The question I pursue across my research is how ideologies guide video game industry practices across the entire network of developers, publishers, marketing, public relations, journalists, and even customers. Games are not value neutral. Game production is embroiled in representation which carries ideologies about how we make sense of the world and how people are meant to exist in society. Production of any cultural artifact is unavoidably influenced by relationships, movement, spaces, bodily capabilities, power, industry, and authority (to borrow from Winner’s foundational 1980 essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”). It is therefore necessary to understand from a critical perspective how game production influences the values and meanings encoded into games and how those meanings can potentially shape individual and community life. My research is especially concerned with intervening in modes of production that reinforce inequalities and finding alternatives that advance social justice.
How Does News Publications’ Relationship with the Games Industry Influence their Production of Articles on Sexual Misconduct?
My dissertation is a thematic content analysis investigating how journalists covered the California Department of Fair and Equal Housing’s (DFEH) sexual misconduct lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Inc. (AB). Game journalists rely on access to games, spokespeople, and press events for coverage and thus their livelihoods depend on their relationship with video game public relations (Stanton & Hohnson, 2024, 4). Therefore, game journalists have developed practices to maintain a favorable relationship with public relations (Fisher & Mohammed-Baksh, 2020). I investigate to what extent this anxiety to maintain relationships with the industry, what Fisher (2012) called the “ideology of anxiety”, shapes how journalists report on sexual misconduct in the game industry. I chose the DFEH lawsuit as a bounded case study (Yin, 2009) not only for its high-profile status that led to a rich pool of data but for the opportunity to examine how game journalists navigate the risk of reporting on news that casts the game industry in an unfavorable light.
I developed a database of 100 articles from both gaming-focused publications (50 articles) and general, mainstream publications (50 articles) from the breaking news of the lawsuit (July 21, 2021) to the settlement (December 15, 2023) and coded each one to see how differences in how much a news publications relies on the game industry impacts reporting. I developed my own method to understand differences in how much a journalist risks losing a favorable relationship with AB with their reporting. I assigned each journalistic action in my codebook a risk score (RS) to quantify the amount of risk-taking with each journalistic action and identify qualitative trends in the data.
Gaming-centric press had the highest total RS and average RS per article for the entire dataset while mainstream press had the highest average RS per sentence. While mainstream press took slightly more risk with each journalistic action they made in an article, overall all the actions that enthusiast press took coalesced in reporting that accrued more risk than mainstream press. Gaming press took less risks than mainstream press when reporting on the breaking news of the lawsuit, with mainstream press directly challenging AB’s statement while gaming press often printed AB’s full statement unchallenged. In follow up articles, however, gaming press centered their reporting on the voices of AB workers and victims of sexual misconduct more than mainstream press who had more even-handed reporting. It seems that as more voices corroborated the lawsuit’s reports over time, gaming press became more willing to take risks in reporting than before. While there is some evidence of the ideology of anxiety in the breaking news reporting, game journalists overall still demonstrated a willingness to take risks in their reporting. With my dissertation, I contribute a new method of understanding risk taking in a variety of journalistic fields and further our understanding of how game industry practices influence journalistic production.
The dissertation will serve as the basis for further research and publication on two trajectories. First, I plan on conducting semi-structured interviews with journalists who have covered sexual misconduct in the games industry. I would ask journalists questions about the choices they made when writing about sexual misconduct in the industry, how they see their role in the industry, and how that guides their reporting. I even plan on reading through some of the articles I included in my database for my dissertation with the journalists who wrote them. Interviewing games journalists will further the work of my dissertation by gaining direct insights into their conscious decision making behind their writing. The second trajectory is a discourse analysis of user comments on articles about sexual misconduct at AB. Research shows how mass media and public perception are “inexorably linked” (Altheide, 1997, 648). Reporting can shape the public and policymakers’ perspectives on social issues (Carroll and McCombs, 2003; Johnston et al., 2015). This means that journalism has power in reflecting and constructing reality (Nelson et al., 1997). Therefore, a discourse analysis of user comments will allow us to gain insight on how the use of language negotiates or influences the authority of AB and games journalism as well as how users promote social change.
You can read my full dissertation here.
How Do We Develop Location-Based Mobile Games Using a Decolonial Framework?
How can we guide the production of a video game that helps advance the goal of decolonization? Games have historically embraced colonial tropes in their mechanics. This can be seen in mainstream location-based mobile games (LBMG), mobile games that overlay a virtual world on top of the physical world and use the player’s movements as inputs in the virtual world. Players of LBMGs like Pokémon GO are encouraged by the game to treat the local environment as a means of accruing as much power as possible and claim land that doesn’t belong to them through dominance and subjugation.
Reflecting on this, my colleague and I created a framework for developing decolonial games based on prior literature and used it to produce a concept for a decolonial LBMG. We found that games developed with decoloniality in mind center on interrogating colonial systems and tropes (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), listen to Indigenous perspectives (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), and revolve around a responsibility to the community rather than the individual (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Pearce, 2009; Quijano, 2019; Trammell, 2022). The goal of our game concept is to give players an opportunity to reflect on their actions in the game and encourage them to be critical thinkers and active participants in their local communities.
To meet our goal, every game mechanic we chose had to be based in our framework. To move away from gameplay about conquering the land for individual gain, we developed the game concept around players working together to reclaim and maintain areas in the game world from an all-encompassing force known as “The Corp” which is transforming the world into parking lots and crumbling buildings left for property speculation. We developed player classes that accommodate many different playstyles and commitments to the game; one class can reclaim land from a distance, for example. LBMGs can exclude players who have impaired mobility. Therefore, a decolonial LBMG needs to be rooted in mobility justice (Sheller, 2018) and provide an equitable experience for all players. Overall, we found that decolonial games are founded in cooperativeness among a community who shares a responsibility to the well-being of every player. Thus, we constructed a game concept that was about fostering a bond between fellow players, the game world, and the local neighborhood.
The goal is to develop our concept into a fully-fledged mobile game. My colleague and I presented our game concept at the 57th annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and the Society for Philosophy and Technology 2023 conference in Tokyo. I also workshopped the concept at a seminar at the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute 2023. Following the suggestion of one of the attendees at HICSS, we plan on first testing this concept as a board game or developing it on a web-based platform. This provides a low-cost way to test the concept while also potentially leading to alternatives for players who do not have smartphones. We hope to work with a variety of community and Indigenous stakeholders as their experience in grassroots collaboration and community building is necessary to realize our vision.
You can learn more about our concept in the proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
How Can We Use Augmented Reality to Encourage Reflection on Meaningful Historical Events?
Memorial games (Rughinis and Matei, 2015) represent an opportunity to engage university students in meaningful historical events the local community and culture. The game TIMeR, for instance, engages students in Aboriginal places and stories by having users scan symbols on walls around the campus which then played augmented reality (AR) animations (Sheahan et al., 2021). In 2022, I created a concept and prototype for an AR experience that invited students at Duke University to reflect on the connection between civil rights movements then and today by allowing students to occupy both the present moment and an experiential representation of a student protest. By engaging students as active participants rather than passive learners, my project aims to further our understanding of not only how we can design memorial AR experiences but how we can contribute to free expression and a deeper connection to the past to encourage reflection on the present.
My AR project was first developed during a course on creating immersive virtual worlds at Duke University that I took while being a student at NC State in 2022. I was tasked with creating a project that interacted with the Duke campus in a political way. My mind immediately went to activism, and I decided to digitally recreate a student protest on campus. My goal with the project was to see if digital technology could help students reflect on the significance of a student protest on campus. From there, I developed an AR experience that allowed students to enter a site and exist in two time periods at once, connecting struggles for civil rights decades ago to the present moment of civil rights activism.
I chose the Silent Vigil, where Duke University students occupied the main quad of Duke and mourned the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I picked the protest for its cultural significance for Duke University, the ease of access of the site, and the opportunity for self-reflection through embodied digital practice. I used photogrammetry of my body to create 3D models of concrete statues in Maya as stand-ins for the protestors. I used Adobe Aero to arrange them into the formation that the students of the protest took based on historical documentation (Sites of Memory). However, I created gaps in the rows to invite users to fill the space and join the protest. I also included a sign with instructions on how to behave just as the students did: standing in revered, respectful silence. The augmented reality experience could be accessed via a QR code that can be placed in front of the James B. Duke statue. This design choice was inspired by Foss and Griffin's (1995) concept of invitational rhetoric, or when the presenter invites the audience to consider their perspective (5). It was also inspired by Brock and Shepherd's (2016) concept of the procedural enthymeme, where a procedural system constructed of operations or rules work together to induce some sort of action in a user (21). The gaps in the virtual art installation invite users to fill the gaps, while the instructions encourage users to essentially role play as the protestors. In this way, they embody (drawing from Hansen, 2003) the protestors by completing the formation in a way that is authentic to the original protest. This is how I bridge the gap between the past and the present.
The project is inspired by research on memorial games, or games that “encourage players to remember meaningful historical events and to consider their significance” (Rughinis and Matei, 2015, 629). Rughinis and Matei (2015) argue that a strong memorial game is not only able to invoke a historical event but uses credible information and offers chances for empathetic understanding of the event as well as self-reflection on its significance. Memorial games can also take advantage of the “rhetoric of time”; not only can developers use time to control the pace of the game to encourage moments of reflection but also craft the game to create a “temporal attitude” that posits an argument on how we should think about the memorialized event in relation to the past, present, and future. “The past appears as a plain object that might be assessed either based on its consequences in the actual world, or in relation with social values and norms,” (Rughinis and Matei, 2015, 637). The project was also inspired by the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project (https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/), an immersive experience preserving one of MLK’s speeches. My public speaking students who experienced the event not only reflected on MLK’s speaking techniques but also about the speech’s relevance to our current moment of civil rights struggles and how they can carry the speech’s message forward.
While the project aims to create a memorial for the Silent Vigil and draws from archives, the experience itself does not rely on presenting archival materials. Memorials of the civil rights movement rely on archival footage to illustrate stories and for emotional effect. As Brasell (2004) argues, news footage is chosen for its newsworthiness which often involves conflict and spectacle. Using archival footage, therefore, risks showing a skewed account of the movement and presenting it “as a spectacle, frozen in times past” (Brasell, 2004, 12) and therefore divorced from our current movement for civil rights. Therefore, this project takes a representative and experiential approach. By embracing the project as an experience rather than something that purely serves as an archive, I go beyond just educating students about the Silent Vigil to create an embodied experience meant to invoke empathy and understanding as well as self-reflection on the current moment.
Through this project, I invite students to exist in two places at once: 1968 and today. Through a representational experience, I avoid relying on mediations of the past from news outlets that present the civil rights movement as frozen in time. The AR experience takes advantage of the rhetoric of time to transport students to 1968 while still existing in the present moment, creating a bridge between the two. Key to this process is attention to detail on how the vigil worked in real life so students can immerse themselves in a way that is authentic to the vigil, helping to preserve the vigil in a way that allows for deeper engagement with the campus. By using abstract representations of people, I invite students to see themselves in the protestors and better immerse themselves in the moment. Instead of just reading about the Silent Vigil, they get to live it. The virtual representation encourages students to imagine and understand what it must have been like to be a part of the event and ask themselves what they can do to carry the purpose and message of the Silent Vigil forward to today’s world.
In the future, I plan on recreating the project in Unreal Engine or Unity as the original files have been lost with the discontinuation of Adobe Aero (Adobe, 2025). I also plan on updating the original models to include more diverse body types and also incorporate links to archival materials for students who want to learn more. Once the new prototype is done, I plan on using a focus group (Kitzinger, 1994) to playtest the experience so I can make sure that it is having the intended effect.
You can read more about the project in the Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.