“Hacking” is an evocative term — one that is mired in tropes that reduce a diverse range of practices into a few stereotypically malicious activities. This thesis aims to explore one hacking practice, videogame hacking, whose practitioners make unauthorized alterations to videogames after their release. Through interviews, game analysis, and reflective writing, this thesis investigates videogame hacking subcultures of production — communities of creative labour that exist in the margins of mediamaking and the fringes of the law.

Following the 2008 Global Recession, there was a significant change in the cinematic depiction of at-risk girls and the telos of their girlhood development. Unlike films released between 2000 and 2008, about girls engaging in risky behavior or rendered vulnerable by difficult circumstances, these new representations failed to offer recuperative conclusions showing the protagonists reflecting on lessons learned or disavowing their dangerous involvements. Rather, this new body of films about at-risk girlhood portrayed girls who appeared to be empowered but were unable to overcome their precarious positioning and achieve appropriate adult femininity. Identifying this trend in post-2009 recessionary festival films from the United States, Canada, France, Peru, and China, this dissertation performs dialogical textual analyses of similarly themed works about precarious girlhood development. This work looks closely at relationships between worsening inequalities under neoliberalism and the ideology’s increased emphases on individual responsibility and the cultivation of resilience and flexibility. At the same time, it examines how this interrelationship reconfigures the significant roles that mother/daughter relationships, domestication, consumption and female best friendship traditionally play in girls’ enculturation into adult femininity onscreen. Using an intersectional feminist phenomenological approach, this project pursues two lines of inquiry investigating the emergence of new feminine subjectivities within late modern and recessionary risk environments: firstly, how these marginalized girls understand and navigate their precarity, and secondly, how the girls’ self-understanding changes as they fail to achieve traditional markers of successful feminine development.

What are platforms? Game consoles and computer hardware? Economic models for things like credit cards or Steam or the PlayStation Store? Social media giants like Facebook? The answer is all three. Marc Steinberg’s The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet, examines the definitions and objects of the ubiquitous term platform. In doing so it also offers a history of the Japanese mobile Internet as site for financial transactions, the starting point for subscription-based mobile games, and the model for the Android and iOS devices that now dominate our lives. To find the economic model behind Japanese platforms, The Platform Economy examines the platform theory developed among Japanese management thinkers in the 1990s, and the platform practice pioneered at Nintendo in the 1980s and 90s, and put into practice in Japan’s “i-mode,” one of the world’s earliest mobile Internet rollouts. Nintendo, it turns out, was one of the early developers of the transactional model for the platform, wherein “the platform” is seen as an intermediary between two or more third parties (in this case Nintendo was the intermediary between players and game developers and chip sellers). Crossing economic theory with the histories of videogames and mobile media , this book teaches us about the platforms that affect our lives today, as much as those – like the Nintendo NES or the i-mode mobile Internet system – that dominated lives in the past.

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Batland: Transmedia Strategy & Videogame Spatiality in Gotham City is an interdisciplinary study of how transmedia strategy (the construction and management of massively collaborative popular culture franchises) has impacted digital gameworlds, and what these gameworlds can tell us about transmedia protocols. It builds a foundation for critiquing and reshaping transmedia theory through frameworks of media studies, game studies, and urban geography. To elaborate this argument, the project focuses on Gotham City. As the hometown of pop culture icon Batman, Gotham has appeared consistently across every conceivable medium and venue for franchising for nearly 80 years, making it arguably the most ubiquitous North American transmedia world of the past century. By examining its history of representation across media--particularly videogames--and reading Batman media texts as an assemblage produced in a networked transmedia complex, I argue that these products are often allegorical for their own processes of development and techniques of cultivating fandom. A focus on narrative as assemblage cuts through the dialectical tension between transmedia as a narrative storytelling mode, and transmedia as a strategic and tactical business model.

This short piece appeared in a Sequart article about the proposed acquisition of Fox by the Disney Corporation. My specific contribution discussed both consolidation and fan works.

"Region lock China" has echoed through the virtual landscape of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and equally caustic player communities alike as the result of the transnationally networked play. This presentation aims to show how the chorus of frustrated English-speaking gamers betrays the phantasmic insularity of the Internet and how the precarious reachability of cross-territory networked play effectively throws the inequalities and material distance into sharp relief. This project equally pays close attention to geopolitical formations of gaming publics while also parsing the matrix of corporate structures and platform powers involved in the dissemination and regulation of Battlegrounds in South-Korean, Chinese, and North-American markets.

The Indie Interfaces: GPS / MESI IP Discoverability Engine Project, is a three-year collaborative grant and initiative between Concordia and GamePlay Space which launched in early 2018. The project, which developed out of the 2017 Indie Interfaces symposium and research group, has presented an interesting opportunity to bridge the gap between academic and industry interests and discussions. Founded in 2015, GamePlay Space or GPS is located in Montreal and is currently one of the largest game development co-working spaces in the world and is home to approximately 32 studios with over 100 individual members. GPS is similar to co-working spaces now typical for media and technology startups as a means of mitigating ‘precarity’ but it is hyper-specialized for indie game studios and developers.

This 2018 project explores the local communities of play that have formed and continue to thrive in Montréal, Canada since the July 2016 launch of the location-based mobile game, Pokémon Go. Over the last two and a half years, Pokémon Go has formed localized communities and collaborative networks, not only on platforms such as Facebook and Discord but also in physical spaces where pervasive play converges with real-world locations and social interactions. Though the initial global media attention and public 'craze' surrounding Pokémon Go has waned since its release, the community has flourished in both local and global social ecosystems which were created and moderated by players themselves.

By interviewing and shadowing three prominent members of the local Pokémon Go community, I explored how ‘hardcore’ players actively engage in place-making practices through meaningful movement within urban spaces, participate in community moderation practices, define ‘acceptable’ forms of play, and form collaborative social relationships.

Introduction: Serious games (SGs) are interactive and entertaining digital software with an educational purpose. They engage the learner by proposing challenges and through various design elements (DEs; eg, points, difficulty adaptation, story). Recent reviews suggest the effectiveness of SGs in healthcare professionals’ and students’ education is mixed. This could be explained by the variability in their DEs, which has been shown to be highly variable across studies. The aim of this systematic review is to identify, appraise and synthesise the best available evidence regarding the effectiveness of SGs and the impact of DEs on engagement and educational outcomes of healthcare professionals and students.

Methods and analysis: A systematic search of the literature will be conducted using a combination of medical subject headings terms and keywords in Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health, Embase, Education Resources Information Center, PsycInFO, PubMed and Web of Science. Studies assessing SGs on engagement and educational outcomes will be included. Two independent reviewers will conduct the screening as well as the data extraction process. The risk of bias of included studies will also be assessed by two reviewers using the Effective Practice and Organisation of Care criteria. Data regarding DEs in SGs will first be synthesised qualitatively. A meta-analysis will then be performed, if the data allow it. Finally, the quality of the evidence regarding the effectiveness of SGs on each outcome will be assessed using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach.

Ethics and dissemination: As this systematic review only uses already collected data, no Institutional Review Board approval is required. Its results will be submitted in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of 2018.

Contribution to an article by Marc-André Maheu-Cadotte et al. published in full open access in BMJ Open. DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019871.

‘Toxicity’ has become a pervasive term for describing and discussing online game communities,but exactly what constitutes toxicity remains loosely defined. This project seeks to uncover how toxicity is constructed and understood within a game community described from inside and out as toxic.

After situating toxicity within prior academic literature on toxicity’s constitutive elements such as griefing, trolling, flaming and racism online, this project focuses on the DOTA 2 community. It examines how the game’s culture operates throughout what Mirko Tobias Schäfer referred to as the media dispositive, or the collection of sites and discourses that the community engages with that overlap with the in-game experience. Throughout the dispositive certain voices are sanctioned by the game’s company, Valve, while others are silenced by the affordances of the dispositive’s sites and game’s culture.

The final section of this work explores the in-game experience through ethnographic, interview, and participant observation data, to uncover how players perceive toxicity in-game. This work finds that toxicity is in part reflective of and formed by the broader culture of the game as discovered through an analysis of the dispositive, but that players possess highly subjective ideas about what constitutes toxicity that they tend to universalize, which strengthens toxicity as a rhetorical rather than descriptive term. The impact of toxicity on players and community members is uneven as some players are put into conflict with others while others, particularly women, are erased from the game space and community discussions. In conclusion, this project finds that toxicity in DOTA 2 is constructed by overlapping cultural and mechanical elements and is as much about what players perceive to be toxic as it is about actual player behaviors.