Selected Refereed Journal Articles
Michael A. DeAnda. "'Thou Shall Never Use a Fire Stone on Eevee': Twitch Plays Pokémon and the Articulation of Brands as Cultural Texts." In Johanna Brewer, Bo Ruber, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Christopher J. Persaud, Real Life In Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (pp. 231-242). 2023. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Excerpt from Introduction: In this chapter, I situate the gameplay and the collaboratively developed narrative of Twitch Plays Pokémon as cultural palimpsests of the Pokémon brand. By studying the collaborative play of the game and with storytelling, I locate alternative logics and pleasures beyond fun, winning, and mechanics of playing games, even among a massive number of players. Rather, my study of Twitch Plays Pokémon emphasizes alternative pleasures related to games, including frustration, cele bration, won der, and trolling. From this collective gameplay, I consider the opportunities for streaming platforms to develop shared memories and collaborative meaning- making. In my investigation of Twitch Plays Pokémon, I situate this experiment as a fan- made paratext of the brand, and I argue that video game brands are not static in their messages but rather are dynamic living texts because of the fine balance of coauthored meaning- making. I emphasize that streaming platforms as transformative play spaces for fans to continue breathing life into these cultural texts, making apparent these coauthoring pro cesses between commercial and consumer entities.
Michael A. DeAnda and Gracie Lu Straznickas. "Undetectable Starting Points: Rethinking 'Passing' in Level Design through Queerness, Disability, and Roxy's Got Balls." Design Issues, 39, no. 1 (2023).
Abstract: In this article, the authors tease out meritocracy from level design by comparing “passing” game levels with “passing” as performances for survival by marginalized peoples. We use HIV to demonstrate passing as a response from the intersections of queerness, race, and disability to inform heuristics for level design that tease out meritocratic design practices. We finish by illustrating our heuristics in action through Roxy's Got Balls, an online drag queen bingo event.
Michael A. DeAnda. "Chisme, Lo Cotidiano and Disruptive Gameplay." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 28, no. 2 (2022).
Abstract: On 12 February 2014, an unknown Australian developer colloquially known as ‘Streamer’ launched Twitch Plays Pokémon, an emulation of Pokémon Red experimentally modified for collaborative play through an online streaming platform, Twitch. During the run of the game, the number of players simultaneously feeding commands into the game yielded some odd in-game behaviors: the avatar would aimlessly pace, give random strings as nicknames to pokémon, and attempt to use items at improper moments. To provide context for this absurd gameplay, players narrativized Twitch Plays Pokémon. What began with a frantic avatar constantly and incorrectly trying to use items in pokémon battles became a messianic tale of good and evil. In this article, I read Twitch Plays Pokémon through methods developed from Latina theology. I argue that when analyzed through lo cotidiano (daily life) and chisme (gossip), Twitch Plays Pokémon underscores experimental games as spaces to collaboratively disrupt privileged readings of cultural texts and assumed uses of technologies. Using lo cotidiano, I discuss how games train players towards certain uses of technologies, privileging these logics in daily lived interactions with technological affordances. I then demonstrate how Twitch Plays Pokémon disrupts the expected play of video games. I use chisme as a critical lens for metacognition and collaborative meaning-making to frame the fan-created Lord Helix narrative generated amidst Twitch Plays Pokémon. Reading the emergent player behaviors as chisme allows me to account for the nuances of fan labor, seeing it as knowledge that is created through experience and then shared, tested, and scrutinized through communities.
Michael A. DeAnda. “An Interview with Drag Bingo Host, Sofonda Booz: Exploring Accessible Game Design and the Construction of Liminal Play Spaces of Gender and Sexuality.” Sexuality & Play in Media [special issue], WiderScreen, 1 no. 2 (2019).
Abstract: Sofonda Booz is a drag queen host of the weekly “C U Next Tuesday Bingo” event at the SoFo Tap, a bar in Chicago, IL. During her Bingo events, Sofonda draws from gay subcultural knowledge and current events to inform her games, requiring additional player participation through call-and-response, conversations, and lip syncs. In this interview, Sofonda relays her experience doing drag and developing her Bingo set, focusing on how she creates a welcoming community for players on Tuesday nights. Through her reflections on her career, she discusses cultural shifts in drag performances that address larger issues of gender and sexual identity in culture. Furthermore, she articulates her methods of researching, designing, and hosting Drag Bingo that speak to game design skills: research, experience design, and iteration.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Assimilation Gaming: The Reification of Compulsory Gender Roles in RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, 4 no. 2 (2019): 155-17.
Abstract: This article analyses the ‘Bunk Buddies’ mini-challenge on Season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present, USA: World of Wonder), during which the competitors identified the sexual positions of Andrew Christian models. In this episode (‘Shady Politics’ 2016), gaming and camera technologies work in tandem to repackage heteronormative models of gender and sexual identity for gay audiences. While the mini-challenge offers Andrew Christian models for visual pleasure of gay audiences, the game mechanics and camera angles reify masculine/feminine gender binaries in the way the preferred sexual positions between men are constructed, coding ‘tops’ as masculine and ‘bottoms’ as feminine. While stereotypes in the gay community also present similar understandings of compulsory gender roles, this depiction in RuPaul’s Drag Race, a groundbreaking television series celebrating gay lives and gender subversion through drag, is particularly troubling because it mythologizes a binary gender model that cites the heterosexual matrix and assimilates gay men into traditional male and female gender roles according to their preferred sexual positions. The ‘Bunk Buddies’ challenge thus suggests that sexual positions between men also have a literacy based on masculinity (penetrating) and femininity (receiving).
Michael A. DeAnda. “Playing With Dick Pics: Networked Technologies and Digital Closets.” Video Game Art Reader, 2 no. 1 (2018): 51-63.
Abstract: Robert Yang’s free photo studio video game Cobra Club poses as a fictionalization of location-based mobile “hookup” applications marketed toward gay men. This “free artistic dick pic” simulator provocatively comments on body image and online surveillance. Cobra Club’s game design successfully reflects queer experience by articulating how networked devices and surveillance technologies digitize the Closet. As video games provide spaces for considering how lived experiences engage present and future technologies to shape our communities and values, Cobra Club allows players access to a gay lived experiences and the continued problematic intersections of gay sexuality, surveillance, consent, and body image.
Michael A. DeAnda, Jennifer deWinter, Chris P. Hanson, Carly A. Kocurek & Stephanie Vie. “‘Families, Friendship, and Feelings’: American Girl, Authenticating Experiences, and the Transmediation of Girlhood.” The Journal of Popular Culture, 51 no. 4 (2018). DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12708
First Page Excerpt: American Girl began as a small collection of dolls, books, and doll accessories celebrating an idealized “American girl” within a historical imagination.1 Today, it has evolved into a lifestyle brand for girls including multiple doll lines, clothes, and accessories for both dolls and girls, craft kits, and a rich array of media, including books, movies, games, and a robust web presence. The American Girl stores, located now in 19 U.S. cities with 4 boutiques at Indigo and Chapters stores in Canada, serve a unique function in American Girl’s transmedia complex. While American Girl items may be purchased online or by catalog, the stores offer not only a lushly conceptualized shopping environment, but a host of what we term authenticating experiences. These experiences include doll salon services, dining in doll-friendly cafe environments, the “Truly Me Signature Studio” where girls can design their own doll outfits or “girl-sized” backpacks and have the pieces printed in store, and a series of store-sponsored special events as well as event and party services for customers.
Michael A. DeAnda & Carly A. Kocurek. “Game Design as Technical Communication: Articulating Game Design Through Textbooks.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 25 (2016): 202-210.
Abstract: This article examines the framing of the designer’s role in game development in textbooks published and circulated over the past decade. The authors investigate the discursive ways coding is downplayed within game design texts as a means of promoting design as a form of creative expression. This speaks to ongoing tension in the games industry of coding and technology versus art. The authors argue that, in their presentation of game design, leading textbooks attempt to frame the field as one of artistry and technical practice, presenting game design as a type of technical communication. The authors ultimately consider the potential and pitfalls of considering game design as a technical communication field and suggest that this framing presents lens for considering the recently professionalized field.
Excerpt from Introduction: In this chapter, I situate the gameplay and the collaboratively developed narrative of Twitch Plays Pokémon as cultural palimpsests of the Pokémon brand. By studying the collaborative play of the game and with storytelling, I locate alternative logics and pleasures beyond fun, winning, and mechanics of playing games, even among a massive number of players. Rather, my study of Twitch Plays Pokémon emphasizes alternative pleasures related to games, including frustration, cele bration, won der, and trolling. From this collective gameplay, I consider the opportunities for streaming platforms to develop shared memories and collaborative meaning- making. In my investigation of Twitch Plays Pokémon, I situate this experiment as a fan- made paratext of the brand, and I argue that video game brands are not static in their messages but rather are dynamic living texts because of the fine balance of coauthored meaning- making. I emphasize that streaming platforms as transformative play spaces for fans to continue breathing life into these cultural texts, making apparent these coauthoring pro cesses between commercial and consumer entities.
Michael A. DeAnda and Gracie Lu Straznickas. "Undetectable Starting Points: Rethinking 'Passing' in Level Design through Queerness, Disability, and Roxy's Got Balls." Design Issues, 39, no. 1 (2023).
Abstract: In this article, the authors tease out meritocracy from level design by comparing “passing” game levels with “passing” as performances for survival by marginalized peoples. We use HIV to demonstrate passing as a response from the intersections of queerness, race, and disability to inform heuristics for level design that tease out meritocratic design practices. We finish by illustrating our heuristics in action through Roxy's Got Balls, an online drag queen bingo event.
Michael A. DeAnda. "Chisme, Lo Cotidiano and Disruptive Gameplay." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 28, no. 2 (2022).
Abstract: On 12 February 2014, an unknown Australian developer colloquially known as ‘Streamer’ launched Twitch Plays Pokémon, an emulation of Pokémon Red experimentally modified for collaborative play through an online streaming platform, Twitch. During the run of the game, the number of players simultaneously feeding commands into the game yielded some odd in-game behaviors: the avatar would aimlessly pace, give random strings as nicknames to pokémon, and attempt to use items at improper moments. To provide context for this absurd gameplay, players narrativized Twitch Plays Pokémon. What began with a frantic avatar constantly and incorrectly trying to use items in pokémon battles became a messianic tale of good and evil. In this article, I read Twitch Plays Pokémon through methods developed from Latina theology. I argue that when analyzed through lo cotidiano (daily life) and chisme (gossip), Twitch Plays Pokémon underscores experimental games as spaces to collaboratively disrupt privileged readings of cultural texts and assumed uses of technologies. Using lo cotidiano, I discuss how games train players towards certain uses of technologies, privileging these logics in daily lived interactions with technological affordances. I then demonstrate how Twitch Plays Pokémon disrupts the expected play of video games. I use chisme as a critical lens for metacognition and collaborative meaning-making to frame the fan-created Lord Helix narrative generated amidst Twitch Plays Pokémon. Reading the emergent player behaviors as chisme allows me to account for the nuances of fan labor, seeing it as knowledge that is created through experience and then shared, tested, and scrutinized through communities.
Michael A. DeAnda. “An Interview with Drag Bingo Host, Sofonda Booz: Exploring Accessible Game Design and the Construction of Liminal Play Spaces of Gender and Sexuality.” Sexuality & Play in Media [special issue], WiderScreen, 1 no. 2 (2019).
Abstract: Sofonda Booz is a drag queen host of the weekly “C U Next Tuesday Bingo” event at the SoFo Tap, a bar in Chicago, IL. During her Bingo events, Sofonda draws from gay subcultural knowledge and current events to inform her games, requiring additional player participation through call-and-response, conversations, and lip syncs. In this interview, Sofonda relays her experience doing drag and developing her Bingo set, focusing on how she creates a welcoming community for players on Tuesday nights. Through her reflections on her career, she discusses cultural shifts in drag performances that address larger issues of gender and sexual identity in culture. Furthermore, she articulates her methods of researching, designing, and hosting Drag Bingo that speak to game design skills: research, experience design, and iteration.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Assimilation Gaming: The Reification of Compulsory Gender Roles in RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, 4 no. 2 (2019): 155-17.
Abstract: This article analyses the ‘Bunk Buddies’ mini-challenge on Season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present, USA: World of Wonder), during which the competitors identified the sexual positions of Andrew Christian models. In this episode (‘Shady Politics’ 2016), gaming and camera technologies work in tandem to repackage heteronormative models of gender and sexual identity for gay audiences. While the mini-challenge offers Andrew Christian models for visual pleasure of gay audiences, the game mechanics and camera angles reify masculine/feminine gender binaries in the way the preferred sexual positions between men are constructed, coding ‘tops’ as masculine and ‘bottoms’ as feminine. While stereotypes in the gay community also present similar understandings of compulsory gender roles, this depiction in RuPaul’s Drag Race, a groundbreaking television series celebrating gay lives and gender subversion through drag, is particularly troubling because it mythologizes a binary gender model that cites the heterosexual matrix and assimilates gay men into traditional male and female gender roles according to their preferred sexual positions. The ‘Bunk Buddies’ challenge thus suggests that sexual positions between men also have a literacy based on masculinity (penetrating) and femininity (receiving).
Michael A. DeAnda. “Playing With Dick Pics: Networked Technologies and Digital Closets.” Video Game Art Reader, 2 no. 1 (2018): 51-63.
Abstract: Robert Yang’s free photo studio video game Cobra Club poses as a fictionalization of location-based mobile “hookup” applications marketed toward gay men. This “free artistic dick pic” simulator provocatively comments on body image and online surveillance. Cobra Club’s game design successfully reflects queer experience by articulating how networked devices and surveillance technologies digitize the Closet. As video games provide spaces for considering how lived experiences engage present and future technologies to shape our communities and values, Cobra Club allows players access to a gay lived experiences and the continued problematic intersections of gay sexuality, surveillance, consent, and body image.
Michael A. DeAnda, Jennifer deWinter, Chris P. Hanson, Carly A. Kocurek & Stephanie Vie. “‘Families, Friendship, and Feelings’: American Girl, Authenticating Experiences, and the Transmediation of Girlhood.” The Journal of Popular Culture, 51 no. 4 (2018). DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12708
First Page Excerpt: American Girl began as a small collection of dolls, books, and doll accessories celebrating an idealized “American girl” within a historical imagination.1 Today, it has evolved into a lifestyle brand for girls including multiple doll lines, clothes, and accessories for both dolls and girls, craft kits, and a rich array of media, including books, movies, games, and a robust web presence. The American Girl stores, located now in 19 U.S. cities with 4 boutiques at Indigo and Chapters stores in Canada, serve a unique function in American Girl’s transmedia complex. While American Girl items may be purchased online or by catalog, the stores offer not only a lushly conceptualized shopping environment, but a host of what we term authenticating experiences. These experiences include doll salon services, dining in doll-friendly cafe environments, the “Truly Me Signature Studio” where girls can design their own doll outfits or “girl-sized” backpacks and have the pieces printed in store, and a series of store-sponsored special events as well as event and party services for customers.
Michael A. DeAnda & Carly A. Kocurek. “Game Design as Technical Communication: Articulating Game Design Through Textbooks.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 25 (2016): 202-210.
Abstract: This article examines the framing of the designer’s role in game development in textbooks published and circulated over the past decade. The authors investigate the discursive ways coding is downplayed within game design texts as a means of promoting design as a form of creative expression. This speaks to ongoing tension in the games industry of coding and technology versus art. The authors argue that, in their presentation of game design, leading textbooks attempt to frame the field as one of artistry and technical practice, presenting game design as a type of technical communication. The authors ultimately consider the potential and pitfalls of considering game design as a technical communication field and suggest that this framing presents lens for considering the recently professionalized field.
Other Publications
Michael A. DeAnda. “Symbols of Latinidades in the 2020 Presidential Election.” HTI Open Plaza, June 2021.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Gay Bingo: Queer Games and HIV Activism.” Queerness in Games [special issue], In Media Res, May 2020.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Informed Experiences, Designing Consent.” Research and Destroy, April 2019. Cross-listed in the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Newsletter, Illinois Tech.
Michael A. DeAnda & Cody Mejeur. “#DigiQueer: Social Dialogue on the Queer Potentials of Design.” Field Guide: A Media Commons Project, January 2019.
Michael A. DeAnda, Brian McKernan, Ansh Patel, Sarah Schoemann & Michael Vogel. “Different Games: An Introduction from the Organizers.” First Person Scholar, September 2015.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Gay Bingo: Queer Games and HIV Activism.” Queerness in Games [special issue], In Media Res, May 2020.
Michael A. DeAnda. “Informed Experiences, Designing Consent.” Research and Destroy, April 2019. Cross-listed in the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Newsletter, Illinois Tech.
Michael A. DeAnda & Cody Mejeur. “#DigiQueer: Social Dialogue on the Queer Potentials of Design.” Field Guide: A Media Commons Project, January 2019.
Michael A. DeAnda, Brian McKernan, Ansh Patel, Sarah Schoemann & Michael Vogel. “Different Games: An Introduction from the Organizers.” First Person Scholar, September 2015.
Selected Featured Interviews
Simon Morrow, "Life's a Game, Let's Change the Rules." Illinois Tech Magazine, Spring 2020.
Mary Beth McAndrews. “Leveling Up.” SMEAR, September 2017.
Jen Lezan. “Exploring Gender & Race in the Gaming Industry.” Halfstack, Summer 2017.
Carly A. Kocurek. “Tabled For Discussion: A Conversation with Game Designer Michael DeAnda.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2 (2015): 151-172.
Mary Beth McAndrews. “Leveling Up.” SMEAR, September 2017.
Jen Lezan. “Exploring Gender & Race in the Gaming Industry.” Halfstack, Summer 2017.
Carly A. Kocurek. “Tabled For Discussion: A Conversation with Game Designer Michael DeAnda.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2 (2015): 151-172.
