I am a PhD Student investigating interactive storytelling and games in the SFU SIAT EMIIE Lab. I recently organized the 3rd annual ArtCamp at the Vancouver New Forms Festival. Much of my research involves applying techniques from the humanities to the study of games and narrative. My MA was a close reading of the popular game Oblivion from three perspectives: believability, performativity, and adaptivity. Each of these three analytical lenses brought to bear a different discourse and vocabulary to the task of analyzing Oblivion, resulting in three distinct, but complementary readings of the game. My PhD research is largely unformed, but will be exploring how to use techniques from AI and User Modeling to adapt interactive narrative experiences to the preferences of the reader. I am hoping to build a prototype interactive story that uses an augmented reality approach in place of a more traditional computing paradigm.

I have also been working on the CATGames research project, a multi-institutional research initiative intended to develop creativity tools for Canadian game developers. My CATGames research, done under the supervision of Jim Bizzocchi, is an investigation of the relationship between story, play, and embodiment at the interface level. This is motivated by the recent popularity of so-called “non-traditional-interfaces” that depart from the canonical control pad mechanism that has dominated console game play since its inception.