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Research
Links to various research papers, posters, and presentations that I’ve put together for conferences, guest lectures, job talks, and the like.
This mostly has material since 2019, but you can find more (and a wider array of topics) on my CV. Most of my research projects also wind up on my github at some point, although it also contains literally dozens of hobby projects that never went anywhere.
- My deepest research topics is choice poetics, which is intended as a technical/critical theory of one particular phenomenon in interactive fiction; a good introduction to the idea can be found in my 2014 Foundations of Digital Games conference paper Towards a Theory of Choice Poetics. A detailed treatment can be found in chapter 5 of my dissertation, which also includes some related experiments in chapters 7 and 8. An example of applying the theory from a non-computational media studies angle can be found in my collaborative 2018 paper Choice Poetics By Example in an Arts special issue on Gaming and the Arts of Storytelling, which examines some choices from Undertale and Papers, Please using the theory.
- At the Foundations of Digital Games 2021 I presented Fractal Coordinates for Procedural Content Generation. You can also access the presentation slides and/or watch a video of my presentation.
- At the PCG Workshop at Foundations of Digital Games 2019, I presented Anarchy: A Library for Incremental Chaos, using these slides. You can access the Anarchy PCG library which includes documentation and implementations in four languages (C, Python, JavaScript, and C#).
- At the Web Based Communities and Social Media Conference 2020 I presented my student Sarah Yan’s work on analysis of twitter responses to Overwatch League games. The presentation slides summarize the work, although the relationships that we had hoped to find were not statistically significant.
- In the summer of 2019 I did research with Hannah May, Christine Lam, and Ohana Turbak on how colonialism in Minecraft manifests at the level of procedural rhetoric. You can see the poster we made, although the research has not yet been published in an academic paper (there’s some other good resources on this topic that have been).
Other Research Info
If you’re interested in games and/or interactive narrative, I’ve put together a list of cool people doing research on games that might be especially helpful if you’re looking for places to go to grad school.