About
28
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Introduction
My research explores the expressive affordances of videogames and other new media forms, looking at how they are mobilised to articulate, interrogate and enact understandings of subjectivity, selfhood and belonging.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (28)
From ‘life simulations’ like The Sims to tactical roleplaying games like Fire Emblem: Fates, from Tamagotchi On to Tokyo Jungle, representations of reproduction and evolution feature in many videogames. But how exactly do games portray these processes? And what do their portrayals reveal about popular understandings of sex and sexuality, pregnancy...
A review of Andrew Burn’s book Literature, Videogames and Learning. Published in 2022 by Routledge. ISBN: 9781032024523, pp. 232.
The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash wi...
For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation l...
IO Interactive’s Hitman is a series rife with satirical social commentary. Whether we are configuring an exquisitely ironic fate for a corrupt politician or disguising ourselves as a clown in order to boobytrap a mobster’s barbecue, Hitman specialises in turning death into a punchline. But should murder be a laughing matter? And don’t ‘slapstick-st...
Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more referentially dense than many walking...
http://what-we-wore.com/
Maintained by photographer and curator Nina Manandhar, What We Wore describes itself as ‘a people’s style history of Britain’. I first encountered it on Tumblr, but in the past five years the project has spread to other social media platforms, spawned a coffee table book, exhibitions and workshops and given rise to spin-of...
Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a fellow player of an online game. An interactive autobiography about a young woman sharing her life online, Cibele explores the terms on which new media enable users to narrate their experiences, represent themselves and forge identities. This article lo...
This special issue follows on from the IABA Europe 2017 conference held at King’s College London hosted by the Ego-Media research group and the Centre for Life-Writing Research, who thank everyone who contributed. The conference theme was “Life Writing, Europe and New Media”: anodyne terms, in the interests of inclusivity, yet their congruence rais...
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses...
Après un article consacré à l’ASMR dans le dernier numéro d’Audimat, voici un nouvel article du jeune universitaire anglais Rob Gallagher, qui analyse cette fois les rapports entre le rap grime et les jeux vidéo. Depuis les classiques de Wiley et Dizzee Rascal, le grime partage plus d’un point commun avec l’univers des jeux vidéo, multipliant notam...
For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used...
Les vidéos ASMR décollent le mince papier peint de nos certitudes du triste mur de la vérité absolue. Ces séances de fétichisme sonore (et relationnel) aux vertus relaxantes, que l’on trouve en masse sur YouTube, bousculent voluptueusement notre perception des frontières entre la musique et le reste du monde audio, qui souvent la déborde. Elles réa...
This book argues that games offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, videogames are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence rou...
A fusion of jungle, garage, hip-hop and Jamaican sound system culture, grime emerged from the housing estates of East London in the early 2000s. The genre has always had strong ties to gaming, from producers who cut their composi-tional teeth on Mario Paint (Nintendo R&D1, 1992) to MCs who incorporate videogame references into their lyrics, album t...
"Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" (ASMR) is a term that has emerged online to describe a mysterious tingling sensation that some people experience in response to particular audiovisual and interpersonal "triggers." Initially coalescing via discussion threads on health forums, ASMR culture quickly began using platforms like YouTube and Reddit t...
In producing an online ‘edition’ of Michael Field’s poem ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian’ from their 1892 collection of poetic ‘translations’ of paintings, Sight and Song, this project aims to suggest how digital tools might enable us to ‘edit’ and present literature in new ways — ways that, in this case, are meant to gesture not just at th...
Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy away from the question of sex. This article considers some of the reasons for this reticence, offering close readings of a number of games in which sex’s absence seems especially significant. Attending to these absences can, I argue, throw light on some pr...
