Engagement: game
I research how playable software can produce new knowledge between scholars, institutions, and communities. Game design is a growing practice in academia and meets growing games literacy in the public, but we lack methodologies that operationalize making and play as collaborative humanistic inquiry. My dissertation contributes propositional modeling, a methodology where digital artifacts trigger divergent interpretation and accumulate what that interpretation yields, so that public play compounds knowledge scholars can’t produce alone.
About
I research how playable software can produce new knowledge between scholars, institutions, and communities. Game design is a growing practice in academia and meets growing games literacy in the public, but we lack methodologies that operationalize making and play as collaborative humanistic inquiry. My dissertation contributes propositional modeling, a methodology where digital artifacts trigger divergent interpretation and accumulate what that interpretation yields, so that public play compounds knowledge scholars can’t produce alone.
The People's Sky 2
The fifth iteration of the People's Tree project series, developed as the centerpiece for the 2025 Madvent launcher. I was invited by the junior team—who had taken over the launcher technology and coordination—to contribute this game for continuity with the series. My contributions focused on technical refinement: redesigning and optimizing the input system for significantly improved panning and zooming controls, recoloring and reskinning the visual aesthetic, and optimizing data serialization and loading sequences. The project marks my transition from lead developer to technical consultant, supporting the next generation of Haunted PS1 organizers.
The People's Sky
The fourth iteration of the People's Tree project, The People's Sky is an experimental game exploring community building by enabling players to design items, append messages, and place them in a shared digital space. For this iteration, I developed several key features, including data-transfer optimizations, new 'trace' visualizations to show player exploration paths, comprehensive analytic logs for post-experiment analysis, and a web application for content moderation.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
The Peoples Tree 2
The second iteration of the People's Tree project, an experimental game exploring community building in networked spaces. I created this application to allow participants to design ornaments and leave messages on a communal tree, offering a unique blend of interaction and shared digital space. The project served as a valuable opportunity to develop new technology, establish policy frameworks for user-generated content, and conduct comprehensive analytics on player behavior.
Where's Home?
An experimental prototype that successfully translated the unshaded, minimalist aesthetic of Rococo into a more complex, architecturally descriptive style. The concept was a sequel to the People's Tree project set in an abstracted Union Station, Chicago. For the prototype, I developed a custom Rhinoceros plugin to optimize and export modular architectural elements, and created a system to randomly place around 100 unique characters and their luggage throughout the scene. While the core technical art was a success, the project was paused to allow for more design iteration on its complex dialogue system.
Puzzle Generation
A dungeon generator where monsters trawl on fixed and cyclical paths, creating a looping temporal structure where an agent attempts to reach the end in the shortest amount of forward steps. I developed this using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to solve for a sequence of moves in time rather than a shortest traversal path in space, as a final project for a course in algorithmic design.
Minotaur
Minotaur is a simple game experience that served as my earliest experiment with embedded analytics. For this project, I built a system that records play sessions and sends summary data back to a Clowder server. This work enabled long-term data collection, and the results from over three years and thousands of play sessions are analyzed in this report.
The Peoples Tree
The People's Tree was the first in a series of experimental games I created to explore community building in networked spaces. In this project, players design ornaments and leave messages on a shared tree. It was my first opportunity to build the underlying technology, develop content policies, and run analytics for a live, public-facing application. A key finding from this and subsequent projects was an unexpectedly high player return rate of 15-30%, suggesting that players felt a personal stake in the collectively-designed artifact and returned to observe its evolution.