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25 August 2022

I have been very excited to start a new, large-scale research project after completing my PhD and Post Doctoral Fellowship. While I am not at the point where I want to reveal the full scale of my research plan, I can say that I plan for it to include both traditional research and a new game project. As a first component of my project I have been engaging in research about Japanese Yōkai. I was excited to present the earliest parts of this research at the Replaying Japan 2022 conference (which used a hybrid model and was hosted by Ritsumeikan University).

This video examines Nioh 2 and its value as a cross-cultural learning tool. The video was inspired by my own experiences playing Nioh 2 before engaging in more formal Yōkai research afterwards. I found that many of the depictions of Yōkai were based upon traditional sources in both physical appearance and, in many regards, to how the player interacted with enemies during gameplay. This led me to think more deeply about the game as a cross-cultural teaching tool and, eventually, resulted in this video.

This was my most elaborate video project yet and took the most time to put together. This was mainly caused by my decision to synchronize the gameplay footage with the audio recording. I think that it makes for a better video but I may not have the luxury of editing a video like this again. Quite simply, it took a lot of time to capture the video, create transitions, take still photos of the art discussed, record the audio, and edit everything together. That said, I’m proud of how it turned out!

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22 March 2022

Recently, I was contacted by my old high school classmate and current faculty member at the University of King’s College, Adam Richter. It was great to see that he is doing well and I was very happy to be invited to give a guest lecture for his History of Science and Technology class. It has been quite a while since I have given a history lecture (as opposed to a communication or game studies lecture with some history incorporated into it), so I was a little nervous. Luckily, it went very well. I was happy to put together the lecture and I hope that I get the opportunity to continue to use my skills in history, historiography, and historical methods.

The guest lecture is broken into three main parts: History, Collective Memory, and Video Games. The History section gives a very brief history of the Pacific War leading up to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is followed by the Collective Memory section, which examines how the atomic bombings have been remembered in both North America and Japan. Finally, the Video Games section gives an example of how the history and collective memory of the atomic bombs is remediated into video games. For this lecture I used case studies of Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Sega, 2018) and Resident Evil 3 (Capcom, 2020).

As with most opportunities for presentations, lectures, and public talks since the beginning of the pandemic the lecture was delivered remotely (and in this case asynchronously). I still have some mixed feelings about this because I love to travel and present my research in person but I also realize that there are some benefits to the remote models as well. Not only was this an opportunity that I would have needed to turn down if it was in-person due to travel costs but it also would not have been recorded and, as a result, much harder to share widely. The lecture is now available on my YouTube channel. You can watch it here:

As a final note, I have upgraded my recording equipment and become slightly more comfortable recording since my last batch of videos. I like being able to more easily and widely share my research so I hope that I can keep recording and editing videos even as we transition back to more normal circumstances.

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2 December 2021

I was honored to win a Hexagram Internationalization Grant for the period of February to May 2020. My original idea for the grant was to create a small game demo in RPG Maker MV and use it as the basis for a game-making and historical narrative workshop at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Unfortunately, the entire project was scrapped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily, Hexagram allowed me to keep the funds which I used to cover non-refundable travel expenses.

Despite this, Hexagram invited me to speak about my grant during their 20th Anniversary Gala. Although I was unable to travel to Montreal to attend the gala, they were very accommodating and allowed me to submit a video in lieu of an in-person talk. Rather than simply reiterate how the project was cancelled, I took the opportunity to talk about the RPG Maker MV versions of Nagasaki Kitty. Though these projects are not directly connected to the grant, I thought that I should provide some kind of content other than saying, “Thank you for covering my non-refundable travel expenses after I had to cancel my project.”

Here is the video:

I would love to pursue my original proposed project (i.e., an international game-making workshop focused on historical narratives) again at a later date but I am also happy with the way that everything worked out. If the workshop had not been cancelled I would have been working on that rather than making a full version of a game (that would later spawn other, bilingual versions).

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15 July 2021

I recently had my first opportunity to be interviewed about my work. I felt excited and honored that Epoch Xperience reached out to me to discuss my RPG Maker MV game Nagasaki Kitty. Epoch is a company that focuses on historical research (not only in games but also in more traditional mediums) and was interested in talking to me about the design and historical work that went into Nagasaki Kitty. Below is the full hour-plus interview where we cover everything from my academic research to how people who are interested in making their own historical games can get started.

I want to thank Mark LoProto for both organizing/recording the interview and providing me with the completed footage to present here. I should note that the lighting and video issues in the completed interview originated on my end and were the unfortunate consequence of completing the interview remotely during a lockdown. Overall I was quite happy with how the interview went and hope that I get the opportunity participate in more of these types of activities in the future.

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13 June 2021

An interesting by-product of the pandemic for me has been an increased amount of time spent learning new software and platforms. I was required to create a video essay version of my talk for the Canadian Game Studies Association and I enjoyed that experience. As a result, I made another video essay based on my International Conference on Games and Narrative 2021 talk. I am lacking in the proper equipment (i.e. microphone, lighting, etc.) so I think that the quality of the video may be slightly lacking, but I still had fun making it. The gameplay clips were captured on a PS4, the audio was recorded and edited using Audacity, and the editing and combing of files was completed using the Microsoft Photos application (which has pleasantly surprised me with its ease of use and number of features).

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31 May 2021

I was extremely excited and honored to be able to discuss an important aspect of my research and methodology at the Canadian Game Studies annual 2021 conference. This was initially accepted as a paper for the 2020 conference and was a speculative paper intended to engage with how I was going to tackle my positionality within my dissertation. However, the 2020 conference was cancelled and all accepted papers were moved to the 2021 conference. As a result, this paper went from, “This is how I think that I will handle positionality within my dissertation” to, “This is how I handled positionality within my dissertation.” The fact that the 2021 conference was entirely virtual meant that I needed to record a video essay which can be found below.

I look forward to further engaging in this field and type of research in my future scholarship. In particular, I am becoming more and more interested in the idea of “erasure” both on the individual level but also at larger sites of power and within collective/cultural memory.

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13 November 2019

I was very excited to give my first game making workshop at the University of Waterloo’s Critical Media Lab.

The Event Poster

I gave a talk as the first part of the workshop that was designed to give the students a brief background on me, my work and its theoretical underpinnings. I was pleasantly surprised with the number of insightful questions that I received during this part of the workshop. If I had let the students keep asking questions it seems like they would have taken up the entire workshop without getting to the critical making part!

A slide from my talk used to help describe how I turn historiography into video games.

After all the questions we did a group play-through of two of my games, Nagumo’s Ruin: The Battle of Midway and Nagasaki Kitty with audience members assigned as voice actors. I was also able to show off some of my work within RPG Maker MV. From here, I had the students download Twine onto their devices and provided an introduction to the tool that allowed them to start making their own games.

The title slide of Nagasaki Kitty. This was the first time that I used audience members as voice actors in a play-test but I think I will keep doing it in the future. It was great.

Overall, I had an excellent time giving my first workshop. In retrospect, I probably would have cut out the talk at the beginning and jumped right into introducing the tools. But I feel like I learned a lot about the time management of a workshop and what to expect from the students. I was very happy to hear that at least one or two of the students had started making something that they wanted to move forward with in the limited amount of time that they had to experiment with the tool. I hope they keep making games.

I would like to thank the students of the Critical Media Lab for being enthusiastic and making my first workshop such a great experience and Dr. Marcel O’Gorman for taking the time to drop in. Finally, a special shout-out to Dr. Lai-Tze Fan for the invitation, organization and support of the workshop. I appreciate you all!

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5 October 2018

This is a short lecture that I had filmed after one of my classes was cancelled. It is a short examination of how video games interact with the past.

Special thanks to Marc, Courtney, Patricia and Dan for helping me with the equipment and the editing of the lecture. Also, a quick shout-out to Mia and her mLab for providing the space, equipment, and opportunity.