About Me

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Interactive Design at William Peace University.

In whatever work I may do, I feel the most fulfilled when I’m able to center my focus on enabling and empowering people. Who I’m empowering and what I’m enabling them to do naturally changes from role to role and project to project, but the core of what motivates me in my work remains the same.

I especially feel that gamification is a massively powerful tool capable of affording developers a means of offering people experiences, understandings, and perspectives to which they may have otherwise been permanently and unknowingly blind. In my eyes, there is no reason that expressive and educational games shouldn't be engaging in their own rights, or that accessibility should be an afterthought.

My Greatest Inspirations

Authors

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

~James joyce

Whether by inspiring the artistic direction of my work, by offering valuable perspectives, or just because of their sense of humor, the following authors have had profound impacts on me:

James Joyce, Douglas Adams, Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Game Designers

we can create games with powerful themes right now. but why? why do this? out of a selfish need for artistic expression? no. because we are designers.

~Jesse schell

The following game designers have done much to change how I look at games, how I think about design as a process and craft, and how I think about games as facilitators of experience for players:

Jesse Schell, Lucas Pope, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Fumito Ueda, Bennett Foddy, James Portnow

Games

If I started spending money on Old Branches and Used Bandages, I'd be out of business in a jiffy!

~Snowdin Shopkeeper, undertale

While not necessarily my favorite games (though many of them are on that list as well), I feel that the following games are those that have taught me the most and done the most to shake and reshape my ideas of what games can be:

Bloodborne, Hollow Knight, INSIDE, Return of the Obra Dinn, Shadow of the Colossus, Space Quest, Undertale