Heya!

The first semester of my MA is almost done, and I’m happy to say I’ll be able to link a couple of my course projects to this blog towards the end of this year! They’re pretty exciting; for instance, have you ever wanted to hear a limited run podcast about how intertextuality and hypertextuality affect the ways people access and interpret video games? I bet you have, and soon you’ll get one, courtesy of me and CMCT 6004 (but seriously, I try to make the podcast as fun and accessible as possible with lots of anecdotes, so give it a listen when it’s avaialble!). I’m also working on a demo for a management simulator that subverts the genre’s glorification of work for work’s sake, though I think I’ll let it sit in the oven for a bit longer before sharing it to my itch.io. I want it to be fully baked when you play 🙂

If you were hoping I was coming to you with a new article, fear not: last month, I was published in Play the Past! In “Conquering the Curriculum: Learning Social Studies from Crusader Kings II,” I talk about, well, learning social studies from Crusader Kings II. The article begins with two shocking revelations: I’ve always been a huge nerd, yet despite that nerdiness, I wasn’t a standout student for most of my life. So, what do you do with a nerd who underperforms at school and plays too many video games? Just give em’ the right game. You can read the article here.

More soon,

Joel