Portfolio

Below you will find samples of my work for your reading pleasure.

The Guardian: Comment is Free
LGBT Content in video games: here come the old bullies
“As one of the few larger game companies providing same-sex content to its audience, EA is caught in the crossfire in the larger political battle currently being waged on sexuality in the US.”

Kotaku
This Gaymer’s Story
“I wrote this out so that you could connect it to an actual experience, not some academic exercise of ‘this is now a general insult.’ You do not get to claim the insult so that you can go use it however you wish. Let me repeat: you do not get to reclaim this word that way.”

With the Galaxy in Flames, My Video Game Hero Came out of the Closet
“I named my Shepard “Sebastian” and, as him, saved the galaxy while gathering a crew on my ship, the Normandy. In return, the game’s creators at BioWare inadvertently gave me a story that allowed me to more meaningfully connect to a coming out story than any I have read or seen in books or film.”

Think Progress
Building Games That Let Players Build the Future
“The writers and designers of a game that entails some level of decision-making can answer many of the typical questions: how, when, where, etc. Ultimately, I am the one who decides why, however.”

The Failures of DC’s Gay Green Lantern Alan Scott
“I am left wondering what would make this Green Lantern specifically interesting to me. Watching him go through pain?”

Medium Difficulty
Analogue, Digital, Binary: Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story
“Eventually messages shown to the AI result in larger and larger chunks being revealed, and the interaction shifts from presenting chunks of correspondence to whether or not you agree with your AI companion when asked questions, or asked for your (restricted, binary) opinion.”

Paste Magazine
An Appropriately Epic Dragon Age Retrospective w/ Kirk Hamilton
“…the unreliable narrator is a twist that I don’t believe we see very often (examples here would be Silent Hill 2 and Final Fantasy VII).”

The Book of Unwritten Tales Review
“Among the dangers of referential humor is the feeling like I’ve heard all this before, or that the joke is in the fact that the reference exists—particularly when using giants like World of Warcraft.”

The Border House
Madison Paige Does Pull Triggers
“Instead of the same treatment as Ethan (which already used the same filmic techniques attributed to the male gaze), her shower is designed in a much narrower quarter, so that the camera pans around her a few times, taking note of her back, ass, and breasts in equal measure.”

Characters Done Right: BioShock 2’s Grace Holloway
“Grace is a woman who fled to Rapture to escape the slums and economic Depression she’d seen elsewhere, being an African American with ties to the U.S. Midwest region. Instead, she found a class structure even more rigid, as she notes how Andrew Ryan holds nothing but a false dream.”

GayGamer
Queer Characters: BioShock
“…the game never explicitly says Sander Cohen is someone who likes members of his own sex. Of course, as Levine confided, “If you asked Sander Cohen if he was gay, he’d probably say no.” It’s in the details.”

Global Game Jam ’11: H.I.V. Extinction 1981
“Your supposed ‘weapon,’ a fired condom, is then more of a defense mechanism. The other dancers could have HIV. You could have HIV. You are both defending yourself as well as others.”

Interview: Guild War 2’s Ree Soesbee on Sylvari
“GG: With the previous questions establishing a basis, how does same-sex attraction fit into the world? The sylvari are not restricted to sexual attraction for mating reasons, but how does the rest of the world/factions see this, especially since Caithe seems to play a fairly large role in the world, and was previously a lover of Faolain?

Ree: Other races of the world see the sylvari as odd for many more reasons than simply their sexuality – the issue of same-gender love among the sylvari is no more strange to, say, a norn than the fact that sylvari bleed a type of sap and not blood. Other races have a history of same-sex relationships, but those relationships tend to be downplayed and not lauded within the culture.”

Gamers With Jobs

Pokédrag Series/Column
“I haven’t been clean-shaven since May. Tonight I contemplated what I would name myself if I were to don a nerd drag persona. The answer was as simple: Leeloo Dallas MultiDrag.”

GameCritics Reviews
Gungnir
“The plot trappings are somewhat so-so in that the twists, turns, and political machinations are not wholly surprising, nor particularly engaging.”

Endless Space
“Being Lord Diva, Her Holiness Supreme of the Sophon empire is a grand position.

It is also lonely.”