About

Half of the work in getting a Ph.D is purely logistical. You are looking at my attempt to create a degree of coherence in the bitstorm that finds its way onto my screen every day.

Currently in my nth year, a primary directive is the completion of my dissertation project at Columbia University. A carefully selected team of professorial greatness channels my raw talent and ambition: Todd Gitlin, Eli Noam and David Stark. The working title of the dissertation is Social Gaming and Discursive Play: Games as Communicative Exchange, and intersects video games, user-generated content and online communities as an entryway into contemporary media culture.

I’m also an affiliate researcher at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a member of the Center for Organizational Innovation, founder of the New York chapter for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), and  teach the course “Video Games: Culture & Industry” at the NYU Game Center. Outside academia I’m managing director at SuperData Research, a New York-based research outfit that provides due diligence on consumer media and technology.

Selected Presentations

• Top 5 Trends in Gaming, NY Games Conference, New York, 2009. (slides)
• Kids, Tweens & Teens, State of Play IV, New York Law School, New York, 2009.
• Game Theory, Play Money, Columbia Business School, New York, 2008. (event organizer)
  
• Media Economics: The Question of Ownership, Hunter College, New York, 2008.
• On Game Mod Communities, 106th Annual Meeting of American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, 2007.
• Game Mods & Post-Industrial Play, CITI Visiting Scholar’s Brown Bag Lunch Seminar Series, Columbia Business School, New York, October 2007.
• The Video Game Vocabulary and the Production of Meaning, MiT5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, April 2007. (abstract)
• Cities, Games and Media: Playing with and in the Urban Setting, Time|Space Dynamics in Urban Settings, Technishen Universität, Berlin, May 2007.
  
• The Aesthetic Vocabulary of Video Games, Seventh Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, November 2006.
• Haussmann’s Media Environment (revised), Sixth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, Fordham University, New York, May 2005.
• Media Technology & Society: Video Game Theory, Dissertation outline, Columbia University, New York, April 2005.
• Good Day New York, Fox Television, aired August 20th, debate with Attorney Sanford Rubenstein on videogame violence, August 2004.

Contact: jv2108 at columbia dot edu