Josh Abboud recently received his Ph.D. from Clemson University in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design program, where his research focused on bringing together various disciplines to inform critical approaches to writing and human communication. His academic interest in games studies comes from an early engagement with film and video production and which carries on through his work in digital writing and technologies. Most recently, his dissertation project explored multimodal composition, particularly cinematic expressions, as an ethical context of collaboration. He is currently teaching as a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Division at the University of Kentucky.
Adele Bealer is a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah, pursuing a degree in American Studies with an emphasis in ecocriticism. Drawing on her M.A. in Environmental Humanities, her dissertation develops a radical ecocritical methodology that draws heavily from performance and spatial studies and that can be applied to the close reading (and close playing) of a variety of traditional and nontraditional texts, including graphic novels and videogames. Triangulated with ecocriticism’s emphasis on process and holism, performance studies and spatial theory challenge traditional nature writing’s celebration of the visibly manifest, its refusal to look beneath the surface. The force of this interruption is to recast environmental scenarios in terms of repetitive performances by multiple human and/Other actors. Performances may repeat, but they can be repeated with a difference. Radical ecocriticism refuses futility, instead infusing its examination of environmental texts with an insistence on possibility.
Andrew Baerg serves as an Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of Houston-Victoria where he teaches a variety of media-related courses. His primary research interest involves the relationship between the sports videogame and its broader social and cultural context. His previous work has examined games like Fight Night Round 2, Fifa Football ’09 and NBA Live ’09. However, as the included chapter suggests, he also enjoys thinking about role-playing games as well. When not working or spending time with his wife, he can usually be found playing the latest iteration of the Football Manager series.
Josh Call is an Assistant Professor of English at Grand View University in Des Moines, IA. He has a B.S. in English and Philosophy (2001), an M.A. in English (2003) and a Ph.D in Composition in Rhetoric (2009). He teaches courses in composition, literacy, rhetoric and visual culture, and general humanities. In addition to co-editing Approaches to Digital Game Studies he is currently researching the connections between games and pedagogy, focusing on reclaiming play in the classroom for better learning. He lives in Iowa with his wife Nichole, daughter Kairie and son Colin.
Lauren B. Collister is a Ph.D. student in Sociolinguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She received an M.A. in Linguistics in 2008 from the University of Pittsburgh and B.A.s in Linguistics and Music from The Ohio State University in 2006. Under the name of Skakavaz, the level 85 Draenei holy paladin, she has been conducting a participant-observation ethnography of the World of Warcraft community since 2007. Her research interests include linguistic change in online spaces, as well as expressions of identity and group affiliation in digital worlds. Past work includes studies on the role of non-alphabetic symbols (such as *, ^, and <--) in online discourse, and linguistic strategies for the portrayal of self and avatar identities in digital worlds.
Christopher Douglas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (Cornell UP, 2009), ‘Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead’ (NOVEL 44.3 [Fall 2011]), and ‘You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!’: Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines’ (Postmodern Culture 13.1 [September 2002]). His current research project is titled If God Meant to Interfere: American Fiction During the Postwar Christian Resurgence.
Benjamin E. Friedline received his B.A. in History and Spanish from Messiah College in 2004 and his M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he specializes in Applied Linguistics, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, and Linguistic Theory. His most recent work is within the domain of Applied Linguistics in that it connects theories from Second Language Acquisition and Linguistics with practical classroom applications. More specifically, this work investigates how second language learners of English acquire derivational morphology within English as a Second Language classrooms.
Alice Henton received her B.A. in English and History from the University of California, Davis in 2005 and is currently completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research interests include archival narratives and constructions of the supernatural.
Trent Hergenrader is a Ph.D. candidate in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on creative writing pedagogy and incorporating games and gaming in writing courses. His fiction has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Best Horror of the Year #1, among others. He recently received a Teaching Excellence Award from his department and was selected for the 2011–12 Tinsley Helton Dissertation Fellowship.
Zachary McDowell is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The first digital game he ever completed was Wishbringer, an interactive fiction game by Infocom, released in 1985. The second was Wasteland. He played them on an Apple IIE. In general, his research focuses on how digital technologies shape communicative practices. He is currently writing his dissertation on the role of digital sharing in restructuring cultural hegemony.
Chuk Moran is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. He studies videogames, time, the undo function, and everyday software. His recent publications include ‘Playing with Game Time: Auto-Saves and Undoing Despite the “Magic Circle”’ in Fibreculture, and ‘Interactive Time and “Real Time” in Software and Society’ in Spectator. He can be reached at chuk.edu@gmail.com.
Kathleen Murphy holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Communication Design at the University of Waterloo. She is currently a user experience researcher and designer for a firm in Waterloo ON. Her games research focuses on character and player interaction, dialogue systems, and the intersections of film, theater, and game.
Neil Randall is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Waterloo; he is also the director of the university’s newly constituted (2011) Games Institute. His many game reviews, columns, and features appeared in various game magazines between 1984 and 2002, and he is a long-time contributing editor to PC Magazine, contributing over the years on various computing topics. He has taught game studies and game design at graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition, he has co-designed and developed several boardgame simulations, and he has taught the works of J. R. R. Tolkien throughout his career.
Douglas Schules is an Assistant Professor at Rikkyo University’s Department of Business in Tokyo. His current research gravitates towards the intersections between copyright, fan translations, and new media. Broadly, however, he is interested in the practices by which Japanese and American cultures are mediated through new technologies, and his dissertation argued, in part, for critical attention towards the medium itself in the act of translation.
Roger Travis is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Classics from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before arriving at UConn in 1997. He has published on Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, Greek historiography, the 19th-century British novel, Halo, the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, ethics in videogames, and game-based learning in classics journals, gaming magazines, and scholarly volumes. He has been President of the Classical Association of New England and of the Classical Association of Connecticut. He writes the blog Living Epic, and is a co-founder and contributing author of the collaborative blog Play the Past.
Gerald Voorhees is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University jointly appointed in Speech Communication and New Media Communication. He teaches classes in media studies, rhetorical studies, and game studies. His research focuses on games and new media as sites for the construction and contestation of identity and culture. He is also interested in public discourse pertaining to games and new media, as well as rhetorics of race and ethnicity in mediated public discourse.
Katie Whitlock is an Associate Professor at California State University, Chico, in the Department of Theater. Her areas of teaching range from theater history to identity performance to theatrical theory, with occasional forays into design, all of which is usually spiced with an interest in technology. Her research is focused on popular culture, specifically on the nature of videogames as connected to performance and other aspects of human experience. She directs and designs productions which pull from her interest in popular culture and media, as well as her interest in digital games. She continues to strive for the ultimate production which will blend theater and videogames into one perfect moment of pop nirvana.
Karen Zook is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. She received her B.A. in Classical Languages and Literatures from Dartmouth College and her M.A. in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut.