaches. While working at the University of California, Irvine, I developed three courses for their new program in the School of Social Sciences covering topics from video game design to cultural and social impacts of video games. These courses were offered once per quarter and were titled Introduction to Video Gaming (an in-depth syllabus for which was featured in Teaching the Game: Volume I), Video Games and Society, and Gender and Video Games. I also taught an upper-division writing course on American Culture, a course on Computational Research in the Social Sciences, and developed a course called Introduction to Data Science and UX Research. In my current role at ASU, my teaching centers on game development and creation, including courses like Designing Play and Game Engine Fundamentals.