Projects
An Environmental Typology of the Sea in Digital Games
This project examines how ‘the sea’ functions and signifies in high-exposure video games, combining SteamSpy ownership data with Steam Store metadata to build an empirically weighted sample rather than a subjective one. Games are drawn from two complementary sources: sea-related Steam tags (sailing, naval, underwater, etc.) and keyword/trope-based detection across top-owned titles from 2015–2025, catching both games explicitly marketed around the sea and those where it appears as a secondary setting (e.g. Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim, The Witcher 3). Each game is coded for whether and how the sea appears — as void, resource, threat, threshold, or inhabitable space — testing the hypothesis that the sea most often functions as an invisible boundary rather than a navigable world. The result is a data-driven, exposure-weighted typology of the sea's cultural and design function across contemporary gaming's most-played titles.
Age in High-Exposure Horror Games
This project asks a simple question: where are the old people in horror games? Borrowing the 'virtual census' method from Williams (2009) and Jones et al. (2025), it codes age, gender, and race across human characters in 79 high-exposure horror titles on Steam (each with over a million owners) and compares the results against real population data. The findings show adults dominate at 78.8% of characters, while elderly characters sit at just 1.2% — and only one, Wickerbottom from Don't Starve Together, is playable. The study argues this gap isn't accidental but structural, shaped by subgenre mechanics and content ratings that quietly encode assumptions about which bodies get to survive horror.
Research Areas
environmental imagination
How media – especially games – imagine oceans, flooding worlds, underwater environments, ruins, and ecosystems – and how bodies, non-human life, and strange ecologies blur into these landscapes.
games as data
Using large-scale game data – ownership, tags, genres, and coded samples – to trace patterns across thousands of titles rather than relying on a handful of case studies.