Book Projects
Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies (writing in-progress)
Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies develops a ludic-textual framework for analyzing videogames as racial projects. Game studies has long positioned formalist methodologies as directly opposed to cultural critiques of videogames, from the narratology vs. ludology debates that initially defined the field to the code studies vs. third wave cultural studies reflecting in game studies today. Racial Recursivity refuses this binary by using formalist methods to show how race works in and across videogames. By examining how game mechanics, narrative structures, and paratextual game materials recursively reinforce socio-cultural ideas around race, racial recursivity reveals how racial logics are embedded within video games, game studies, and gaming culture. The methodology pays special attention to the role of repetition in both videogames and racial logics. Videogame communicate meaning via repetition while race has been naturalized through the constant reoccurrence of different racial utterances and practices. Racial Recursivity, then, aims to serve as a method of ludic-textual analysis and as a broader theoretical approach that allows us to understand how race in video games operates within a self-referential system that naturalizes larger socio-racial formations through repetitious interactive play.
Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature (research in-progress)
Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature charts how Black American writers have represented play while simultaneously charting the history and interconnected nature of play and American racial ideology. This project hopes to create a racial historiography of play and race in both American social-political history and across Black American literature across 6 proposed chapters. “Ludus as Impossibility: Play in the Slave Narrative” looks at how Slave narratives often present play as something impossible yet realized for the enslaved, especially the slave child in texts by William Grimes, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. “Ludus as a Losing Game” follows Eva’s claim in Toni Morrison’s Sula that “Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895” (68) to explore how Black writers have articulated the “rigged game” that Black people participate in called the American project and how writers have confronted the “games white folks play.” “Breaking the Rules” begins with that viral Twitter moment from 2020 when Black users rejected the official Uno Twitter account because Uno plays “their own damn game wrong “ as this entry point allows us to explore how Black gamers have historically broke rules and regulations around card games while navigating regimes of ludic control such as the anti-gambling laws of the Antebellum period that were then later used as legal precedent for prohibition-era bans on card houses and eventually anti-loitering laws. “(Dis)Ordered Ludic” argues the ephemeral nature of the Negro League Baseball clubs exemplifies a playful reading of Cedric Robinson’s theory of disorder—a breaking of the “ordered play” prioritized in Euro-centric Play Theory. “Gaming the System and Playing the Race Card” explores how 1980s conservative rhetoric framed the Welfare Queen as someone who allegedly “cheats” the system aka “the game” and argues that 90s and 2000s hip hop confronts and embrace the “cheat” with the rise of the “playa” image who uses criminality win the game. The final chapter “Black Ludic and Genre Play” turns to contemporary speculative fiction with writers like NK Jemisin, Colson Whitehead, and Victor Lavelle playing with literary form and genre to articulate an alternative imaginary in speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy while simultaneously navigating the game that is market expectations that the contemporary publishing apparatus has of Black writers to write a particular type of fiction.
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Edited Volumes
Japanese Video Games: GÄ“mu Critiques of Western Worlding with DA Hall, Spring 2027 (proposal under review).
The book serves as a scholarly introduction to the ongoing negotiation in Japanese Vidoegames with western aesthetic practices. Nintendo was founded in the opening decades of the Meiji era and 100 years later dominated the global game market after rescuing the U.S. video game market in the wake of the 1983 crash. In other words, considering Japanese videogames as isolated from a global context misunderstands a long history of active construction of that identity as global and globalizing. We are interested in long running game series that have had a major impact on game culture due to their popularity while simultaneously representing and critiquing the Western world. This collection calls for more nuanced scholarship that considers Japanese video games as globalized cultural products that are informed by Japan’s unique history while simultaneously existing within the broader globalizing networks of contemporary society. Across an introduction and 13 chapters from academics at various stage of their careers, Japanese Video Games: GÄ“mu Critiques of Western Worlding explores Japanese video games as intentional and active cultural objects. We show that these projects engage with the long history of Western aesthetics in order to critique and contest the ideological constructions of those traditions in the global context.