This page contains information on many of my current scholarly and artistic research projects. Below you will find specific information and links related to my “Playful Records” SSHRC postdoctoral project and my curatorial, design, game dev, and media arts practices.

🗃️ Playful Records

As part of my current SSHRC postdoctoral research project, I am working on a monograph titled Playful Records: Counter-Archival Game Art and Videogame Collections that is under contract with Amsterdam University Press for its “Games and Play” series. This book is heavily informed by the curatorial and archival research I conducted during my previous Mitacs Accelerate postdoc with the SSHRC Partnership Grant project, Archive/Counter-Archive. If there are no delays in finishing the manuscript or the review process, this book is currently scheduled for publication in 2027.

The other half of my SSHRC postdoc consists of using the open-source tool CollectionBuilder to produce a pedagogically-oriented digital archive focused on award-winning game Celeste (Maddy Makes Games, 2018) and the career of its director, writer, and co-programmer, Maddy Thorson. Featuring an emotional narrative about a trans woman’s mental health struggles, Celeste has fostered a vibrant queer fan community of speedrunners, modders, and artists. By assembling an archive of paratexts produced by these communities alongside a variety of developer-created material, one of my project’s primary goals is to provide tools to allow game studies scholars to more easily teach Canadian videogame history. This archive is currently under development and I am aiming to publish an initial prototype in late 2025 or early 2026.

🖼️ Media Art Curation

Below are photographs from a recent exhibition of ecocritical game art I curated at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon in Summer 2023 titled Object Gardens. Participating artists included Guggenheim fellow Peter Burr (USA), 2018 EQ Bank Emerging Digital Artist Award winner Anna Eyler and her partner and collaborator Nicolas Lapointe (CAD), and Venice Biennale-presenting artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen (DNK). My selection of these artists and their work was significantly influenced by my growing interests in ecocritical, historical, and postcolonial game studies and the writing of authors like Jeff VanderMeer, Donna Haraway, and Timothy Morton.

Click here to see more photos and read the curatorial essay for the exhibition that was published in PAVED Meant Vol 5(2024).

Below is a photograph of a recent exhibition I coordinated at the Archives of Ontario in Summer 2023 titled Margaret Perry: A Life in Film. The traveling exhibition was initially put on at the Nova Scotia Archives and curated by Jennifer VanderBurgh (St. Mary’s University) and Carla Taunton (NSCAD), and I collaborated with them to do the exhibition design to recreate it at the Archives of Ontario as a part of that year’s Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at York University.

👨‍💻 Game Dev

To complement my game studies research on various aspects of independent game development, I also engage in small-scale game development projects in my spare time. These are often centred around informal and grassroots engines that have garnered what Stefan Werning has referred to as “tool fandoms”.

The first of my current game dev projects is a side-scrolling card battler RPG tentatively called Mold Ant Hole that I am creating using RPG Maker MV and MythAtelier’s Card Combat and SideMV’s Basic Side-Scroller plugins. The general premise of the game is that you play as an exterminator who has been hired by an elderly witch to clear out the colony of anthropomorphic ants that have occupied her basement. A lot of the character design and overall aesthetics of this game have been inspired by Canadian comic artist Michael Deforge’s Ant Colony and “Canadian Royalty” (from Lose #4).

The other of my two current game dev projects is a currently untitled interactive text adventure game inspired by my love for the Fighting Fantasy series of game books. For this project, I am loosely adapting Laird Barron’s short story “Oblivion Mode” from the anthology Children of Lovecraft. To create the art for this game, I am using JP LeBreton’s PLAYSCII, which is an open source ASCII art program. The tile/character set I am using in PLAYSCII to create my images is Mrmo Tarius’s MRMOTEXT and I am using the PLAYPAL palette (what was used for the original MS-DOS version of DOOM). To develop the actual game, I am using the open-source Python-based engine, Ren’Py.

🧊 3D Modelling

As part of my ongoing research into the Haunted PS1 independent game development community and the low-poly 3D modelling and chunky photo-based texturing it is known for, I have been slowly creating a collection of similar low-poly game assets in Blender. My selection of objects to model is also informed by my ongoing interest in ecocritical game art and how games like Animal Crossing have approached collecting as a game mechanic. In keeping with my interest in game archives, I am also planning on submitting this collection once it is done to Miziziziz’z “The Big Collection of Commercially Usable Retro 3D Style Assets.”

📐 Graphic Design

A selection of promotional assets (posters, slides, social media content, etc.) that I have either directly designed or provided art direction for as a part of my time working as the Knowledge Mobilization Officer for the SSHRC Partnership Grant project Archive/Counter-Archive.

These are a couple of posters that I created for events that were curated by ANGURA!, a Japanese experimental art collective that programs screenings and exhibitions in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Montreal.