Amanda L. L. Cullen

In October 2018 I was invited to join a committee established by the UCI Esports Arena to address the need to create more inclusive and comprehensive guidelines and code of conducts for use by the arena. This partnership has been very fruitful. Not only have we begun reshaping of the existing code of conduct and…

On December 1st, 2018 myself and another member of the CATS Lab, Kathryn Brewster, hosted an event that we organized which we called the Games @ Play Arcade. We conceived of it as an arcade to introduce the UCI campus to experimental independent games, a domain that often goes overlooked on a campus so focused…

The UCI Diversity and Inclusion in Esports Task Force has published a report in the latest issue of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. The task force, of which I am a member, is chaired by Dr. Constance Steinkuehler and includes individuals from several offices and departments on the campus who are committed…

I have published a piece of writing in Feminist Media Studies for a special issue on women in sports. My contribution is a thought piece on the pressures of postfeminism and failure on women interested in competing in esports, using Overwatch‘s Geguri as a case study. Geguri is an amazing athlete whose career I have…

Cowritten with my fellow UCI CATS lab member, Spencer Ruelos, I have published a thought piece on the need for increased communication between the disciplines of anthropology and game studies. The piece was published on Platypus, the peer-reviewed blog run by CASTAC (Commitee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing) that is affliated with…

A piece that I worked on with Kate Ringland and Chris Wolf was published this week on First Person Scholar. A Better World: Examples of Disability in Overwatch Kate has been an enthusiastic supporter of my Overwatch research since I came to UCI. When Symmetra’s autism became part of the canon lore we both saw…

In the Winter 2018 quarter I was enrolled in a wonderful course “Ethnographies of Technology” with Dr. Valerie Olson in the UCI Anthropology Department. Each participant in the class was asked to select a book that they considered to be an interesting example of an ethnography of technology published in the last decade. And instead…

I co-authored a paper with a couple of my colleagues from the STAR (Social and Technological Action Research Group) lab. The paper presents a meta-analysis of research examining visibility of disability in order to contribute to discussions about how perceptions surrounding disability can be probed through an examination of visibility and how these tensions do,…

This year I attended the 10th annual IndieCade, thanks to the generosity of my advisor Dr. Bo Ruberg and Stephanie Barish, founder of IndieCade. IndieCade showcases the work of hundreds of independent game developers every year in order to cultivate innovation and artistry in games, and is the largest and best known games festival for…

I had a great time at San Diego Comic Con talking about my Overwatch research and my experiences as a PhD student researching player experiences and video games, which are now a huge aspect of our popular culture here in the United States. Thank you to the GeekEd organizers for inviting me, and thank you…