Doug Stark is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Doug’s dissertation focuses on the military, industrial, and artistic implementation of games and play in the post-war to mid-century USA. He explores how the archive on cybernetic discourse, behavioral management, and aleatory aesthetics not only serve as historical a priori for computer games, gamification, and forms of experimental art as we know them today but also how games have long been media to think with and through. Appraising applications of games to particular epistemological problems, he makes the media philosophical claim that game-human complexes engender unique capacities to think. Otherwise, his research and teaching concern twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, film, and new media always with an emphasis on the political and ethical implications of technological mediation. He has forthcoming and published work on Afrofuturism, neoliberal gamification, videogame literature, and walking simulators in Extrapolation (2020), Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies (2019), Encyclopedia of Video Games (est. 2020), and the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds (2020) respectively.
