Contributors

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• Contributors

Ashlee Bird is a Native American game designer and PhD in Native American studies. Her work theorizes digital sovereignty, drawing on Native American studies, media studies, and game studies to address representations of Native American characters in video games. Bird analyzes specific colonial methodologies being replicated within game spaces in order to then replace these with decolonial methods of game design being undertaken by herself and fellow Native game designers with a focus on what she terms “synthetic Indigenous identity,” oriented around promoting Indigenous futures. Beyond her academic writing, she has created three artworks, publicly exhibited seven times in group and solo exhibitions, and has curated one show. Among these are two of her original video games, One Small Step and Full of Birds, which were featured in InDigital Space at the ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Festival in 2018 and 2019 respectively. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Red Dead Redemption that explores the complex relationships different players have with games and undertakes an exploration of the Red Dead Redemption series and what the games have offered (or not offered) to their player bases.

Stephanie Boluk plays, makes, and writes about games at the University of California, Davis. Their work incorporates game studies, media theory, and political economy to explore the relationship between leisure and labor in the post-2008 global economy. They co-authored Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames, as well as a series of small games, including Footnotes and Triforce with Patrick LeMieux. For more information visit https://stephanieboluk.com.

Christopher Carloy is an assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago. His research centers on videogame history, with a focus on the 1990s and 2000s. His dissertation, “‘True 3D’: The Form, Concept, and Experience of Three-Dimensionality in 1990s Videogames,” traced the emergence of “three- dimensionality” as a multivalent and contested concept in video-game cultures in the 1990s and its intersection with shifting styles and experiences in major videogame genres. More broadly, Chris’s work deals with spatiality across media and art forms and seeks to understand videogames as part of much longer traditions of spatial representation and design.

Alenda Y. Chang is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chang’s work has appeared in numerous journals, among them Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Qui Parle, electronic book review, Feminist Media Histories, and Resilience. Her 2019 book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (U. Minnesota Press), develops environmentally informed frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. At UCSB, Chang co-directs Wireframe, a studio promoting collaborative theoretical and creative media practice with investments in global social and environmental justice. She is also a founding co-editor of the UC Press open-access journal Media+ Environment.

Edmond Y. Chang is an associate professor of English at Ohio University. His areas of research include technoculture, race, gender, sexuality, queer game studies, feminist media studies, popular culture, and American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recent publications include “Gaming While Asian” in Made in Asia/America, “Imagining Asian American (Environmental) Games” in AMSJ, “Queergaming” in Queer Game Studies, and “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities. He is the creator of Tellings, a high-fantasy tabletop role-playing game, and Archaea, a live-action role-playing game. He is also an assistant editor for Analog Game Studies and a contributing editor for Gamers with Glasses.

David Ciccoricco is an associate professor of English at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He frames narrative fiction as a valuable mode of inquiry into the workings of cognition, and draws on cognitive science and philosophy of mind to establish how fictional minds help explain actual ones. David is the author of Reading Network Fiction (2007), a book on pre-web and web-based digital fiction, and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015), which explores cognitive approaches to narratives in print novels, digital fictions, and story-driven video games. His work appears in Narrative, Poetics Today, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Games and Culture, and Storyworlds journals.

Julianne Grasso is an assistant professor of music theory...