Christine Tomlinson

• PhD
• Assistant Professor of Games and Esports at Arizona State University

Video games offer a wealth of potential topics for instruction at the university level. Theoretical content can be made more concrete and accessible and allow students to consider course content in new ways. Topics related to biases, stereotypes, behaviour, representation, and ethics can be explored. This is particularly true for narrative-rich gam...

»Fictional Practices of Spirituality« provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of...

Online spaces offer fan communities and content creators many outlets for expressing their interests, but they also tend to place users in positions where they encounter hostility, toxicity, and gatekeeping. In the case of online streaming on Twitch, users frequently encounter hostility based on identity and seek assistance from fellow users via so...

Digital games have long been investigated for links to negative influences, but they exert a range of impacts on players. A variety of factors can contribute to stressful experiences in play, including game content, player interactions, and gender. This project uses qualitative methods to better understand how players experience and perceive these...

The resurgent interest in cyberpunk in video game cultures centers the genre's historical and racially problematic themes. Moreover, competitive/online play and the attending toxicity, along with recent Covid-19 based anti-Asian sentiments center the need to theorize the discursive patterns in which these phenomena appear. Taking the recurring talk...

Video games are not immediately synonymous with romance, but role-playing games can present players with opportunities to flirt, establish digital relationships, and even experience intimacy with pre-programmed in-game characters. This project explores understudied elements of video game players’ emotional investment in games through romantic narra...

Video games have become a major source of entertainment across the globe. Along with this growth as a form of leisure, video game companies have recognized the importance of the communities and cultures that consumers build around their products. Fans establish identities linked to their gaming habits, whether they are playing games themselves or v...

Esports offer a new and unique opportunity for fans. Not only can fans watch professional players, but they can experience the game directly as players themselves. In this paper, we explore esports fan identity at the intersection of viewer and player in Overwatch, League of Legends and FIFA forums, considering a spectrum and influence of geek to s...

Most aspects of life involve gender gaps in terms of entrance, experience, and outcome. Video games have largely not been an exception to this, but more recent studies are finding that factors other than gender may be more powerful as predictors for similarity or difference among players. This study uses interviews with 54 current adult video game...

The intricacies of romantic relationships in popular video games.

Hostility in video games has been a cause for concern since multiplayer gaming began gaining popularity. Many of the studies conducted on this topic have highlighted negative behaviors as particularly aggressive toward women, but relatively limited in the broad context of general audiences or in contrast to positive multiplayer encounters . This st...

Social problems scholars have pointed to sensitive depictions of social problems like smoking, rape, and spousal abuse on television as evidence of the success of movements devoted to those causes. Media scholars have countered that the pressure on television producers to hew to formula inevitably leads to stereotypical depictions of social problem...