“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.

This dissertation represents the written portion of an interdisciplinary research-creation project that explores ways of studying creative practices with a focus on a kind of interactive experience called a hybrid game. It represents a contribution to the field of critical game design research. It builds on research from an extensive range of fields, including queer game design, intersectional feminist theory, critical design, critical game design, game design practice and methods, practice-based research and research-creation research, performance and theatre, live-action roleplay studies, alternative controller studies, autoethnography, and archival studies. From there, this research proposes and uses a methodology for studying the practice of creating interactive experiences that have non-standard, custom physical elements along with digital ones, especially those involving a facilitator. I make the case that autoethnography, though it has some limitations, is a well-suited method for research-creators engaged in design research.

This article relates to the 2018 CSDH/SCHN conference proceedings. This paper outlines Michael Iantorno’s and Melissa Mony’s experiences with quantitative game analysis by summarizing the first year of development of the prototype ludomusicological database GameSound. To further the discussion, this article also summarizes and analyzes the work of fellow digital humanities scholar Jason Bradshaw, who applied intriguing types of tool-based analysis to BioShock Infinite. To conclude, the paper hypothesizes where this type of research could lead in the future: both for GameSound and for other projects using similar methods and methodologies.

This thesis examines the destabilization of a hierarchical ordering of human vs. nonhuman agency found in digital media which present a surge of “animacy” – perceptible qualities of “agency, awareness, mobility and liveness” (Chen 2012). It examines one webtoon (The Bongcheon-Dong Ghost 2011) and two video games (Undertale 2015 and Doki Doki Literature Club 2017), which push at the boundaries of their respective media forms by channeling technical/computational forces (e.g. Javascript or memory storage) into character animation; “animation” in a doubled sense: both as the fusion of discontinuous instants afforded by the mechanical succession of images as well as the production of a social Other possessing qualities of life and agency (Silvio 2019). The result is a perception of agency (and thus animacy) that resists the categorization of both the character and the media object. Challenging dominant structures and theories of comic readership, video game play, or “database consumption” (Azuma 2009) respectively, these works argue against the control that the human operator is presumed both to have and to require as part of a framework which constitutes the works themselves as media objects. This thesis further argues that the structures critiqued and challenged by these works index a broader conceptualization of human action in the world, predicated on “animacy hierarchies” which are buttressed by binaries of human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, moving/still, subject/object, and will/determination. By adopting an animist logic, in which images/media/characters might potentially act in unforeseen ways, these works challenge and destabilize such binaries.

In this paper we develop the concept of design bleed, a standpoint approach to game design. We adopt the terminology of bleed from the Nordic community around live- action role-playing games and use it as a lens on game development. Based on our own experiences in developing two game jam games, Lovebirds and Get Your Rocks On, we identify four ‘ingredients’ for bleed-inspired game design. We develop design bleed as a community affirming design practice which can be used as a tool for carving out shared standpoints. We suggest that this is particularly productive for game designers at the margins, as it has potential to be creatively and emotionally healing but can also invite expressions for political resistance to normative game culture.

L’animation pornographique et érotique commerciale semble avoir toujours existé sur les écrans français. Son histoire commence par les court-métrages d’animation destinés aux maisons closes du début du XX^e siècle, en passant par les grands succès commerciaux de longs-métrages dans les années 1970 tels que La Honte de la jungle ou Fritz le chat, jusqu’à la diffusion estivale en 2018 de la série d’animation française Peepoodo and the Super Fuck Friends. Pour autant, cette production subit une marginalisation économique, juridique et morale, limitant sa distribution. À partir d’une rétrospective historique puis d’une étude de cas, cet article se propose d’apporter une première réponse à la question de savoir si une industrie de l’animation pornographique – et non pas seulement un ensemble de contenus cinématographiques et audiovisuels – a la possibilité d’exister dans la France des années 2010.

User retention is the first challenge in introducing any information and communication technologies (ICT) for health applications, particularly for seniors who are increasingly targeted as beneficiaries of such technologies. Interaction with digital technologies may be too stressful to older adults to guarantee their adoption in their routine selfcare. The second challenge, which also relates to adoption, is to supply empirical evidence that support the expectations of their beneficial outcomes. To address the first challenge, persuasive technologies such as serious games (SGs) are increasingly promoted as ludic approaches to deliver assistive care to older adults.

Presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association, this presentation built off of my previous work of League of Legends, discussing how of conglomeration, user data and the esport scene influences player behaviour. Connecting to arguments of surveillance, filter bubbles, and the digital economy, this presentation argued that game platforms are actively shaping users play habits and preferences. I initially explore the relationship between Tencent's control of Riot Games (founders of League of Legends) and the social features that are introduced and adjusted. This is furthered by connecting it to recent work on the dangers of the digital economy, exploring how these economic practices are embedded in the free-to-play game platform. Finally, this presentation concluded with a brief discussion of the competitive community space. Highlighting the impact of League of Legend's popular competitive scene, I argue that its popularity directly influences players to participate in the game 'like the pros'. While some of my claims do not directly impact each player, these processes (among unexplored others), cause a change in community play. I conclude by discussing the positive potential of these process, specifically around toxic community cultures.

This thesis explores how a selection of video games, created by transgender people using the free software Twine, create space for the survival and flourishing of queer and trans subjects through visions of transformative relationships. It deploys the lenses of queer theories of failure (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure), disidentification (Muñoz, Disidentifications), and utopianism (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia) to perform close readings of the techniques of narrative and game mechanics used as strategies for survival, resistance, and relationality in anna anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree and Queers in Love at the End of the World, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s With Those We Love Alive, and ira prince’s Queer Trans Mentally Ill Power Fantasy. The analysis focuses on games produced in and around the moment of the “Twine revolution” (Harvey) that aimed in the early 2010s to radically re-envision video games as spaces for minoritized subjects to thrive. Even as the transformation of video games culture as a whole remains an unrealized ideal, this paper argues for the importance of revisiting the under-examined queer strategies these games depict and enact in order to imagine possibilities for “rewrit[ing] the game” (Halberstam in Halberstam and Juul), and through this for “rewrit[ing] the map of everyday life” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 25), possibilities which can allow for the flourishing of queer and trans modes of relationality within and against toxic and exclusive norms in game play and design.

Poster presented at the General Meeting of the Global Alliance against Respiratory Diseases in Beijing.

Background: Worldwide, 6 people out of 10 have no access to treatment, or are not encouraged to follow it. Air pollution alone kills 7 million people yearly, reduces our life expectancy by 20 months, and costs 6% the gross world product. Devices to assess lung capacity remain often unavailable in low / middle income countries.

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.