My research centres on two related areas. Firstly, I am interested in how computer games imply or suggest certain practices to us that lead to our carving out certain habits and dispositions. This pertains to the way that players actively exercise their ‘freedom’ in gameplay and how they transform themselves into subjects with particular sensibilities, values, embodied dispositions, and forms of attention. These considerations bear on the relationship between power, subjectivity, and play.

Secondly, I explore how gameplay can be conceived as an aesthetic experience or aesthetic practice. This concerns the player’s intuitive, non-cognitive grasp of the game as a system with possibilities and constraints. The player’s approach to gameplay can be a means for them to continuously engage with self-interpretive processes and to develop their self-reflexivity – this has the potential to be conducive towards an aesthetics of the self.

My background is interdisciplinary. I hold a PhD from the University of Manchester (Sociology), an MA from The Courtauld (History of Art), and a BA from University College London (Philosophy and the History of Art). My ESRC and President’s Doctoral Scholarship funded PhD explored the ways in which player practices in contemporary single-player computer games (particularly RPGs) can be said to be aligned with what may be called a ‘neoliberal self-fashioning’ or to constitute the Foucauldian aesthetic practices of the self that lead to a ‘transformation’ or ‘transfiguration’ of the playing subject.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• The aesthetics of computer games
• Self-transformation through gameplay and playful technologies
• The socio-cultural significance of habitual practices connected to gaming
• The technologies of the self, neoliberal subjectivity, and the aesthetics of existence
• Gaming and narratives of the self

I would look to supervise PhD candidates who are looking to work on any of the areas listed under my research interests (and to contact me if they have any questions).

Teaching

I teach on modules that explore the relationship between users and technologies, drawing upon a range of philosophical traditions to critically evaluate the ways in which users are entangled with technologies in complex ways that result in transformations in their relations to self. Most of my modules centre around digital games and I foreground students combining detailed ethnographic work with strong theoretical analyses of their own (and others’) gaming experiences as practices that can cultivate brief, as well as enduring, habits.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Expertise

• Game studies
• Subjectivity and identity
• Aesthetic theory
• Critical social theory
• Foucault studies

Participation in expert panels

• ‘The reflexive askēsis of computer gameplay as an ethico-aesthetic practice’. Keynote talk for Exploring Aesthetic Practices. University of Jyväskylä. Oct 23rd-25th, 2024.
• ‘Attending to one’s own playstyle: the reflexive ascesis (askēsis) of gameplay.’ Invited talk for ATTENTION!: series of lightning at KCL. Nov 15th, 2023.
• Program chair of the 13th International Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, ‘The Aesthetics of Computer Games’. St Petersburg State University, St Petersburg (October 21-25, 2019).
• Panel organiser for ‘‘Subjects’ and ‘objects’ in game studies.’ Panel at The 12th International Philosophy of Computer Games Conference: Values in Games. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen (August 13-15, 2018). Panellists: Espen Aarseth, Andreas Gregersen, Justyna Janik, Sebastian Möring, Feng Zhu.

Selected Publications 

• ‘The Intelligence of Player Habits and Reflexivity in Magic: the Gathering Arena Limited Draft’. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 38-55 (2023).
• ‘The freedom of alienated reflexive subjectivity in The Stanley Parable.’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2020).
• ‘The ‘affective’ ethics of computer games: ‘aesthetic education’, the ‘technologies of the self’, and the cultivation of an ‘affectivity’’. Proceedings of The 12th International Philosophy of Computer Games Conference (2018).
• ‘Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault.’ ToDiGRA Vol. 3, No. 3 (2018).
• ‘Self-limitation and self-affirmation in (anti-)totalising thought’. Terra Critica VII (2019).
• ‘Between Autopoiesis and Neoliberal Self-Fashioning: the Dialectics of Self-Construction in Single-Player Role-Playing Games.’ Proceedings of The 9th International Philosophy of Computer Games Conference (2015).