Hot diggety dog, do I feel like crap. Last night I got home late, intending to do my taxes, when I discovered that my Quicken register and my Excel spreadsheet and my receipt envelopes weren’t playing nice with each other so instead of actually doing calculations in TurboTax, I wound up spending another night surrounded by piles of little strips of paper and pounding upon the number keys of my laptop with great vengeance. My original intent was to go to bed at midnight, but when I finished ‘syncing’ my registers it was 2AM. So I grunted, closed the laptop and went into bed. Ah, what fools these mortals be. After lying there awake for a few minutes, I got back up, marched back out to the living room and fetched my PowerBook, then lay in bed doing my taxes until 4:45 AM. Then then! I closed the ‘Book again, swearing to rise in the morning and double-check for the errors that a man doth make in the wee wee hours of the morning, and lay there for a while listening to the birdies chirp outside my window. Eventually the waves of sleep mercifully washed over me, and I conked out as the roar of traffic out on Western began to grow.
When I awoke, the sky was bright and the traffic was quieter. “Aha,” thought I, “I have slept for a good six to eight hours and it is now sometime in the late morning. Time to carpe me some diem and make up for lost time!” I summoned my energy and threw off the covers, wide awake and raring to go.
Guess what time it was.
That’s right. 8 oh-frickin’-clock.
Say it ain’t so, Jim. Say it ain’t so.

Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.

