Critical Work

Wear Your Heart on Your Screen: Provoking Player Empathy in Video Games
2016
​Dissertation for M.Sc. in Design & Digital Media

Pushing back against a volume of psychological studies suggesting that video games increase violent and aggressive behavior in players, I aim to explore how games may create the opposite effect: specifically, my project measures how games affect players' empathy and compassion. To this end, I designed an developed a video game, Looking Back, posting it on a free indie game site where players could download and play it. The game was accompanied by a survey of followup questions; drawing on these responses and live and recorded instances of player reactions, I analyzed how and if players had shown signs of significant empathetic engagement.

Dost Thou Even Hoist, Brother?: Shakespeare, Derridean Hauntology, and New Media Adaptation
2014
​Presented at UC Berkeley's Undergraduate Comparative Literature Research Symposium

In his essay "The Ethics of Infidelity," Thomas Leitch criticizes contemporary adaptation theory, particularly the emphasis placed on an adapted work's fidelity to the "original" piece. I see this as a problem especially when considering new media; adaptations whose mediums differ so vastly from that of the "original" are doomed to be viewed as unfaithful while any innovations they may offer are dismissed. Citing Shakespeare's literary authority as an example, I examine adaptations of his work occurring through memes, on Twitter, and in video games, deconstructing and exploring their complex relationship to their "originals."