Projects

Here you can find all my non-academic, strictly-speaking, outputs. These are often more creative, informal, or community-oriented activities that don’t strictly fit into the publication mold.

Drafting the Informed Way: Risk Assessment & Player Strategic Practice (Principal Investigator)

Over the last eight years, as critical discourse on lootboxes and marketing strategies in games has become more pointed, one game that has danced on that boundary is Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast, 1993). Fresh off of its 30-year anniversary and boasting over 27 000 unique cards (90 000 if we count reprints), the game has been in the public eye because of its expanding cultural cachet. In part, as the game folds in popular film and game IP, like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Stranger Things (2016), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Jurassic Park (1993), it is becoming increasingly clear that the game is a hub for multiple communities. Conversely, it’s business model as the proto-lootbox continues to trigger anxieties about gambling, especially for minors.

One angle that remains understudied however, is how consumers/players adapt to the randomness of the card pack, and their own card decks. Often discussed by content creators on Youtube, Twitch and Spotify, game formats like draft and sealed task players with dynamic risk assessment and pattern recognition that challenges a linear reading of the game as “pure” gambling. This has been located in the example of Jon Finkel, the first Magic hall of fame inductee, who has gone on to find success in professional poker. The underlying assertion being that Magic is a language that teaches transferable risk assessment skills. Likewise, many other pro players and data scientists produce content, or write for Magic outlets online, offering resources for amateur players or even veterans. Most notably, the development of data tools like 17lands.com herals a new data-driven age of risk assessment where the game is played across a wider platform assemblage when run through Magic: The Gathering Arena (2019), the brick and mortar game’s newest digital iteration.

Run through both the Jeu Responsible a l’Ere Numerique (JREN) and Risk Research Working Group, Drafting the Informed Way is a nascent project tasked with studying 1) what tools, outlets and content is produced with the aim of training consumers in risk assessment for the game, 2) who are the cultural producers engaged in this work, and which critical lenses do they favor (data, culture, professionalization, enjoyment, etc), 3) how do consumers make use of these tools in their everyday lives and 4) how do gaming subcultures within the Magic community inflect all of the groups above.

TAG Critical Watch

Critical Watch has been the highlight project of 2024-2025 for me. Hosted in tandem with Marc Lajeunesse, the Coordinator of TAG and part-time faculty in the English department at Concordia University, each month we schedule one game adaptation, or game-related movie for viewing and critical discussion. This includes critical remarks given by myself, and following the viewing an in-camera discussion. Following that discussion, time-permitting, we also organize podcasts with students and faculty around the university to elaborate our thoughts.

Critical Watch is entirely free, and open to the public, though seating is limited. We have screened, once a month, The Super Mario Bros Movie (Horvath & Jelenic, 2023), War Games (Badham, 1983), Uncharted (Fleischer, 2022) and for winter 2025 we’ve slated Sonic the Hedgehog (Fowler, 2020), Tetris (Baird, 2023), Assassin’s Creed (Kurzel, 2016) and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Kasdan, 2017).So far, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting many scholars from Concordia University, McGill University, Universite de Montreal, College Lasalle, students and members of the public who are all brought into conversation around these movies, and around the rising tide of game adaptations that is currently sweeping Hollywood, as the superhero genre is ebbing.

Hai La Masa! (Out Fall 2025)

Hai La Masa is an analog card game design project currently in-progress at the prototyping stage. Current plans are to release the game as a print-and-play open access card game, with two specific game modes: one where the gameplay structure is intended to convey the reality of that time period, and the other where the game is reconfigured for subsequent enjoyment.

Inspired by family stories of surveillance, shame, fear, love and resilience under the Romanian Communist regime of the mid-1980s, this game asks players to attend a fictional dinner part where one or more of their family members and acquaintances may be informers. Conveying the atmosphere of a traditional family dinner party, players will play as a grandparent, one of the parents, a young adult, or family friend, juggling the social aspects of keeping up conversation about tenuous topics, while dodging topics that the presumed informer(s) are seeking insight on.

Hai La Masa! requires minimal setup, and focuses more on the interpersonal dynamics of person-to-person surveillance that a relatively-low-tech environment put to use. By 1985, the Romanian secret police (Securitate) employed about 11 000 personel, with a much wider range of half a million informers, for a national population of 22 million civilians. This game is intended to model the atmosphere produced by a lived situation where anyone, at anytime, could be listening in.

Connecting to Game

Connecting to Game started with a simple question: How could we produce content about games that is sometimes more academic, and sometimes more accessible? We decided that we could produce content in as many formats as we felt necessary, without the constraints of the daily news cycle, or the release schedule for games and media at large.

Connecting to Game’s main goal is to bring you (the readers, the listeners, and the viewers) longer form articles, podcasts (including produced episodes and interviews with academics and games industry folks), video essays and game streams covering a wide variety of topics.
Starting with our Humour and Games podcast, we’ve tried to approach the meeting point between humour, culture and games from both the academic side, and the industry side where professionals operate day by day. The plan going forward is to continue approaching games (analog and digital) with that same mindset, while providing you with high quality reflections and analysis.

Welcome, and please get ready, we’re Connecting to Game!

Segment (In-Progress)

Segment is a speculative card game cultural design toolbox,inspired in equal parts by my own work on modern card games (including trading card games and living card games) and other in-vivo/postmortem documentation of card game design by markers of Magic: The Gathering, Gwent, Legends of Runeterra, and Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Likewise, it takes inspiration from Ben Robbin’s Microscope, while departing the realm of TTRPG design to consider the card plane.

This project is intended to provide aspiring card game designers with a broad set of design questions and process-based prototyping to produce culturally-inflected worlds for new card games, as well as deriving structural divisions, mechanics and card formatting from that cultural starting point.

This game asks users to rethink the base assumptions that have underlaid card design from the movement of the game of Naibs, and Ganjieh, into Renaissance Europe, to classical playing card suits, to color segmentation in modern card design. Likewise it asks, what if we reconsidered the quantification of culture, ethnicity, religion, and power relations between real-world locales and peoples to push again colonial logics of accumulation and violence, towards something less defined.

Segment is currently in early stages of planning, and is paired with methological publicaitons intended for the study of card games.

The Humour and Games Pod

This podcast series explores the relationship between humour and games thinking through questions of design, player reception, and broader cultural implications. Our interviews are presented in a dual-release format. First, as a set of edited episodes featuring interviews with a variety of game industry professionals and academic researchers. Each of these episodes highlights a different aspect of humour (e.g. humour in design, player perspectives, performed humour, community humour etc.). Second, the original interviews are released in full so that listeners can engage more directly with the work of specific folks that they are most interested in. The podcast brings together industry perspectives on designing humour in games with that of academics and independent developers; Practice and theory together.

After Season 1 (2020-2021), we’re currently interviewing more makers and academics for Season 2 (2022), more unique episodes with developers for breaking work (game titles, projects or upcoming campaigns) and also a special focus Season on emerging work in the field. Stay tuned for more news!

The podcast is available to listen on here on the TAG website as they release, or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and on our standalone website.