I’m sitting here at my desk, sorting out piles of papers that have been growing for the last six months. That means that I’m just now putting away the last artifacts of my relationship with Jenny. This afternoon I took the battered old dog-eared picture of her out of my wallet. It’s a pretty picture, her senior picture from high school, and the only wallet-sized one she’d given me since 1996. I’d been carrying it around in my wallet for the last couple of years. Today I tucked it into an envelope, along with the last of our love letters and some wrapping paper left over from her Christmas present to me, and filed it away in the big walnut filing cabinet I keep in my room. On my computer, I have enough storage space to keep entire libraries of information, but that cabinet houses the irreplaceable stuff.
As I do this, and as I paste the ticket stubs from the last things we did together into my journal (because like a lot of webloggers, I keep a dead-tree journal as well for all the stuff that’s really too hairy to go into here), I realize what I’m doing. I’m putting away the detritus of the past and moving on. Meanwhile, six thousand miles away, American forces are turning the lives of Iraqi citizens into dust. I’m starting to rebuild. I wonder when they’ll be able to do the same.
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.
