MA Saskatchewan
HBA Saskatchewan
Email: michael.hancock@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
Michael Hancock specializes in game studies, with a background in rhetoric, pop culture, and technical communication. Michael was a founding member and reviews editor of First Person Scholar and a co-host of the academic comics podcast Three Panel Contrast.
Michael likes to spend his time thinking too deeply about Choose Your Own Adventure books, reading fantasy literature, and talking loudly about which era of Star Trek tells us the most about the contemporary world (currently Deep Space Nine, but it varies).
Selected Publications
“Playing it By the Book: Transmedia and Player Formation in the Videogame Instruction Manual Paratext.” In Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality, edited by Astrid Ensslin and Isabel Balteiro, Bloomsbury, 2019.
“Doppelgamers: Videogames and Gothic Choice. ” American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jason Haslam and Joel R. Faflak. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Current Research
Michael is currently researching gamebooks, and other intersections of gamic structures and literary roots. These intersections, and how we respond to them, connect to what it means for us to read, to play, and to grow.
Areas of Expertise
- Comics
- Fantasy
- Pop Culture
- Writing and Technical/ Science Communication