Below is a sample of games designed as part of my PhD coursework at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. For a list of which games have been published and presented (and where), click on the Research tab located in this website’s header. To inquire about the print and play for this section’s tabletop games, feel free to reach out at the email linked to my Rutgers Profile.
Italiani Brava Gente
A 4-6 player, asymmetrical worker-placement game that repurposes the ‘myth of the good Italian’ to examine Italy’s amnesia regarding its colonial legacy, exploring possibilities of rebellion and resistance in social crime accounts (as documented by Francesca Locatelli) documented across the Eritrean capital of Asmara.
Land to the Tillers
A 3-6 player cooperative, deck-building game set against the backdrop of capitalism’s rise during the ‘long’ 16th century of western Europe (as documented in the archived experiences of peasants in the English county of Essex). Adapting research from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, this game attempts to re-litigate that lost battle of revolution fought by peasants in Essex, with players working together to combat witch-hunts and land privatization as they struggle to survive and protect the commons against the rapid progress of capitalist development.
Can You Eat It?
A light 2-4 player card game that considers the multi-sensory experience of ethnographic settings, building on the insights of Sarah Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography to examine how much we can learn when we step into the embodied encounters of our research environments.
Terms of Inclusion
A 2-4 player worker-placement board game that features the un/acknowledged labor involved in platform technologies. Adapting research from digital inequality and critical algorithm scholars, this game spotlights the breakdowns and challenges experienced by users enrolled in the gig economy, asking what other work is needed to power our in/efficient technologies.
Street Art deTours
A crowd-sourced, geo-locative experience that invites people to find imaginative ways to walk through, and play inside, public spaces across the Australian city of Melbourne. This project was designed as part of my Fulbright-sponsored research with Dr. Alison Young at the University of Melbourne, and it was designed in collaboration with Dr. Lachlan MacDowall and Dr. Chris Honig.
Unlike regular tours, this project’s detours are not informational; while most use street art and graffiti to guide their viewers, no background is provided about their images or artists. Instead, these detours use creative experiments and personal storytelling to create new perspectives for their locations and document the city’s changing landscape, drawing on content generated by undergraduate students at the University of Melbourne as part of their final assessment.
Race to Citizenship
A 4-8 player racing game that draws on data from racial prerequisite cases to help illustrate how unstable conceptions of whiteness, filtered through the lens of capitalism, continue to structure the experience of American life today. As identified by Ian Haney López, these 52 cases (which came before state and federal courts between 1878 and 1952) documented the challenges faced by petitioners seeking US citizenship, who struggled to navigate the many contradictions implicit in race’s social construction.