This is where list my growing collection of my publications, organized by type and most recent publication. While providing the abstract (or editor’s overview) of the publication, if available, I have provided links to read each work online. Topics range from Transmedia Storytelling, to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, to Science Fiction Studies.
Book Publications –
Emergent Transmedia in Imagining Transmedia (April 2024). Chapter.
This chapter … considers how tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) provide a model for how players can use the tabletop form and various digital extensions (e.g., pod-casts, interactive livestreams, and other media) to create compelling storyworlds; remediate existing fictional worlds with new themes, identities, and tensions; and democratize access to acts of imaginative world-building, by linking physical play with easy-to-use tools for digital production.
In the original Matrix series (1999–2003), the Wachowski sisters created a science fiction (SF) world to explore their experiences as closeted transwomen. After more than a decade of living openly as a transwoman, Lana Wachowski revisits the world she created with her sister in the 2021 solo film The Matrix Resurrections. This chapter explores how Wachowski’s film serves as an extended visual metaphor for what gender theorist Jack Halberstam describes as the assimilation and exploitation of queer people by neoliberal economic systems. This is particularly evident both in the story arcs of Trinity, Neo, and Agent Smith and in the redesign of the Matrix itself, which actively encourages public expressions of misery while using them to defuse any real revolutionary energy. At the same time, Wachowski’s film dramatizes SF author Nalo Hopkinson’s concept of literary and cultural renovation, inviting audiences to rethink revolution as depending not just on one singular messianic figure who makes a single grand sacrifice, but on smaller, everyday acts of kindness and connection amongst individuals who, collectively, have the power to slowly but surely change the world for better.
Journal Publications:
“I Saw the TV Glow: Traumatic Identity Through Cinematic Trans Metaphors” in Science Fiction Film and Television.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024) details the life of the main character, Owen, as he deals with the disappearance and mysterious return of his friend, Maddy. Reviews of the film focused on the trans themes of the film as implied by its director Jane Schoenbrun. However, I believe these reviews focused too much on the general trans aspect, overlooking how the film expands the genre of identity horror. Effectively transcribing the emotional distancing experienced by individuals living with dysphoria, Owen’s story has created a new cinematic perspective that helps bring to light the experience of living through dissociation in response to extreme trauma.
Structures of interaction for creating dramatic agency in epistemic narratives: Return of the Obra Dinn and Telling Lies as design exemplars. Entertainment Computing 44, 100520
Epistemic narratives, according to Marie-Laure Ryan, are driven by our need to know something. Interactive epistemic narratives raise the question of how to provoke and satisfy this need while hiding information from an active consumer, an interactor who is expecting the characteristic pleasure Janet Murray has defined as dramatic agency. In this paper we analyse two approaches to creating the experience of dramatic agency in epistemic interactive narratives, the spatial navigation of Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) and the video database of Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies (2019). For both interactive narratives we identify characteristic design strategies and the challenges and opportunities they offer for the development of the genre, and we discuss the light they shed on the problem of closure in epistemic narrative.
The New Cosmic Horror: A Genre Molded by Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Postmodern Horror. SFRA Review 315 Winter.
Conference Publications –
Red [Redacted] Theatre: Queering Puzzle-Based Tangible Interaction Design. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 509-524
Red [Redacted] Theatre” is a tangible puzzle-based experience exploring queer history. We used queer methods to design puzzles with archival materials, guiding participants from a more normative “surface” understanding of history into exploring queer histories, breaking familiar language and constructs through play and tangible interaction. Our reflections contribute design considerations for queering tangible interaction through puzzles: (1) designing and deconstructing layers of queer understanding, (2) attending to situatedness in designing tangible puzzle artifacts, and (3) designing puzzles that solve to complexity. We also offer insights on how facilitation and debrief of the experience can prompt reflection on queer history and ways of understanding. Overall, this pictorial contributes to Queer HCI by deepening queer tangible interaction, particularly for exploring queer history.
“It Has to Ignite Their Creativity”: Opportunities for Generative Tools for Game Masters. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
In this paper, we describe the results of interviews we conducted with experienced game masters (GMs) of tabletop role-playing games. In these interviews they discussed the challenges they face preparing and running game sessions, as well as the tools they use. From these interviews, we used qualitative analysis to discover three guidelines for designing generative tools for GMs: 1. provide inspiration, not answers; 2. allow for customization of the generative possibilities; 3. prioritize ease of use (speed, portability, and online accessibility) in design. While there are some limitations to our approach which we describe in this paper, we found these rules summarized the needs of the GMs we interviewed and provide useful advice for those interested in designing generative tools for GMs.
Shopping in a Pandemic: A Persuasive Game for COVID-19. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
Presented at CHI Play Expended Abstracts; Co-Author – Dino-Store is a persuasive game that was designed to use gamification way to communicate with people and raise awareness on COVID-19. The game’s setting is grocery shopping and the mechanic indicates that how different protection strategies, such as wearing mask, keeping social distance can affect people’s infection chances in the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper will break down how the game designed by merging concepts from persuasive game models and uncomfortable interaction theory to create an engaging, but stressful experience for the user.
Gated Story Structure and Dramatic Agency in Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies. Interactive Storytelling: 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2020, Bournemouth, UK, November 3–6, 2020, Proceedings 13. Awarded Best Paper.
Sam Barlow’s story-based video game Telling Lies (2019), like his previous game, Her Story (2015), is based on an interaction mechanic in which the player searches a fixed archive of videoclips using keywords found in the dialog of the fictional characters. This storytelling strategy can be situated within traditions of epistemic narratives in which the interactor navigates through a set of unchanging narrative segments, motivated by the desire to increase knowledge of the story. Such stories offer the pleasure of revelation, and they hinge on hiding information so that it is later revealed in a way that maximizes the experience of dramatic agency. This paper explores the expressive potential of Barlow’s signature database search mechanic for creating the experience of dramatic agency through managed revelation. By mapping our own experience and examining Barlow’s development documents and code, we describe how the artfully gated search mechanic creates temporal disjunctions that provide glimpses of narrative situations that pique curiosity while suppressing explanatory revelations. Using Telling Lies as an example, we identify some characteristic design challenges and opportunities afforded by the constrained database search approach and point to unexplored design opportunities that could make this strategy the basis of a more widely-practiced genre. (Video Presentation of Paper below).
Experience and ownership with a tangible computational music installation for informal learning. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction
In this paper we present a preliminary design and initial assessment of a computational musical tabletop exhibit for children and teenagers at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). We explore how participatory workshops can promote hands-on learning of computational concepts through making music. We also use a hands-on approach to assess informal learning based on maker interviews. Maker interviews serve to subjectively capture impromptu reflections of the visitors’ achievements from casual interactions with the exhibit. Findings from our workshops and preliminary assessment indicate that experiencing and taking ownership of tangible programming on a musical tabletop is related to: ownership of failure, ownership through collaboration, ownership of the design, and ownership of code. Overall, this work suggests how to better support ownership of computational concepts in tangible programming
Dissertation / Thesis –
Transgressive Narratives: Expanding Interactive Digital Narrative Design Language with Queer Twists and Active Disruption of Belief – PhD Dissertation 2025
Transgressive Narratives: Expanding Interactive Digital Narrative Design Language with Queer Twists and Active Disruption of Belief presents a framework for the expansion of critical analysis and design of interactive digital narratives through the union of Queer Theory’s recontextualization of failure and Science Fiction Studies’ framing of cognitive estrangement as a design method. The current focus of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) research is on the complete immersion of an interactor within an artifact such that moments of failure and ambiguity are minimalized or removed from an experience. To challenge this design prerogative, queer failure and cognitive estrangement provide a design strategy where interactors enter into a queered state of being which reconfigures their understanding of both the presented narrative worlds and their own personal rule systems and questions frequently glossed over hegemonic and oppressive cultural structures.
To formulate this framework, two concepts were created through the investigation of various digital artifacts. The first, Queer Twist, expands IDN’s framing of narrative contextualization from its reliance on positional, revelatory understanding of narrative as defined by the individual’s cultural perspectives. The Queer Twist expands contextualization to provide space for minority concepts whose logic and/or recontextualization processes might exist outside traditional cultural conventions and perspectives. The second concept, Active Disruption of Belief, expands IDN’s Active Creation of Belief cycle where interactors challenge and, in faux-dominance, gain immersion within and understanding of an artifact’s narrative. Active Disruption of Belief draws on cognitive estrangement to expand believability to include belief building via external artifact centered challenges which disrupt the interactor, priming them for further recontextualizations to their understandings. Combined together, these two terms seek not to destroy, but expand IDN’s potential beyond the current limitations brought about by its focus on immersion and lack of meaningful engagement with ambiguity.
Design Agency: Dissection the Layers of Tabletop Roleplaying Game Campaign Design – Master Thesis.
In the field of digital media, the study of interactive narratives holds the aesthetics of agency and dramatic agency as core to digital design. These principles hold that users must reliably be able to navigate the interface and the narrative elements of the artifact in order to have a lasting appeal. However, due to recent academic and critical discussions several digital artifacts are being focused on as possible new ways of engaging users. These artifacts do not adhere to the design aesthetics foundational to digital media, but represent a movement away from the principle of dramatic agency in interactive narratives. In an attempt to understand this separation and offer a solution to this developing issue, another non-digital interactive medium was studied: tabletop role-playing games. The designers of this medium were studied to understand the techniques and methods they employed to create dramatic interactive narratives for their users. These case studies suggested the designers used a third design aesthetic, design agency, to help balance the tension between agency and dramatic agency of the users of their medium. This design aesthetic could provide a balancing force to the current issues arising within interactive narrative. My master’s thesis that translates the analog design of tabletop roleplaying games into a language digital designers can use.
TM Gasque 