Here are my papers and essays that I've written over the past few years.

• A Critique on Storytelling and Creativity in the Digital Medium
  A paper I wrote for the Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) concerning how computer games could be seen as a new form of storytelling, and how they may one day be as respected forms of expression as books, film, and other forms of visual and aural art are today. NOTE: Because this paper was geared towards a conservative literary audience, I felt I had to be a little harsh on the current state of video game industry to get my point across (i.e., it's hard to tell a slew of English professors at Kenyon that Pac-Man was a work of interactive fiction). What I express about the current state of the industry is therefore biased; and looking back to the state of the industry as it was a year and a half ago, it seems as though much has changed for the better.
• Predicaments of Storytelling in the Digital Medium: An Analysis of the Interactive Property
  An in-depth analysis of what I think it means for a work of art to be interactive, why many of today's computer games today aren't fuly interactive under my definition of the word, and what can be done to make games feel more interactive.
• An Anthropological Inquiry into the Cultural Nature and Implications of Multi-User Dimensions
  In this paper, I examine the MUD as a culture from an anthropological perspective. Readers who are already familiar with MUDs might find this paper to be somewhat dull, since it was written for the anthropological community (i.e., for an audience that has no idea what MUDs are, hence a lot of time is spent describing the basics of how a MUD works).
• On the Proposition of Integrating Figurative Social Spaces with Physical Communities
  This paper describes a theory of mine about a so-called "parallel shared community" in which two localized physical and virtual communities can be used to strengthen one another. One of the interesting things I found when researching about MUDs was that, although their final effects were potentially strengthening to an individual's perception of his or her identity, the individual was almost always forced to ostracize himself or herself from his or her community. In this paper, I begin by examining the ways in which virtual communities such as MUDs can strengthen an individual and a community, and then examine the prospect of maximizing permeability between the physical and virtual sub-communities so that they may strengthen the community as a whole.