Hello, world! I’m Eric, and this is my personal site. This site has gone through many variations on a similar theme: originally, a GitHub Pages site built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub; then, a Jekyll site built and served directly from a Raspberry Pi; then, a Jekyll site built and served by Netlify from a source on GitLab; then, a more substantial departure with an Obsidian Publish site; and now, what I hope to be the most lightweight, portable, and low maintenance version, a Jekyll site built and hosted on SourceHut Pages.

I was first exposed to the elegant simplicity of publishing with Markdown and Pandoc by academics concerned with sustainable, durable research and with the decommodification and mobilization of knowledge. This led me to Jekyll, and from there to the indie, low tech, minimal, and permacomputing worlds of thought, which in turn have inspired my continual tinkering with this webpage. My experimentation with these tools and ideas has turned into a general interest in the ways in which technology scaffolds social relations, and the new communities of transformative practice that can emerge when we critically engage with these technosocial systems.

I completed an undergraduate honours degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at SFU in 2016, with a thesis on law and violence in Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. I went on to pursue a master’s in interdisciplinary humanities at TWU, which I completed in 2018. My thesis, “Fiction in the Integrated Circuit,” asked the question what is it for a cyborg to read fiction?, and through critical dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Jean Baudrillard, as well as a hermeneutic reading of the technical literature from the history of the development of solid-state electronics, I articulated a theory of integrative subject matter, a complex, poietic monism that works to deconstruct the transcendental subject and its apparatus of representation.

Since defending my master’s thesis, I have conducted numerous qualitative research studies on narrative and games, employing the phenomenological, hermeneuetical, and poststructural methods of my academic training to perform mechanical close readings of games like Kentucky Route Zero, Hollow Knight, The Last of Us, and FromSoftware’s oeuvre from Demon’s Souls to Elden Ring, as well as tabletop games like Dream Askew / Dream Apart and Trophy Dark. In the midst of this research practice I became an instructor in the Game Development program at TWU, where I have been teaching since 2020, covering a wide range of courses including interactive storytelling, video game aesthetics, game production, and project management for video games.

I have maintained a critical design practice over the years, publishing numerous tabletop roleplaying zines on itch.io, including two—Lost Scriptures and Glitchspiel—which I successfully crowdfunded during Kickstarter’s Zine Quest in 2020 and 2021. I have also published two chapbooks of poetry—On the Back of a Tiger and Stratum of Choice—and my first full length trade collection, The Deep, is in submission.

By day, I am a project manager at Electronic Arts, working as a development director on the FC Gameplay team. My shipped titles include FIFA 23, FC 24, and the forthcoming FC 25. My project expertise covers the development of a wide range of gameplay features (“3 C’s”), environments, bootflow, game and controller settings, and front end user interface and user experience. I have extensive experience managing hybrid and distributed teams, and I take pride in my commitments to operational excellence and continuous improvement, building processes from the ground up that are informed by real work and focused on real value. My approach to project management is indebted to Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s writing on organization in his 1985 book Classes, which I would recommend all game production professionals with socialist inclinations read.

This site consists in its entirety of an enormity of markdown files, rendered to html by Jekyll. Here you can find notes and bookmarks, annotations and lectures, essays and conference papers, and more. Click through to collections to navigate the site tree, join my email list for periodic updates in your inbox, or choose from a list of curated RSS feeds to which you can subscribe in the RSS reader of your choice.