Biography

Christine is a doctoral student in the Klein College of Media & Communication. Her research generally deals with the intersection of culture, identity, and gaming(/play), relative to the concepts of narratives and storytelling. In her latest work she has been studying how gaming – in particular narrative-focused gaming – contributes to the construction of both personal and cultural identities through community and shared experiences. She has also done work in the field of fan studies, including analyses of the extent to which fandom operates as a safe space (and for whom), fan interactions with producers via social media, and the phenomenon of “meta” writing (that is, fan-produced quasi-academic textual analyses). In a blending of her many research interests, she recently wrote a book chapter (publication forthcoming, Spring 2021) discussing how fans of livestreamed tabletop roleplaying games (also called “actual play podcasts”) understand the concept of player and character failure, as well as how the existence of an audience may add an additional frame of performance to the already complicated and nuanced behavior of the player.